Titanic: Welsh adventurer hopes for rescue success

Contact with Ocean Gate's Titan submersible was lost less than two hours into a diver to the Titanic wreck

A Welsh adventurer who descended to the Titanic wreck said she had her "fingers crossed" for the five people lost in a submersible.

Ultra-runner and broadcaster Lowri Morgan spent five hours surveying the Titanic when she was presenting for a children's programme in 2003.

She called the two-and-a-half mile descent into the Atlantic Ocean "cold" and "claustrophobic".

"I'm really hoping for some good news" on the rescue, she said.

"It's terrible to think what they might be going through," Ms Morgan told BBC Radio Wales.

"I remember when I was in [a different] submersible there were three of us.

"We had enough oxygen for three-and-a-half days per person but we knew... even if we had a scratch of the portal window that we'd be dead within point two of a second because of the pressure."

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Contact with the small sub descending to the Titanic's wreck in the mid-Atlantic was lost about one hour and 45 minutes into its dive on Sunday.

A massive search operation being run from Boston, Massachusetts, is attempting to locate the vessel and the five people on board.

Lowri Morgan says her trip to the Titanic wreck was "cold" and "claustrophobic"

Ms Morgan said: "More people have been to space than to the site of the Titanic and the depth that we went to.

"When you are an adventurer, you make sure you know the risks before actually signing on that dotted line."

She said her descent from the Russian scientific vessel the Keldysh was a "roller coaster" going from excitement to the grim realisation that they were visiting a "graveyard for 1,500 people".

The 12-hour journey to the wreck and back was physically demanding, she said.

"It's quite claustrophobic there, it gets quite cold, we had NASA suits made for us to keep us warm.

"Of course you get hungry, we didn't take much food down because you don't want to go to the toilet."

She recalled a "massive sense of relief when they opened the door and you see and feel the fresh air on your face".

Ms Morgan said watching the current rescue efforts brought back memories of her own trip to the bottom of the North Atlantic.

"I am really crossing fingers that this will be a successful rescue and the five people will be found," she said.