From: andya@praxis-cs.co.uk (Andy Ashworth)
Newsgroups: sci.military.naval
Subject: Re: Could the Titanic have been saved?
Date: Thu, 15 Jan 1998 12:45:25 GMT

On Sun, 11 Jan 1998 22:05:36 -0500, Bill M  wrote:

>Ben Lanson wrote:
>
>Of course, we'd have to take into consideration the quality of the steel
>used.  The latest writings indicate that it was of extremely low
>quality.  What effect a collision at 21 knots head-on can only be
>speculated.

I saw a Discovery Channel special the other week looking into this and
other issues around the Titanic sinking. Using  side scan sonar
through the mud the location of the holes along the starboard side
were investigated. This technique identified that the majority of the
water came in through popped rivets and small rips in the steel -
total area letting in water was estimated to be in region of 1 square
metre. The problem with plugging the leaks was not the size of the
leaks but the sheer number and the difficulties of getting to them in
time. Some computer modelling was carried out by 2 Naval Architects
from Harland & Wolff who agreed that such leakage across a large
number of locations would fit with eye witness reports of the sinking,
i.e. timings, etc.

>
>Of course, if I were a Professor of Physics or Naval Architecture at
>some University, this would have been an assignment years ago.  Or has
>it been done?

The same programme also showed the recovery of a piece of plating for
metallurgical analysis; the quality of the steel was poor compared to
today's standards and at low temperatures would have been
exceptionally brittle. It was actually predicted that the mid-ships
section of the ship (i.e. the bit not apparent on the sea-bed) would
have literally shattered due to the stresses brought on immediately
after the sinking with a still air-filled stern section being dragged
down by water-logged bows. This was used as a explanation for the
reported sounds like "breaking glass" reported by some survivors.

Andy Ashworth

From: Thomas.Buell@diesel.heim1.tu-clausthal.de (Thomas Buell)
Newsgroups: sci.military.naval
Subject: Re: Could the Titanic have been saved?
Date: 15 Jan 1998 14:14:18 GMT

Andy Ashworth (andya@praxis-cs.co.uk) wrote:
: This technique identified that the majority of the
: water came in through popped rivets and small rips in the steel -
: total area letting in water was estimated to be in region of 1 square
: metre. The problem with plugging the leaks was not the size of the
: leaks but the sheer number and the difficulties of getting to them in
: time.

This sounds as though leak sails (term?) would have helped a lot.
(Don't know the English term: Large sheets of strong canvas with
long ropes on the corners for handling them. They are lowered in
front of the bows, moved to the damaged area and get pressed on the
leak by the water flowing in. Or are these the same as the "collision
mats", mentioned before?)

AFAIK, this is a rather oldfashioned method, did Titanic carry such
equipment or anything else that could have been used that way?
From my experience from DC school handling a leak sail is not that
easy, but placed properly it greatly reduces the inrush of water. So
it may become possible to pump the water out of a damaged compartment
again and work on the leak from inside.

I've read on the web that Titanic had some sophisticated DC facilities,
such as remote controlled or automatic watertight doors, smoke detectors
etc.
Does anyone know the capacity of her pumps? Would it have been possible
to reduce the amount of water entering the ship below what the pumps
could hanlde? 1 m^2 isn't very large an area, is it? And draining
one damaged compartment would have been enough.

	regards,
	Thomas

From: iburrell@leland.Stanford.EDU (Ian Burrell)
Newsgroups: sci.military.naval
Subject: Re: Could the Titanic have been saved?
Date: 15 Jan 1998 13:14:23 -0800

In article <34be1f65.20473397@leibniz>,
Andy Ashworth <andya@praxis-cs.co.uk> wrote:

>One other thing I found interesting/horrifying, the Harland & Wolf
>computer model showed that the water tight compartments were not full
>height, i.e. once a water tight section was full it overflowed into
>the adjacent section(s). This was apparently another reason for the
>sinking - if the compartments had extended the full height of the
>ship's hull, there would have been a much greater chance of saving
>her.


This was the reason Titanic was only supposed to be able to survive
flooding in four bow compartments.  Five compartments were flooded on
Titanic which dragged the bow down far enough that water spilled over
the top of the watertight bulkheads.

After Titanic, her sister ships, Olympic and Britannic, were refitted
and redesigned with some of the bulkheads extended all the way to the
deck.  They were supposed to be able to survive the flooding of six
bow compartments.  However, Britannic struck a mine in the Aegean
during WWI and sunk in less than an hour.  The reason was that the
watertight doors weren't closed because of a change in shift and that
a row of portholes were open.


 - Ian

--
  Ian Burrell  iburrell@leland.stanford.edu
  http://www-leland.stanford.edu/~iburrell/
The meek shall inherit the earth, the bold shall get the stars. - IB

Newsgroups: sci.military.naval
From: baldwin@netcom.com (J.D. Baldwin)
Subject: Re: Could the Titanic have been saved?
Date: Fri, 16 Jan 1998 21:31:59 GMT

In article <34B8EFC7.41B9@communique.net>, Bill Radigan
<radiganb@communique.net> wrote:
> Or could the sinking have been delayed 2 hours when help arrived?
> Or could rescue have arrived earlier? Or at least, could more people
> have been saved.
>
> Some suggestions .....
> 1. Jettison the ground tackle and cut away weight forward.

You know that old joke about "re-arranging the deck chairs on the
Titanic"?

> 2. Improvise a bulkhead above the level of the critical one.

A LOT of work to be done in very little time.

> 3. Counterflood aft.

It's been [mumble] years since my last Naval Architecture class, but
I'm guessing that this would buy nowhere near 2 hours, and it's damned
risky in and of itself.

> 4. Jettison coal.

You already threw the deck chairs overboard to save weight.  What's
the point?  Seriously, there just wouldn't be enough time and manpower
to jettison a significant fraction of the ship's displacement.

> 5. The ship Californian is in sight 10-15 miles away.  Steam in
> reverse towards it at maximum speed.

"Toward *her* at maximum speed," please.  I wonder whether this would
have helped, and pulling backward through the water might well have
made things worse by drawing more water on board.

> 6. Californian misinterprets distress rockets as fireworks. Set a large
> fire on the forecastle. (It's always better to yell "Fire!" than
> "Help!")

This is a good one.  If you're really in distress, you'd better be
sending every form of goddam distress signal known to man, plus a few
you make up yourself.  "Open flames on deck" is an internationally
recognized distress signal (if intentionally set, and even more so if
unintentional!) and pretty much always has been.

> 7. The ship contains thousands of "steamer trunks".  Not watertight
> exactly but they will take a while to fill. Dump the contents and jam
> them in corrodors and cabins as far forward as possible.

Or you could just stick your finger in the hole.  Nothing you could
improvise with stuff like this could withstand even a small fraction of
the water pressures involved.

> 8. Overload the lifeboats.

Hell, *loading* the lifeboats would have been a good idea!  Yes, the
lifeboats should have been overloaded -- the seas were calm, and help
was expected quite soon.

> 9. Use steamer trunks, deck planking, and lifejackets to improvise
> rafts. (This is desperate, I know, but hey.)

Some have suggested that improvisation of rafts was a fairly basic
seamanship skill back then.  In benefit of hindsight, this is probably
where efforts should have been concentrated.  A few passengers could
have been pressed into service to organize the loading of the
lifeboats while deck seamen lashed various materials into rafts.
Better than standing around and listening to the band, anyway.

> What would a USN damage conrol team have done? Any other ideas?

A USN DC team would have patched and shored up the hole.  I've always
wondered just how well-equipped modern cruise liner crews are for
handling serious structural casualties to their vessels.
--
 From the catapult of J.D. Baldwin  |+| "If anyone disagrees with anything I
   _,_    Finger baldwin@netcom.com |+| say, I am quite prepared not only to
 _|70|___:::)=}-  for PGP public    |+| retract it, but also to deny under
 \      /         key information.  |+| oath that I ever said it." --T. Lehrer
***~~~~-----------------------------------------------------------------------



------------



Newsgroups: sci.military.naval
From: baldwin@netcom.com (J.D. Baldwin)
Subject: Re: Could the Titanic have been saved?
Date: Mon, 19 Jan 1998 04:18:24 GMT

In article <34C11E6A.5636@umich.edu>, Joshua Turner <shua@umich.edu>
wrote, quoting me:
> > Some have suggested that improvisation of rafts was a fairly basic
> > seamanship skill back then.  In benefit of hindsight, this is probably
> > where efforts should have been concentrated.  A few passengers could
> > have been pressed into service to organize the loading of the
> > lifeboats while deck seamen lashed various materials into rafts.
> > Better than standing around and listening to the band, anyway.
>
> This last exchange illustrates what was probably the real tradegy of
> the Titanic disaster. The lack of lifeboat drills, combined with the
> perception that the ship was 'unsinkable', made it almost impossible
> to get the lifeboats that were available loaded efficiently and
> correctly.  The above suggestion, while interesting, fails to take
> this into account--if the crew was unable to get passengers to climb
> into perfectly serviceable boats, how were they to convince the
> passengers to stand around building life rafts?

Good point.  In truth, I had actually sort of forgotten just how
wildly unorganized and panicky the situation aboard Titanic had
been.  But this provides an insight that goes a long way toward
answering the original question:  "How would a Navy DC crew have
handled matters?"

The main reason a Navy crew would have been so much more effective is
due to one simple factor: discipline.  Even a substantially below-
average U.S. Navy warship crew wouldn't degenerate into complete
confusion and panic.  This is not to say that confusion and panic are
unknown in the annals of Navy damage control efforts, of course, but
the value of even a little occasional practice is immeasurable.  A
solid, well-trained crew might well have saved 90% or more of
Titanic's passengers, mainly by overloading the available lifeboats,
instead of grossly *under*-loading them (!), but also by improvising
damage control measures and ad hoc liferafts as described above.

The main lesson of Titanic, as with so many other historical events
("Challenger" springs to mind) is that stupidity + complacency + more
stupidity is a deadly combination, whose effects are unfortunately not
confined to the perpetrators of the stupidity.  How natural selection
ever got us *this* far, given this state of affairs, is beyond me.
--
 From the catapult of J.D. Baldwin  |+| "If anyone disagrees with anything I
   _,_    Finger baldwin@netcom.com |+| say, I am quite prepared not only to
 _|70|___:::)=}-  for PGP public    |+| retract it, but also to deny under
 \      /         key information.  |+| oath that I ever said it." --T. Lehrer
***~~~~-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Newsgroups: sci.military.naval
From: baldwin@netcom.com (J.D. Baldwin)
Subject: Re: Could the Titanic have been saved?
Date: Wed, 21 Jan 1998 18:52:54 GMT

In article <34C5921F.5567@umich.edu>, Joshua Turner <shua@umich.edu>
wrote:
> IMHO, there were many hundreds of things that could have been done
> to save many or all of the souls on the Titanic. However, few if any
> were under the control of the crew once the ship struck the berg. By
> that time, it was too late. The Titanic was doomed from the moment
> it collided with the ice, by virtue of bad steel, a poorly designed
> compartmentalization system, crew and passengers that had never
> undergone a lifeboat drill, lack of enough lifeboats, a captain who
> didn't understand how much of a slug his ship was when it came to
> turning, a lack of 24 hour wireless coverage by other ships in the
> area, bad luck, and a whole lot of other factors which can be
> debated from here to eternity. We can call the crew stupid, or
> incompetent, or lay the blame at the feet of Ismay and Morgan, or
> the British and American governments if we want; there's plenty of
> blame to go around. But in a broader sense, the Titanic disaster was
> not caused by the negligence of any one party, but instead by a
> failure to understand the ramifications of a technological advance.

For purposes of "root causes" you're right, and it's easy to call
people from another time "stupid" when you've benefitted from 86 years
of re-hashing and hindsight on hindsight on the incident -- the
*basic* problem here is exactly what you say:  people just expected
"Titanic" to be safe by virtue of her sheer size.  Nature, however,
is unimpressed by "size" on the scales in which humans deal.

There are, however, two elements of the tragedy that are, even
correcting for historical context and "20/20 hindsight,"
incomprehensibly stupid.  The first *was* in the control of Titanic's
crew; the second was not.

1. Failure to overload lifeboats, or for that matter to *load* the
lifeboats to capacity.  Come *on*.  Any sailor knows that a lifeboat
is "rated" for a capacity based on "most likely" conditions -- the
rating is a "best guess" as to the safe capacity.  If you're looking
around at what we today call "sea state zero" waters, it's what we
today call a "no-brainer" to figure out that the boats could safely
hold even more than that.  And still they put 65-man boats to sea with
1/4 or less of capacity?  Inexcusable.

2. Californian's failure to respond to a distress flare.  Assisting
others who signal distress (in peacetime) is a mariner's duty that
goes back about as far as seaborne travel itself.  It has been
codified in international law since well before Titanic sailed, and
was part of tradition-with-force-of-law since the time of Sir Francis
Drake.  I don't care *what* they thought or guessed might have been
Titanic's intent in firing the flare -- if there is the *slightest*
bit of doubt (and I've read that the question came up aboard
Californian), you respond to the call, and sort it out later if it
turns out to be a false alarm.

Non-watertight "watertight" bulkheads, too-ambitious speed for icy
waters, poor steel (maybe true, maybe not), communication deficiencies
-- all of these are gray areas, but I simply can't understand or
justify the above elements of this disaster.
--
 From the catapult of J.D. Baldwin  |+| "If anyone disagrees with anything I
   _,_    Finger baldwin@netcom.com |+| say, I am quite prepared not only to
 _|70|___:::)=}-  for PGP public    |+| retract it, but also to deny under
 \      /         key information.  |+| oath that I ever said it." --T. Lehrer
***~~~~-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Newsgroups: sci.military.naval
From: baldwin@netcom.com (J.D. Baldwin)
Subject: Re: Titanic, Look and weep
Date: Sat, 24 Jan 1998 16:01:04 GMT

In article <34c9328f.69096583@news.exis.net>, Peter H. Granzeau
<pgranzo@exis.net> wrote:
> >In the movie "Titanic," after Murdoch gives the "starboard rudder"
> >order, the helsman spins the wheel in the direction one would expect
> >for a left turn, which is of course what was intended.  This seems
> >historically correct, as was the "starboard" command -- are you saying
> >that the effect of a wheel turn should have been opposite to what we
> >would expect?  Ship's wheels work the same way as a car's steering
> >wheel:  to turn left, one turns the wheel counter-clockwise.
>
> Okay.  Same with whipstaffs.  I wasn't "saying" anything; I haven't
> seen the movie, and for all I knew, the actions of a ship's wheel were
> reversed.  Evidently only the helm orders were reversed, from what
> people are saying.  Was the famous "glancing blow" taken on the port
> or starboard side?

Here's how it went in the movie:

1. Murdoch sees the iceberg and calls "hard starboard rudder" or
something to that effect.  (Also "all back full" on the engines,
of course.)

2. Helmsman spins the wheel rapidly to the LEFT -- I thought this was
a glaring error for a moment, and then I remembered that this would
have been accurate in the 19th Century, assumed that the practice
continued for some time into this century and went back to watching
the action.

3. Ship continues toward the berg pretty much at full speed for
a long, agonizing minute, then S-L-O-W-L-Y her bow moves to the
left . . .

4. . . . but, of course not quite enough, and she strikes the berg
slightly (or so it seemed) on the starboard bow.  There was no
sudden impact, just a "shuddering" -- and this, I understand, is
historically accurate.

5. When the captain arrives on the bridge and asks what it was he
just felt, Murdoch informs him that they've struck an iceberg, and
that he tried to port around it, but failed.

I certainly hope I haven't spoiled any plot elements for those who
haven't yet seen the film.  At least I'll shut up about how it all
turns out.

Q:  Would Murdoch have been better off ringing for "back full" on
    only the port and center screws, leaving the starboard engine
    at "ahead full"?  This is how one makes for a tighter turn in an
    emergency situation in a modern two-screw ship, after all.  He had
    little hope of decreasing Titanic's speed appreciably with "all
    back full."  More to the point, should he have known this at the
    time?  Would this have been a standard tenet of seamanship, as it
    is today?
--
 From the catapult of J.D. Baldwin  |+| "If anyone disagrees with anything I
   _,_    Finger baldwin@netcom.com |+| say, I am quite prepared not only to
 _|70|___:::)=}-  for PGP public    |+| retract it, but also to deny under
 \      /         key information.  |+| oath that I ever said it." --T. Lehrer
***~~~~-----------------------------------------------------------------------