Titan sub hearing live: OceanGate volunteer said nobody was concerned until sub ‘was really overdue’ from dive
Coast Guard has released more footage of the Titan submersible wreckage including remnants of its hull scattered on the sea bed, following the ‘catastrophic implosion’ that killed all five passengers on board
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A tearful mission specialist recounted collecting personal belongings from the victims of an OceanGate sub before it dove under the water and the dangerous of dives to the site of the Titanic wreck.
Renata Rojas, the mission specialist from the US submersible company that operated the expedition, is currently addressing the US Coast Guard Titan Marine Board of Investigations panel. She is expected to be followed by former scientific director Dr Steven Ross after lunch.
They are two of the witnesses testifying to the panel investigating the “catastrophic implosion” of the Titan submersible, killing all five passengers on board.
Their comments come after damning Tuesday testimony from OceanGate’s former director of marine operations David Lochridge who stated he had “no confidence whatsoever” with the Titan’s construction.
“It was inevitable something was going to happen. It was just a [question of] when,” the whistleblower, who is one of 10 ex-OceanGate staff or suppliers that make up the 24 witnesses, testified.
The Coast Guard released more footage of the Titan sub wreckage on Wednesday, with video from June 22, 2023, showing remnants of the hull and carbon fiber debris scattered across the sea bed.
Rojas recalls losing communications with Titan submersible
Mission specialist Renata Rojas says she had just finished her lunch when the team lost communications with the Titan submersible.
She said Stockton Rush’s wife, Wendy Rush, usually sat at the communications table.
Mission specialist breaks down describing collecting belongings of Titan crew members
Shortly before crew members stepped into the Titan submersible, Rojas says she was tasked with storing the belongings of crew members.
“As mission specialist, people get inside the sub, they have to take their hat off, their lifejacket off, and we place that into each individual bags so they know it’s their belongings,” she said. “I was the one holding that bag for them as they got in the sub.”
Rojas describes reaction of crew notifying authorities
“It didn’t seem to be anything of concern until 6pm,” the mission specialist said, explaining when OceanGate employees thought something was wrong. “I don’t think we got concerned until it was really overdue.”
She says she believes the Canadian Coast Guard was first notified once the vessel did not resurface.
Rojas says passengers slept inside sub during one trip
Instead of coming back to the surface, Rojas said that weather during one dive was so dangerous that OceanGate made a decision to let passengers sleep on the vessel in the ocean for five hours.
“The weather when they came back to the surface was very rough,” she said. “It was safer for them to sleep and wake up five hours later and get them back on the platform.”
She added that one of her colleagues, Tim Catterson, a former OceanGate contractor, expressed that he would never get inside the submersible.
Rojas breaks down describing demeanor of passengers
Rojas broke down as she continued to describe what happened on the day of the tragedy. She said all of the passengers were excited to embark on their expedition.
“I saw five people smiling on the way to their journey,” she said. “Excited. We had wonderful weather.”
Rojas says she never felt ‘unsafe’ on OceanGate vessel
“I knew what I was doing was very risky,” she said. “I never at any point felt unsafe by the operation.”
Rojas says she gave OceanGate a deposit once she knew they wanted to build a submersible
The OceanGate mission specialist said she paid OceanGate a deposit in April 2017 for a trip in 2018. The trip was delayed until 2021 because of ongoing testing. Some of the ongoing issues included making a new carbon-fiber hull.
“It had a lot of noise,” she said. “Stockton was very verbal about the dives he did. It was noisy and the noise was not calming down. The sub was probably not strong enough.”
Renata Rojas says she disagrees with David Lochridge’s account of one of OceanGate’s dives in 2016
“He must have gone on a different dive,” she said. “Nobody was panicking. Nobody was crying. There was definitely no swearing or yelling.”
Earlier this week, David Lochridge said Stockton Rush, OceanGate CEO, threw the vessel’s controller at him during a voyage after a passenger began to cry over alleged concerns that Rush was driving recklessly.
“He hit me on the side of my head,” Lochridge said during testimony. Rojas said she was on the vessel during the dive but did not witness the interaction.
James Cameron says he should not have weighed in on Titan sub disaster in new interview
Speaking to The New York Times, filmmaker James Cameron has said that he shouldn’t have discussed what might’ve happened to the Titan submersible after the vessel imploded.
Cameron is a prominent figure in the deep-diving community. He has taken 33 dives to the wreckage of the Titanic. Following the incident, Cameron was publicly critical of OceanGate, the company that operated the Titan submersible.
When asked about his response to the hearing this week, Cameron told the outlet: “I should not have passed on hearsay information about the weights on national TV. We have enough intentional disinformation in our world today, without adding to it with undisciplined rumor mongering.”
Renata Rojas, an OceanGate mission specialist, takes the stand
Rojas is a New York City banker. She said she was “obsessed” with the Titanic, even before the wreckage was found in 1985. So she became a scuba diver.
“I wanted to find the wreck but someone beat me to it,” she said, adding that she had been interested in finding a way to see the wreck. That’s how she found OceanGate.
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