Important Note:

Opinions are fun. My friends tell me I am someone with lots of opinions and that's fine since I don't get mad at others when they disagree with me. In this same spirit I am interested in hearing yours views as long as you are able to share your views without boiling over. I look forward to hearing from you. I tend to write in the form of short essays most of the time, but contributions do not need to be in this same format or size. Some of the content here will date itself pretty quickly, other content may be virtually timeless, this is for the reader to judge.

Displaying 1 - 1 of 1

It is never as simple as “Just an Iceberg”                                                                                    

Posted at: Apr/07/2012 : Posted by: mel

Related Category: Perspectives,

100 years ago, April of 1912 the ocean liner Titanic sunk while crossing the Atlantic Ocean on her maiden voyage. Within hours of striking an iceberg, the great ship was gone along with 1514 souls. All of us learned this either in school, at the movies, or maybe by watching the history channel.

Disasters are continually plaguing humanity, but some are unique in how the manifest themselves. The great Chicago fire and the San Francisco earthquake were cause by a single event. We know that the PANAM flight that went down over Lockerbie Scotland was caused by a bomb planted on the plane. When complex technology and human error are blended we periodically end up with different kind of disaster described in a scenario called an “Event Cascade.” Event Cascades are the collection of technological failures, human omissions, leadership missteps and a little bad luck all coming together at one place and time. While striking the iceberg was significant, it alone did not result in the loss of the “unsinkable” Titanic.

I will share my list and you can see how many factors conspired to doom the great ship (mostly in no particular order).

The iceberg is obviously number one on the list. With the majority of its widening mass under water, striking the berg at full speed would have done major damage to the plates and seams of the ship below the waterline. No collision with the iceberg would have meant that our event cascade would never have been initiated.

Lower grade iron rivets were used in portions of the bow and stern as opposed to higher grade rivets used in the rest of the ship’s hull construction. The lower grade rivets during the collision would have ripped apart more easily causing a larger opening and faster flooding. My research on why these rivets were used is unclear. Some data suggests that the high grade rivets were in short supply during the construction of the bow and stern. Other data suggests that the high grade rivets were only compatible with the crane mounted hydraulic technology used on the uniformly shaped sides of the great ship.

We have all heard the expression “speed kills”. There is no doubt that the ship’s captain, Edward J. Smith was attempting to better the crossing time of the Titanic’s older sibling Olympic. A major part of promoting a liner in that day for transatlantic crossing was to brag about its speed. Obviously, the best version of this would have been to set a new record on the maiden voyage. None of this was lost to Captain Smith and he would likely have wanted his name associated with the new record crossing on the newest and greatest ship of its day. The down side to the increased speed would have been that the ability to maneuver away from a rapidly closing iceberg would have been diminished and the potential damage from an impact would have been increased.

An important iceberg warning received over the wireless went unheeded. While within range of Cape Race Newfoundland, Titanic received multiple warning about North Atlantic ice fields. The last and most detailed warning was not passed along by the senior radio operator Jack Phillips to Captain Smith because it was not received with the prefix “MSG” designating Masters’ Service Gram. Any message with the MSG prefix would have required a personal acknowledgement from the captain. With the MSG prefix missing, Phillips apparently interpreted the message as non-urgent and returned to sending passenger messages. We will never know if this last message would have made the captain and crew more cautious in dangerous waters.

Did you know that the ships lookouts did not have binoculars? Apparently the ship was stocked with binoculars, but they were all safely stored behind lock and key. The only officer with a key for this special locker was bumped from the crew just before departure without returning the locker keys. It is difficult to say one way or another if lookouts equipped with binoculars would have spotted the iceberg in time or not. Being nighttime and the ship not equipped with searchlights, it is questionable how visible an iceberg would have been. Please note that searchlights were not common on ships until many years later.

The unsinkable ships watertight bulkheads did not reach all the way to the fairweather deck. While the ship did have watertight bulkheads on many levels of decks below the waterline, none existed above the waterline. As the forward portion of the ship flooded vertically, the fairweather deck dipped below the waterline allowing water to spill into each compartment successively. Much like a plastic ice cube tray, there were no holes going from cube to cube, but once the water got high enough, the next row of cubes would flood from the top. Clearly, watertight bulkheads were a great idea, but their implementation was not thought completely enough. A better design might have kept the ship afloat longer for rescue or prevented the ships loss entirely.

Of course, any time you are dealing with the oceans, weather has to be considered. With warmer than normal waters in the Gulf Stream that spring, conditions would have been ripe for a larger than normal concentration of ice almost exactly where the collision occurred.

Did the Titanic’s steersman turn the ship into iceberg dooming the ship? According to a surviving ships officer of the day, after the iceberg was spotted, the command was issued to turn “hard to starboard.” This was apparently misinterpreted as “make the ship turn to the right” rather than “push the tiller right to make the ship head left”. Since maneuvering the rudder in one direction produces the opposite motion for the ship this can be confusing for a layman. This story was never widely substantiated but is worth noting for the potential of confusion in evasive maneuvering.

Over the years there has been a lot of debate over the steel used in the construction of the ship. Early studies suggested that the carbon content of the steel would have made it brittle, and therefore more prone to catastrophic failure with the cold and the impact of the collision. More recent testing suggests that the plating was ductile enough to bend rather than fracture during impact with the iceberg, though we still cannot discount the concern over differing types of rivets mentioned earlier.

Lastly is the issue of lifeboats. We all know that there were not enough lifeboats to accommodate all the 2200 passengers and crew. Technically, Titanic sailed with enough lifeboats to support only about 1,200 people. As tragic as this sounds it exceeded the 1,060 person lifeboat capacity required by law at that time. I know there is arrogance about sailing an unsinkable ship, but if you need lifeboats at all, wouldn’t they be needed for everyone? This is one of those obvious in hindsight questions. I suspect that the lifeboats that were on an unsinkable ship were thought of more as ornaments.

When technology and man meet, if there is a failure, it is seldom a single cause. Whether the Titanic, the Costa Concordia, a train collision when the engineer is texting, a plane falling out of the sky or a power grid failure; these events will continue to happen. Some people call this a perfect storm of events. Engineers call this an event cascade. In these situations, it is likely that no single failure would result in the catastrophic loss of life. Never the less, when technology, design, arrogance, distraction and external forces all meet the events will cascade on each other and disaster is the result.

Western society is integrating technology into more and more of our daily activities as our lives become immersed and dependent on this same technology for routine activities in our lives. This means that a perfect storm of event failures and oversights are more and more likely to merge at one place and time to create these disasterist event cascades. While you may not be destine to run into an iceberg, the collision of nature, technological failure and human error are going to become recurring theme in our futures.

Comments (0)                                                                                                                                                    [Add Comment]