Titanic sunk by exceptionally high tides

[dhermann1]

As we close in on the centennial of the sinking of the Titanic, we can expect to see more stories of this sort. This one says that there were exceptionally high tides in January of 1912, causing larger icebergs to be broken off, and enabling them to flow into the Titanic's path. Interesting.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4664291...moon-sink-titanic-tides-may-have-played-role/

 

[MisterCairo]

You mean global warming wasn't to blame?????!!!!![huh]

 

[Shangas]

I always maintained that, and this was what a friend convinced me of, the Titanic hit the iceberg because of the delay at Southampton. The ship was supposed to leave at Noon on the 10th but didn't finally leave until 1:00pm because of an incident with another ship being ripped off its moorings and pulled into the Titanic's path.

Because the ship never made up the lost time, its meeting with the iceberg in the Atlantic was assured. If it was on time, they would've just simply glided past each other and nothing would've happened.

Of course that's just one theory. I'm sure there's lots of others...

 

[Stanley Doble]

If they weren't trying to set a speed record the crash would not have happened.

In those days the fastest ship was sure to be the most popular. This could mean hundreds of thousands of dollars of profit to the owners on every voyage. So it was very important for a new ship to take the Blue Riband and the captain knew it. If this led him to take chances and push up the speed in spite of the fog, well you have to take chances if you want to win and besides the Titanic had the latest in iceberg detection equipment. By taking the Blue Riband on her maiden voyage, the publicity would be terrific and her success would be assured. The captain knew this and if he didn't you can bet the owners reminded him. Jobs like captain of the Titanic represent the peak of professional success and there are always lots more captains looking for promotion than there are spanking new top of the line ocean liners if you get my drift.

Others say the Titanic would have been better off if they hit the iceberg head on. If they had, the bow of the ship would have been smashed but the water tight compartments would not have been broached. The ship could have limped into port or at least stayed afloat until rescue ships came. By grazing the iceberg and ripping open the whole side of the ship, it sank so fast there was nothing anyone could do.

It is easy to play the what if game. You can look at your own life or any event and see how things could have been so different if you could only change some decision or incident.

 

[Shangas]

The Titanic was NOT trying to set a speed record.

It couldn't do it anyway - It didn't have the top speed at the time. Even if it went as fast as possible, it wouldn't have beaten the Lusitania, which had a higher top speed. Titanic's was 24kt. The Lusitania could top out at nearly 27.

The WSL knew it couldn't beat Cunard with speed. So it tried to beat it with luxury instead. It was glamour, not power, that was the Titanic's marketing tool. It wouldn't get you to New York faster than any other ship...but it would get you there in style.

---

I'm not sure if I buy the whole 'head-on collision' theory. The ship would've been severely damaged if it crashed into the iceberg at 24 knots. Most likely, the force of the impact would've done almost just as much damage as splitting it open like a can of fish. And if the force of the impact had damaged the engines or the power-generator onboard, then the ship wouldn't be able to move, or even worse, wouldn't be able to send out radio messages if the power was cut.

 

[Atticus Finch]

You can look at your own life or any event and see how things could have been so different if you could only change some decision or incident.

Yep. A friend of mine used to explain his many traffic citations by saying that he was speeding to save lives. He belived that traffic accidents were predestined for drivers who obeyed speed limits. He, on the other hand, obeyed no traffic laws whatsoever. He believed that he frequently sped through intersections seconds before predestined collisions occured...thereby foiling fate, as it were. He used to smile and say that only God knew how many lives he had saved by not being where he should have been at the exact instant another driver tried to occupy the same spot.

AF

 

[Edward]

You mean global warming wasn't to blame?????!!!!![huh]

Climate change is the underlying cause. The polar ice-caps melt, raising the tides.... and on.

If they weren't trying to set a speed record the crash would not have happened.

In those days the fastest ship was sure to be the most popular. This could mean hundreds of thousands of dollars of profit to the owners on every voyage. So it was very important for a new ship to take the Blue Riband and the captain knew it. If this led him to take chances and push up the speed in spite of the fog, well you have to take chances if you want to win and besides the Titanic had the latest in iceberg detection equipment. By taking the Blue Riband on her maiden voyage, the publicity would be terrific and her success would be assured. The captain knew this and if he didn't you can bet the owners reminded him. Jobs like captain of the Titanic represent the peak of professional success and there are always lots more captains looking for promotion than there are spanking new top of the line ocean liners if you get my drift.

Whether or not they were trying to set a record, they were certainly trying to get there as fast as possible. The poor Captain was given the blame for it, though in reality he was being heavily leaned on by his superiors to get to NYC within a certain timeframe, hence the haste. Had they not been so keen to push ahead, the ship would have taken a course around the area the ice was in. Instead, half a dozen ice warnings were ignored, the last not even making it to the bridge.

A couple of other great what ifs on the Titanic are:

- what if the watertight bulkheads, so much trumpeted it its promotional material, had gone all the way to deck level? The answer, of course, is that not enough water could have gotten into the hole to fully sink the ship (or at least, if my memory is faulty here, it would have taken so much longer that many or most lives could have been saved.

- what if there had been more lifeboats? The Titanic actually by some way exceeded the standards of the day as to the number of lifeboats required to be provided, yet even fully loaded they only had space for a fraction of the total number of passengers on board.

- what if those in First Class had not been prioritised? We've all seen those photos of the first lifeboat rowing away, less than half full, while steerage passengers were kept below decks. That more first class men than steerage class children survived is a shocking, shocking indictment of the contemporary English class system and its priorities. Ironically, the opposite would probably be true in today's equivalent - air travel. There are all sorts of conspiracy theories to explain this, but I gather from various sources that those sitting in the front of the plane are more likely to die than those in the rear....

 

[Atticus Finch]

- what if the watertight bulkheads, so much trumpeted it its promotional material, had gone all the way to deck level? The answer, of course, is that not enough water could have gotten into the hole to fully sink the ship (or at least, if my memory is faulty here, it would have taken so much longer that many or most lives could have been saved.

I have always been puzzled by the compartment dividers on the Titanic being called “bulkheads”. In my opinion, they could have been more accurately called “fences”. To me, a bulkhead is something that, when closed, allows the entire compartment behind it to be completely flooded. But I guess such was not the practice in shipbuilding at the time.

AF

 

[Edward]

I have always been puzzled by the compartment dividers on the Titanic being called “bulkheads”. In my opinion, they could have been more accurately called “fences”. To me, a bulkhead is something that, when closed, allows the entire compartment behind it to be completely flooded. But I guess such was not the practice in shipbuilding at the time.

AF

It's outside of my field of expertise, but it always seemed to me to be such an obvious design flaw... I don't know whatvwas "normal" back then in this regard, though.

 

[MisterCairo]

Polar ice melting raises the overall sea level. "Tides" are caused by the moon's gravitational pull on the earth.

Climate change is the underlying cause. The polar ice-caps melt, raising the tides.... and on.



Whether or not they were trying to set a record, they were certainly trying to get there as fast as possible. The poor Captain was given the blame for it, though in reality he was being heavily leaned on by his superiors to get to NYC within a certain timeframe, hence the haste. Had they not been so keen to push ahead, the ship would have taken a course around the area the ice was in. Instead, half a dozen ice warnings were ignored, the last not even making it to the bridge.

A couple of other great what ifs on the Titanic are:

- what if the watertight bulkheads, so much trumpeted it its promotional material, had gone all the way to deck level? The answer, of course, is that not enough water could have gotten into the hole to fully sink the ship (or at least, if my memory is faulty here, it would have taken so much longer that many or most lives could have been saved.

- what if there had been more lifeboats? The Titanic actually by some way exceeded the standards of the day as to the number of lifeboats required to be provided, yet even fully loaded they only had space for a fraction of the total number of passengers on board.

- what if those in First Class had not been prioritised? We've all seen those photos of the first lifeboat rowing away, less than half full, while steerage passengers were kept below decks. That more first class men than steerage class children survived is a shocking, shocking indictment of the contemporary English class system and its priorities. Ironically, the opposite would probably be true in today's equivalent - air travel. There are all sorts of conspiracy theories to explain this, but I gather from various sources that those sitting in the front of the plane are more likely to die than those in the rear....

 

[Edward]

Polar ice melting raises the overall sea level. "Tides" are caused by the moon's gravitational pull on the earth.

Oh, hang on.... yes, I'm talking how high the tide comes up due to there being more water available (caps having melted), but yes, you're absolutely right, the actual tides themselves are tied to the moon.

 

[Shangas]

The ship's speed has been a matter of debate for a hundred years now.

The Titanic's speed was absolutely NO DIFFERENT from ANY other ship sailing the Atlantic route that night. It was common practice...Hell...it's STILL common practice...to go at full speed through the Atlantic. The QM2 and the QV do it all the time. To say that the Titanic was going "too fast" is a useless argument, because by that logic, ALL ships were going too fast. When it was actually normal practice.

Don't forget - These ships are MONEY.

They get money by promising to get you from England to America in a week.

If they don't, people cancel crossings, they book their tickets on another steamship line, the company loses money.

So it was very important for the big steamship lines (in the day, White Star and Cunard, mostly) to deliver on their promises. Even today, crossing the Atlantic takes at least five days by ocean-liner.

More lifeboats MIGHT...or MIGHT NOT have helped, on the Titanic.

Lifeboats as provided, were sixteen wooden boats, four collapsibles. If my memory serves, the Titanic could hold as many as nearly 50 lifeboats.

The problem is, having lifeboats is not the end-all of the problem.

Yes, you have the lifeboats.

Can you LAUNCH THEM?

If you can't launch them, you can't use them. You can't use them, then there's no point to them being there. Granted, they took their sweet time (it was an hour before the first boat was launched), but once they started, a boat was launched every five minutes. And even then they didn't get them all off on time. The last two boats were literally floated off the ship as the boat-deck went under water.

If there were another thirty lifeboats onboard, what would've happened at this point? Perhaps more people might have been saved, but then, that's a "What if?" scenario.

The bulkheads on the Titanic were not designed to cope with the impact of an iceberg. They were designed to cope with the impact of the Titanic with another ship, either a head-on collision, a glancing-blow, or a T-bone smash, where a relatively small amount of the ship would be damaged.

They didn't count on the ship being popped open like a ziplock bag in the middle of the Atlantic.

 

[Atticus Finch]

I was reading somewhere that the total area of the holes inflicted on Titanic by the iceberg was actually only just over one square meter...smaller than a typical office desk top. But the holes were in different places along the ship’s hull. This allowed six “watertight” compartments to flood…two more than the ship was designed to float…and all six were forward of amidships. I enclosed "watertight" in quotes because the compartments were far from that. The bulkheads were short enough to be topped by flooding and they were. Then, as forward the compartments flooded in sequence, the bow weight quickly became sufficient to fracture the hull, and the ship’s fate was sealed.

AF

 

[Shangas]

Five compartments were breeched, not six. Forepeak, the holds (3 in total) and one of the boiler-rooms.

The ship was designed to stay afloat with a max of 4 compartments gone.

The bulkheads were raised on the Olympic and the Britannic. In the case of the Britannic, they did actually help. The higher bulkheads meant the ship sank slower. However, when that ship met its fate, not all the doors could be closed due to the damage to the ship, and as a result, the sloshing water caused it to tip over.

But it was still a better result than the Titanic - only 30 people died, and most of them from the initial explosion.

 

[Atticus Finch]

Years ago, sailing ships engaged in combat were sometimes "hulled" by cannon fire. That is, as a ship was heeled over in a hard reach, an enemy sailing up wind would fire cannon into the exposed area of the ship’s hull normally located beneath the waterline. In order to save their ship, sailors would then have to go over the side and stuff mats of woven hemp rope and tar into the ball holes. Water pressure would hold these tar-mats in place and reduce the flooding until the ship could limp away from the battle.

I've always believed that this tactic could have been used to save the Titanic…or at least it could have slowed the flooding until California or another ship arrived. Sadly though, without protection from the frigid North Atlantic water, no human would have survived long enough overboard to accomplish such a task. So…in the game of Ifs, here’s another big if….if only Titanic had been equipped with one Schrader or Miller Dunn diving suit (both in common use in 1912), a bucket of tar and a hundred yards of good, hemp rope.

AF

 

[Shangas]

I've heard of that tactic being employed before. I think Capt. Cook used it when his ship crashed into the Barrier Reef off of the Queensland coast in the 1770s. They stuffed an old sail with rope and scraps of cloth, stitched it into a sort of pillow and then lowered it down the side of the ship. The suction of the water pulled it into the hole and wedged it in place.

It slowed down the water enough that they could pump the ship out and head for land to make a more permanent repair.

But in the middle of the Atlantic, I'm not sure such a thing would've worked. As you say, they would've had to have gone very far down, and the water was like -5 degrees that night (saltwater freezes much lower than freshwater, which is why). It would've taken too long and would've been far too risky. Especially at night.

I daresay that the ship would've had plenty of rope. Tar...maybe. But there's no mention of a diving suit or even a diving-bell on the ship's manifest.

 

[1961MJS]

... Ironically, the opposite would probably be true in today's equivalent - air travel. There are all sorts of conspiracy theories to explain this, but I gather from various sources that those sitting in the front of the plane are more likely to die than those in the rear....

Hi Edward

Yep, those in the front of the plane usually hit first and hit hardest. That's probably why the smoking section used to be in the rear of the airplane giving everyone on board equality in death rate...

Later

 

[Cobden]

I think attributing the sinking of the Titanic to one single cause is something of a fruitless exercise; there are so many minute things that contributed to the sinking - and if any of them hadn't happened the disaster itself wouldn't have happened; it's rather like a Domino chain, really. Further more, many of the decisions made make a certain amount of sense even with modern logic, and most of decision made sense if one accepts period logic (that is, without the experience of the Titanic to learn from) and scientific understanding.

The reason the bulkheads didn't go to the top? What would now be considered health and safety - ventilation for the boiler rooms, which let us not forget were being stoked by burly men. If they had gone all the way to the top, you'd get a lot of suffocating stokers. Yes, they could have been higher without much detrimental effect to the ventilation, but it took the Titanic to sink for people to realise this. They erred on the side of caution regarding ventilation rather then the (rather unlikely) possibility of being holed in five compartments

Similarly, the lack of lifeboats. In the vast majority of sinkings, lifeboats are much like the lifejackets and rafts on aeroplanes; about as much use as a chocolate teapot - listing, quick sinking, etc, and they become useless. The idea was that lifeboats would transfer people to the nearest ship, then go back to collect others (the collecting ship also using it's lifeboats for this purpose) - one wasn't expected to be in the water in a lifeboat for any amount of time. Of course, this is best case scenario thinking, but then so is providing lifeboats in the first place.

Iceberg warnings...this a bit of a strange one; the Captain did know about ice and did take steps to avoid, primarily heading south away from both the likely location of icebergs (icebergs as far south as where the Titanic was hit was almost unthinkable). There were two messages that did notify the Titanic of ice in it's path, but one never reached the bridge (probably on account of some technical difficulties that the wireless crew were pre-occupied dealing with), the other (from the Californian) was received at rather a bad time. The wireless operator was transmitting messages from the passengers to the Cape Race relay station - as it was quite far away, he had to the volume turned right up so he could here the replies. The Californian, far closer, sends a message in, (probably) deafens the wireless operator who promptly tells the Californian to "Shut Up" (literally, that is what he morsed). The Captain acted as if there was no ice about, because as far as he knew there wasn't any ice about. There were also issues with the way wireless operators were employed (to whit, they were employed by the Marconi company and not the White Star Line) that added to their woes.

The lack of binoculars appears to have been a bit of a foul up - the chap who had the keys to the cabinet seems to have been transferred to another ship with the keys still in his pocket, but this point is rather contentious.

The actions of First Officer Murdoch are, again, a little bit contentious. If he had slowed down and carried on straight, most people would probably have survived. If he had turned without slowing down, everyone probably would have survived. By attempting to slow down and turn, he appears to have doomed the ship. The reasons why slowing down and hitting it would have saved her are fairly simple, but would have been a hell of a risk, and not one I think any First Officer would be willing to take. Even if the ship had stayed afloat, people would have died and become seriously injured having been flung across rooms following the collision. Keeping at full speed and turning would have been just as counter intuitive back then as now, but by putting the ship into reverse it caused a fluid disruption around the rudder, meaning it lost it's stearing. Add on to this that the central screw was turbine powered (the outer screws were reciprocal motion) and thus didn't go into astern added to this. Simply put, in reverse there wasn't enough water flowing past the rudder to allow it to turn as quickly as would have been the case on full power. It's not unlikely that he forgot the centre screw didn't have a reverse gear (turbine powered engines were less then 20 years old, and pretty bleeding edge on passenger ships in 1912 - it can be hard shaking experienced men out of habits of a lifetime); it's possible he attempted to stop the ship before deciding to turn and forgot to reset the engines to ahead.

 

[Shangas]

I speak from years of experience using distance-viewing aids, when I say that binoculars would've been of NO help at all to the lookouts on the night.

Even if the lookouts DID have them in their hands at the time...there's such a slim chance that they would've made any difference at all that they may as well not have had them in the first place.

The issue with the wireless operators boils down to lack of proper protocol.

Phillips, the Titanic's head wireless-operato was sending out passenger messages to Cape Race Lighthouse in Newfoundland, the nearest land-station to the Titanic.

The Californian sent this message:

"I say, old boy, we're stopped and surrounded by ice".

The Titanic wired back:

"Shut up! Shut up! I'm busy! I'm working Cape Race!"

What's the issue here?

The Californian is acting like that annoying jerk at the office who comes up to your desk and taps you on the shoulder trying to get your attention.

"Dude...Dude!...Hey dude!...DUUUUUDE!!! There's like...ice out there...dude..."

So the Titanic just ignored him.

The Californian should've sent out: "MSG - ICE WARNING - Lat *etc* Long *etc*".

MSG - Master Service Gram - Official communique from one ship to another. NOT TO BE IGNORED.

Instead, what the Californian sent out was a chatty, informal "what's up, dudes?" which pissed off the Titanic's operator because he wasn't polite enough to send his message using the proper, established rules of radio etiquette of the time. So he just ignored it.

Also, the Californian was pretty close at the time, so its signal would've been blasting into Phillip's headphones like a megaphone, which would've pissed him off even more.

 

[Treetopflyer]

I concur that you cannot tie one single event that doomed the ship. With any mishap, it is a “Swiss Cheese” model where all of the holes line up to allow an event to happen. I am sure that there were several causal factors in this mishap. Like with an aviation mishap, you have to look at every aspect of the situation and see how they connect. It all starts with the actual manufacturing of the materials that the ship was constructed of all the way through the moment the ship hit the iceberg.