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(WASHINGTON) — A piece of the Titan’s carbon-fiber hull recovered after the submersible’s deadly catastrophic implosion showed “anomalies,” a National Transportation Safety Board engineer said Wednesday during a weekslong hearing on the incident.

Don Kramer, the acting chief of the NTSB’s materials laboratory, testified during the U.S. Coast Guard’s hearing into the June 2023 implosion of the OceanGate submersible while on a deep-sea dive to the Titanic shipwreck.

Kramer said his team examined material from the manufacturing of the hull and found “several anomalies within the composite and the adhesive joints, including waviness, wrinkles, porosity and voids.”

They also examined a piece of the hull recovered from the ocean floor and found similar anomalies, including “waviness and wrinkles within the hull layers” and voids within the adhesive that joined the layers, he said. The recovered hull also showed “features consistent with rubbing damage at one of those adhesive joints.”

Kramer said the Titan debris on the ocean floor showed that the hull “encountered a significant amount of delamination” — or separating into layers — most of which was within or adjacent to co-bonded adhesive interfaces.

Asked by OceanGate’s counsel whether any of the delaminations, voids or rubbing damage could have been present before the implosion, as opposed to being caused by the implosion, Kramer said he is not offering analysis as to when they occurred.

Further asked by OceanGate’s counsel whether any of the issues he observed could have caused the implosion, Kramer said that is “still subject to our own internal analysis at this point.”

Strain response after loud bang on dive 80

Kramer also discussed the loud bang passengers heard as the Titan ascended during a dive that occurred a year before the implosion, on July 15, 2022 — referred to as dive 80 — which has been referenced throughout the two-week hearing. The bang was also detected by the Titan’s real-time monitoring system, which had sensors to detect acoustic events, as well as multiple strain gages to monitor mechanical strain, he said.

Kramer said his team determined that the hull’s strain response changed after this loud bang incident in subsequent dives in 2022. He said the strain gage data showed a change in the strain in the hull for four of the eight gages.

“Those changes persisted from dive to dive,” he said.

There was no difference when comparing the strain response to a dive prior to dive 80, Kramer said.

No strain data is available for dives conducted in 2023, according to Kramer.

Phil Brooks, OceanGate’s former engineering director, testified on Monday that following the loud bang on dive 80, the strain gage data showed a minor “shift,” though they did not see “any further shifts in strain data” on subsequent dives in 2022. Nothing “really seemed out of the ordinary,” and OceanGate co-founder and CEO Stockton Rush made the decision to continue dives, Brooks said.

Asked how his team arrived at its determination on the change in strain response based on the graphs of the available data, Kramer said, “I guess it’s a matter of opinion as to whether one can discern the changes in strain output.”

Brooks said Rush theorized that the loud bang was caused by the frame “readjusting back to its original shape” as it returned to the surface.

Kramer noted that the NTSB’s investigation is still ongoing, and the scope of his presentation was therefore limited.

Marine Technology Society draft letter to Rush

William Kohnen, the CEO and founder of submersible maker Hydrospace Group, said during his testimony on Wednesday that he would not have made a carbon-fiber hull. He said it would cost “too much money” and “is really, really difficult.”

The investigators asked Kohnen about a draft Marine Technology Society letter he wrote in March 2018 to Rush based on public safety concerns raised during a conference.

“This was considered an issue of where we as consensus, as professionals in this industry, had significant concerns — not on one particular thing, but the overall approach of neglecting the years of experience and tradition and diligence that we applied,” he said.

Kohnen said the letter was signed by around 40 members and went through other drafts, though the Marine Technology Society board never approved sending it to Rush on behalf of the society. Rush still managed to get a copy of the original draft letter, which Kohnen said they discussed over the phone.

During the call, Kohnen said he told Rush he found the language on OceanGate’s website confusing for the general public not familiar with submersibles and that they were “highly inferring” the experimental sub was classed, when that wasn’t the case. He said the website was subsequently updated.

Kohnen stressed the importance of classification and regulations to build safe submersibles.

“We have a record of 50 years without a single fatality until Titan,” he said. “It does indicate the power of our regulation.”

OceanGate suspended all exploration and commercial operations after the deadly implosion, which killed five people, including Rush.

The hearing on the incident is scheduled to run through Friday.

The main purpose of the hearing is to uncover the facts related to the implosion and to make recommendations, the Coast Guard said.

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(NEW YORK) — As Helene swept through North Carolina last week, John Norwood and his fiancé, Julie le Roux, sought shelter at a neighbor’s house.

As they attempted to wait out the worst of the storm, which made landfall in Florida as a Category 4 hurricane, a mudslide destroyed the home they had taken shelter in.

“We looked outside and there was a 30-foot-tall wall of water and rocks and tree debris just coming at us,” Norwood told ABC News.

The debris knocked the house “straight down,” flushing out those who had been huddled inside, he said, adding, “And we all got washed downriver.” Norwood was rescued, but le Roux is still unaccounted for, he said. She’s one of hundreds of people who are unaccounted for after the storm, according to officials.

The storm was “unprecedented” for western North Carolina, requiring an “unprecedented response,” Gov. Roy Cooper said Monday. At least 40 people were killed by the storm in Buncombe County, in the western part of the state, local officials said Monday.

Hundreds of people were missing or unaccounted for as of Monday throughout the southeastern United States, Homeland Security adviser Liz Sherwood Randall said as she gave a lengthy update on the federal response to Helene, including a warning that much is still unknown about the situation.

“When I said there could be up to 600 people lost my point was, there 600 people unaccounted for,” Sherwood Randall said. “That’s the number we’re tracking right now and that we can essentially validate from multiple sources.”

But, she added, there was still uncertainty in that number. It included many who hadn’t been heard from, but they may just be out of contact, she said.

“And as the president said this morning, we’re very hopeful that some of those people just don’t have cell phones working and actually are alive,” she said.

Elsewhere in North Carolina, there were gas lines stretching from stations, as survivors waited for fuel. Officials were busy supplying water and ready-to-eat meals, Will Ray, the director of the state’s Emergency Management agency, said.

In Marion, a city in the state’s hard-hit western area, rescuers used a pulley system to pull Norwood to safety, carrying him over rushing flood waters. A ceiling rafter had crushed his legs, he said, but at least he was rescued. He said he hasn’t seen le Roux since the mudslide hit.

“I crawled around screaming, looking for her,” he said as he fought back tears, “and I just couldn’t find her.”

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(NEW YORK) — Former FTX executive Caroline Ellison said she deserves no prison time for her role in one of the largest financial frauds in history and federal prosecutors seem inclined to agree.

Ellison’s attorneys urged Judge Lewis Kaplan to be lenient when he sentences her Tuesday afternoon, arguing Ellison “unflinchingly acknowledged her own wrongdoing, without minimization, blame shifting or self-pity.” They added, “She time and again proved herself an enormously credible and important cooperating witness” against her on again-off again boyfriend, former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried.

Ellison testified for three days at Bankman-Fried’s trial that ended with a conviction on all seven counts: wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud on FTX’s customers; wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud on Alameda Research’s lenders; conspiracy to commit securities fraud on FTX’s investors; conspiracy to commit commodities fraud on FTX’s customers; and conspiracy to commit money laundering.

Federal prosecutors agreed Ellison provided “extraordinary cooperation that was crucial to the Government’s successful prosecution” of Bankman-Fried.

“Although she did not blow the whistle on any misconduct before FTX’s collapse, she came clean prior to FTX’s declaring bankruptcy to her employees on November 9, 2022,” prosecutor Danielle Sassoon wrote in a letter to the judge. “Ellison approached her cooperation with remarkable candor, remorse, and seriousness.”

Prosecutors declined to make a specific sentencing recommendation. Defense attorneys suggested a sentence in line with a recommendation from probation officials of time served plus three years supervised release.

“Caroline poses no risk of recidivism and presents no threat to public safety. It would therefore promote respect for the law to grant leniency in recognition of Caroline’s early disclosure of the crimes, her unmitigated acceptance of responsibility for them, and—most importantly—her extensive cooperation with the government,” defense attorney Anjan Sahni wrote in a letter to the judge.

Sahni outlined Ellison’s “complex” relationship with Bankman-Fried that began when the two met at Jane Street Capital in 2015 when she was an intern and he was a junior trader.

“Caroline moved around the globe at his direction, first to Hong Kong and later the Bahamas” while working “long, stressful, Adderall-fueled hours,” Sahni said.

“Caroline was in an on-again-off-again, sometimes-secret relationship with Mr. Bankman-Fried that she understood at the time was fundamentally unequal. Deeply unhappy, Caroline repeatedly considered leaving Alameda, but Mr. Bankman-Fried convinced her to stay, telling her she was essential to the survival of the business, and that he loved her (while also perversely demonstrating that he considered her not good enough to be seen in public with him at high-profile events),” the defense letter said.

Her attorney said it all “warped” her moral compass and led her to take actions “that she knew to be wrong, helping him steal billions.”

Bankman-Fried was sentenced to 25 years in prison in March. He has filed an appeal to overturn his conviction.

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