During the tragic incident aboard the Titan submersible, the CEO’s wife, Wendy Rush, heard a loud noise and innocently inquired about it, unaware that it was the sound of the sub imploding, leading to the demise of her husband and four others on the vessel.
Newly released footage from the US Coastguard captures the moment Wendy Rush, spouse of Stockton Rush, attempted to establish communication with the crew as they descended to explore the remains of the Titanic.
Mrs Rush, who was monitoring the sub’s progress from a support ship, can be seen reacting to a noise that sounded like a ‘door slamming’.
She then turns to a team member sitting behind her and asks ‘what was that bang?’
Moments later Mrs Rush, who was a director of OceanGate with her husband, received a text message saying the sub had dropped two weights.
Initially interpreting the noise as a routine part of the dive, investigators now speculate that the ‘bang’ she heard was, in fact, the critical moment when the submersible collapsed.
It is thought the message she received was in fact sent just before the tragedy with its arrival being delayed due to the sound of the implosion, the BBC has reported.
The video of Mrs Rush is being used as evidence in the two-year long investigation by the US Coastguard Marine Board into the sub’s catastrophic failure.
All five people on board were instantly killed in the tragedy on June 18, 2023.
The victims included OceanGate co-founder Mr Rush, adventurer Hamish Harding, father and son Shahzada and Suleman Dawood, as well as Frenchman Paul-Henri Nargeolet.
The passengers had paid to see the wreck of the Titanic, which lies some 3,700 meters below the surface of the Atlantic Ocean.
It is believed the vessel imploded around 90 minutes into its descent with its wreckage later found 330 yards away from the bow of the ship.
The new video footage released by the US Coastguard comes after the sub’s haunting final moments were also revealed earlier this year in a sound clip.
The audio, which detected an ominous noise from around 900 miles away, was captured from a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration device.
The US Coastguard reported in February that the sound was the ‘suspected acoustic signature’ of the vessel’s implosion.
The eerie recording was the latest piece of evidence to emerge in the wake of the ill-fated expedition which sparked a huge investigation into determining the cause and the company’s processes as well as industry-wide safety reviews.
The submersible suddenly lost contact with its support vessel, Polar Prince, after just about an hour and 45 minutes into the two-and-a-half hour descent.
One of the last messages from the crew to Polar Prince before the submersible imploded stated, ‘all good here,’ according to a visual re-creation presented at a Coast Guard hearing last year.
But the loss of contact sparked an international manhunt to track down the missing vessel which had plunged 12,400ft – more than twice as deep as the Grand Canyon – under the North Atlantic ocean.
Eventually, however, the wreckage of the ship was found on the ocean floor about 330 yards off the bow of the Titanic, with Coast Guard officials reporting that no one on board survived.
Following the tragedy, questions emerged about the safety of the submersible, which had been making voyages to the Titanic wreckage site going back to 2021.
It was later revealed that the vessel was being operated by a video game controller, and leaders in the field of deep-sea exploration had even warned Mr Rush five years earlier that the company’s ‘experimental’ methods could end in ‘catastrophic’ disaster.
Others inside the company also expressed concerns, including David Lochridge, who worked as the Titan project’s director of marine operations.
He had demanded more rigorous safety checks on the sub – including ‘testing to prove its integrity’.
Lochridge also wanted the company to carry out a scan of Titan’s hull to ‘detect potential flaws’ rather than ‘relying on acoustic monitoring’ – which would only detect an issue ‘milliseconds before an implosion’.
But he was unceremoniously booted from the company in the aftermath, as Rush continually brushed off the concerns.
He even suggested at one point that questions about the Titan’s safety credentials was ‘personally insulting’ and he branded claims he was ‘going to kill someone’ as ‘baseless.’
Rush went as far as saying he was ‘tired of industry players who try to use a safety argument to stop innovation’ as he appeared resentful of the ‘obscenely safe’ regulations he viewed as an obstacle to development and innovation.
By September last year, the US Coastguard conducted public hearings to grill company executives on what may have gone wrong.
At the hearing, Karl Stanley, a submersible pilot and designer of the Roatan Institute of Deepsea Exploration, claimed Rush was more concerned with leaving ‘his mark on history’ than keeping his passengers safe.
‘He knew that eventually it was going to end like this, and he wasn’t going to be held accountable,’ Stanley testified.
‘But he was going to be the most famous of all his famous relatives.’
Stanley went on to say he had tried to flag safety concerns he noticed during a test drive in April 2019, including cracking noises and issues with drop weights. He emailed Rush, who dismissed the concerns.
‘I felt also, this exchange of emails strained our relationship from what it had been previously,’ he said. ‘I felt like I pushed things as far as I could without him telling me to shut up and never talk to him again.’
Stanley also said he viewed OceanGate’s characterization of paid passengers as ‘mission specialists’ to be an attempt to avoid accountability.
‘It’s clearly a dodge with trying to get around U.S. regulations with passengers,’ Stanley said.
Additionally, the company’s ‘entire business plan made zero sense,’ Stanley said.
‘There was nothing unexpected about this. This was expected by everyone who had access to a little bit of information,’ Stanley said.
‘And I think that if it wasn’t an accident, it then has to be some degree of crime. And if it’s a crime, I think to truly understand it, you need to understand the criminal’s motive.
‘The entire reason this whole operation started was Stockton had a desire to leave his mark on history.’
But Amber Bay, director of administration for the company that owned the doomed submersible, insisted that the company would not ‘conduct dives that would be risky just to meet a need’.
Still, she agreed that the company wanted to deliver for those who paid $250,000 and were encouraged to participate as ‘mission specialists’.
‘There definitely was an urgency to deliver on what we had offered and a dedication and perseverance towards that goal,’ she told a Coast Guard panel.
She later broke down in tears when discussing the tragedy, which was personal, because she knew the victims.
‘I had the privilege of knowing the explorers lives who were lost,’ Bay said through tears.
‘And there´s not a day that passes that I don´t think of them, their families and the loss.’
OceanGate, based in Washington state, suspended its operations after the implosion. The company has no full-time employees currently, but was represented by an attorney during the hearing.
The company said it has been fully co-operating with the Coast Guard and the National Transportation Safety Board investigations since they began.
