In a closing remark Lochridge said he believes that had his safety concerns that he raised with OSHA been taken seriously, the incident wouldn’t have happened.

In a statement, he said: ‘As part of this investigation my family and I also hope to find out why OSHA did not actively address my concerns regarding OceanGate and the submersible Titan.

‘This is especially troubling given that I was under the supposed safeguard of the whistleblowers protection scheme at the time.

‘In my opinion, OSHA failed not only my family financially and emotionally but stood by and did not to prevent further acts from OceanGate.

‘I believe that if OSHA had attempted to investigate the seriousness of the concerns I raised, this tragedy may have been prevented.

‘As a seafarer I feel deeply let down by the system that is meant to protect not only seafarers but the general public as well.

‘Additionally I believe that the participation last year of the OceanGate operational team in these proceedings would have been invaluable in addressing numerous unanswered questions.

‘I sincerely hope that no other family will have to endure a similar tragedy in the future.’

Lochridge said that OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush had flat out refused to implement emergency life support on a sub.

According to the whistleblower he said to do so was a ‘complete waste of money’, which Lochridge believes was the CEO ‘showing off’.

He added: ‘He was a control freak. It was his way or not at all’.

The hearing then heard about medical certifications for submersible pilots at OceanGate.

According to Lochridge they cost around $700 each, and the company ‘wasn’t willing to pay for the trainee pilots to get that certification’.

When asked if there was any written policies on the use of over-the-counter medicine or substances for these pilots Lochridge said he wasn’t sure.

Lochridge told the hearing that appropriate training was ‘imperative’ and that companies should be required to provide it to staff.

‘Stockton’s vision was give somebody this PlayStation controller and within an hour they’re going to be a pilot, it’s not the way it works.’

He then compared it to be similar to someone being shown how to fly a helicopter and then expecting them to take passengers.

Lochridge explained that his own training had been ‘very in-depth’ and it took him years.

He then added: ‘Stockton was very against qualification because it cost money. He was very against even the pilot training manual, he was against that as well.

‘He thought a pilot should be able to come along, learn something from a day and be efficient.’

OceanGate employee turned whistleblower David Lochridge told the hearing that the implosion of the vessel was bound to happen.

He said: ‘It was inevitable something was going to happen, and it was just when.’

Lochridge said that they had been ‘bypassing’ all rules and regulations in place by experts from the US military and Coast Guard.

David Lochridge said that in November of 2018 he decided to drop his claim and lawsuit against his former employer.

He told the hearing that he and his wife decided it was causing them ‘hurt’ and was a burden financially.

According to Lochridge it was proving to be ‘too much for us as a family’. He said he never ‘paid a penny’ to the company.

This meant he had to sign a non-disclosure agreement preventing him from speaking out against OceanGate or mentioning Titan.

He said he was happy to have been subpoenaed so he could talk about his concerns.

The hearing restarted with Lochridge explaining that he was hit by SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation) lawsuit from OceanGate.

His caseworker at OSHA told Lochridge that he believed OceanGate were trying to pressure him into cancelling the OSHA complaint.

His former employer had asked him to pay $10,000 which he and his wife declined.

Lochridge said he never ‘once got any correspondence’ from attorneys at OSHA despite promises being made by the agency to protect.

He then decided to countersue OceanGate in federal court so as to allow information relating to his claims to be in the public domain as a matter of ‘public safety’.

After months of back and forth he was told by OSHA that his case was in a backlog of 11 cases and it was unclear when they would investigate his claims. Lochridge said this was hard for him and his family.

David Lochridge has resumed given testimony to the panel after an extended lunch break.

Lochridge said that after raising his concerns with OSHA, him and his wife were served a settlement and release agreement from OceanGate’s lawyers.

Speaking with the hearing he described the agreement as a ‘threat’ that was issued by them to try and get him to ‘back off’.

He said: ‘OceanGate wanted me to walk away from the OSHA claim. They basically demanded that I pay them money to settle with them because they had to hire an attorney to represent them in the matter with OSHA.

‘They state that if I don’t they’ll contact previous employers, ex-spouses, US immigration, fraud, theft, everything is in this.’

After lawyers representing the company told the hearing they did not have those documents, a break was called in proceedings.

Lochridge told the hearing that a test dive in the Titan headed by Stockton Rush in the Bahamas was primarily to boost the CEO’s ego.

He told the hearing: ‘Without saying anything, people know my opinion on Rush. This was an ego boost.’

The next day he was terminated from his position and emailed a letter that said him and Rush had been ‘at an impasse’.

After he was let go from OceanGate for being what he described as ‘anti-project’, Lochridge said he informed the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA).

He told the hearing that he raised concerns with the government body about the Titan vessel.

After contacting them, Lochridge said he was then placed under the whistleblower protection scheme after they deemed his concerns serious.

He said: ‘I didn’t want anybody going in that submersible, it was dangerous.’

Lochridge described a meeting he had with OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush where he raised safety concerns about the Titan sub.

According to Lochridge his concerns about the safety of the sub was dismissed by almost everyone at the company besides finance director Bonnie Carl.

In this meeting, he says Rush told him the sub ‘doesn’t just implode, it screams like a mother before it implodes’.

He added: ‘For the CEO to say that, in front of other people regarding that carbon fiber [hull], it’s disgusting, it’s appaling.

‘Total disregard for safety, not even just for himself but for everybody else. Didn’t care, engineering department didn’t care.’

Lochridge said he was pushing to have the sub pressure tested and for nondestructive testing to take place, which was kicked back.

He continued: ‘I voiced my displeasure about the lack of NDT, all that came up and [it was] completely dismissed. It was a disgrace.

‘It would have been naive of me to think he wasn’t going to do something to me for doing this. I knew he’d fly off the handle.

‘I didn’t do it out of badness. This report, I was asked to do it. That built Titan sub was weeks away from being handed off by myself, I was appalled.’

Lochridge told the hearing that due to all the problems he found on the Titan submersible ‘there was non way I was signing off’ on it.

He also said that his team had been getting scaled back as people left, which according to him was due to the problems with the submersibles.

Lochridge also told the hearing that the rate of turnover in staff was ‘incredible’.

The hearing was shown images of a home-made oxygen scrubber unit, an integral part of a submersible.

Lochridge told the hearing: ‘Stockton liked to do things on the cheap’, as they were shoown a picture of ‘Stockton’s idea’ of a scrubber unit.

The image shows the scrubber unit which is made up of a box from Home Depot and a computer fan that is crudely glued to the top of it.

Lochridge said that the scrubber was integral in maintaining atmospheric pressure in the submersible.

He added: ‘[Stockton] decided not to use a known manufacturer. It’s a plastic box and a computer fan.

‘He wanted to do a test on it, I humoured him and it didn’t work.’

Lochridge said he had been made aware that everything on the Titan submersible that imploded had been repurposed from the original vessel.

He said: ‘They reused these domes, they reused these sealing faces, they reused the acrylic, they reused the interior. Everything was reused.

‘It’s all cost. I wasn’t there for that, but I know firsthand that everything was reused. I am sure that will all come up as part of the investigation.

‘How the hell they managed to get the carbon removed will be an interesting topic’.

Lochridge told the hearing that he had ‘no confidence whatsoever’ in the Titan submersible.

When asked if he had confidence in the way Titan was being built, he told the hearing: ‘No confidence whatsoever, I was very vocal about that and I still am’.

Lochridge said he believes they dismissed his concerns due to ‘costcutting’, ‘engineering decisions’, and the desire to get to the Titanic.

He added: ‘A lot of steps along the way were missed, it was pretty evident.’

Lochridge said that the COO of the company should have stepped in and described some of the people employed on the Titan as being ‘children’.

He added: ‘Some hadn’t even been to University yet that Tony Nissen had employed, none of them were experienced submersible operators. There was no experience across the board.

‘That was the appeal of me going across and making something good. It was nothing, it was all smoke and mirrors, they always had issues with their expeditions.

‘I didn’t know this at the time when I went across.’

Earlier in the hearing Lochridge said that from the outset it had been made clear that the company objective was to go to the Titanic wreckage.

He said that he was also told how the company ‘wanted to be able to qualify a pilot in a day, somebody that had never sat in a submersible’.

Lochridge described this as a ‘huge red flag’, adding that there was no training in place for pilots and nobody was even qualified to man a sub.

CEO Stockton Rush and Tony Nissen, the former engineering director of OceanGate, kicked the University of Washington Applied Physics Lab (APL) from the project to design the Titan vessel themselves.

Lochridge said: ‘Stockton decided to do all project engineering in house. He said he had lost confidence in APL. I think it was mostly a time thing.

‘He introduced Tony Nissen and brought him in for the Titan build, they’d already put everything online that the vessel was going to Titanic.’

Lochridge said that Nissen took over and phased everyone out of the project including the team at the University of Washington.

He said: ‘I said to Stockton I wasn’t happy we were phasing out APL. It got to the point that Tony and Stockton told me I was never to speak to Dave Dyer again.’

Dyer is the Principal Engineer at the APL team.

Lochridge said that neither Nissen or Stockton were happy with APL and wanted them off the design and build of Titan.

He said the decision to kick the team off the build was down to ‘arrogance’, adding: ‘They think they could do this on their own without proper engineering support.’

According to Lochridge, Nissen also had no previous experience in building submersibles – something which he also raised concerns about but was shunned.

Lochrige told the hearing that the basis behind OceanGate was to make money.

He said: ‘There was very little in the way of science’, adding that they had strong media team that could sell the seats aboard the submersibles.

The former director of the company said it wasn’t scientists onboard but rather ‘people who had money’.

According to Lochridge people would pay up to $35,000 to dive on the Alcatraz vessel.

Lochridge described an incident on the Andrea Doria in which he was supposed to take four paying clients to the wreck of the ocean liner that sank in 1956.

He said he was to drop down over several days and keep his distance from the deteriorating wreck while aboard one of the OceanGate submersible’s.

Lochridge said: ‘Unfortuantely the CEO [Stockton Rush] decided he wanted to take it down, I objected. He told me I was staying out, I objected again.

‘I was sort of reigned in at the time, “just remember I am the CEO you are just an employee”, he said. I eventually persuaded him to let me come on the dive.’

Lochridge said that Rush took the helm of the sub which was controlled by a Playstation controller.

Despite the plan to drop over several days, Lochridge said that Rush said ‘don’t tell me what to do’ and went straight for the wreck.

Lochridge added: ‘He came straight down hard on the bottom, smashed straight down – visibility went everywhere.

‘We could see metal plates, we could clearly see the starboard side of the bow of the Andrea Doria. It was an absolute mess.’

Lochridge said that Rush continued to argue with him in the sub despite him offering him help as to how to get out – with two paying clients onboard.

The CEO then went full speed into the portside of the ship, causing it to crack. Which caused him to panic, according to Lochridge.

After one of the customers shouted at the CEO to hand over the controls Rush threw the the controller into the side of Lochridge’s head, causing it to break.

Lochridge then managed to get the sub away from the wreck and back to the surface within 15 minutes.

It was this incident that Lochridge said left the CEO embarassed and led to him being phased out of programs with OceanGate.

OceanGate Expeditions CEO Stockton Rush is seen here on May 27, 2023

At the start of the hearing Lochridge laid out his work history, telling officials that he had been a navy diver before earning his qualifications in underwater inspection offshore, and as a commercial diver.

Lochridge told the hearing that he then became involved in submarine rescue in 2001, with his wife seeing an advert for OceanGate in 2015.

He said the company and him ‘seemed like a good fit’ after spending two weeks with the company in May of that year where he was informed of the plan to visit the wreckage of the Titanic.

DailyMail.com will be providing live updates today as the second day of the OceanGate Titan submersible hearing continues.

Key witness David Lochridge is to testify before Coast Guard officials, Lochridge had previously branded the submersible that imploded ‘unsafe’.

He wrote in a 2018 report that the craft needed more testing and passengers may be endangered when it reached ‘extreme depths’.

Follow our coverage as we bring you the latest news from the hearing in South Carolina.