TUNED IN BUT NOT LISTENING: CONTEMPLATING TITANIC DISASTER AT 100

To review the basic facts involved in the Titanic Disaster which occurred 100 years ago today:

Titanic did not have enough lifeboats for everyone on board. The British Board of Trade lifeboat regulations worked off a fantastically outdated and complicated mathematical equation that actually involved the size of the ship, not the number of people it held. The Board of Trade required 16 lifeboats. The shipbuilders thought that 64 boats would be ideal and recommended 32 to the owners.

The leaders of White Star Line, the owners of Titanic, believed that if the ship ever did sink, it would not sink fast. The lifeboats, they believed, could be used as shuttles taking passengers to nearby rescue ships and then returning to pick up more. Therefore, they ordered 20 lifeboats.

The designers of the ship built the watertight compartment bulkheads to stop flooding in the worst sort of accident they could comprehend. That calculation involved four water tight compartments at most. They did not comprehend an iceberg compromising the ship’s hull and bottom for the length of six plus compartments. This sort of accident happened a hundred years ago tonight. The resulting flood sank the ship in just under three hours.

Hindsight is always 20/20. It is easy today to fault everyone involved for overconfidence and the cutting of the proverbial corners. Building technology, then and now, is a compromise between safety, politics, and cost.

About eight problems manifested themselves on the Titanic after it hit an iceberg, and they all conspired to sink the ship and kill 1500 people. If any one of these eight problems had not occurred, the incident might have turned out less tragically. Despite the truth of that statement, we should not overlooked the one proximate cause of the disaster – overconfident bridge officers.


TITANIC RADIO

The Marconi Company privately owned the radio system as a convenience to the passengers; its operators did relay weather and other safety messages to the officers, though passenger communication to the shore was its main concern. Titanic’s wireless had a transmission range of about a 1000 miles. Its massive antennae stretched between the masts. Titanic was out of direct contact with Europe and North America for about half of the voyage, but it not out of contact with other ships in the lanes.

For a couple of days, as Titanic sailed west across the Atlantic, its wireless operators received warnings from east-bound ships that their sailors had seen ice problems southeast of Newfoundland in and around the shipping lane to New York.


TUNED IN BUT NOT LISTENING

Edward Smith, captain of Titanic, knew of ice warnings to the west. He traveled at top speed right into the problem. In the late 19th century and early 20th century, when the largest vessels were half the size and weight and about half as fast as Titanic and its sister ship Olympic, their captains regularly sailed through ice infested waters at full speed. However, a ship weighing in at over 46,000 tons and traveling at 22 knots an hour has increased its vulnerability by some quantum factor. It cannot quickly stop for an iceberg or quickly port around an iceberg as did smaller vessels.

The day of the disaster, Titanic’s wireless operators sent messages to its officers that warned of ice problems in the shipping lane ahead of them to the west. The captain shifted his course south -- a little -- but continued to increase his speed.

According to an entry in the Encyclopedia Titanica, (reported also in Walter Lord’s landmark book A Night to Remember):

“The single-funnel liner Mesaba was among the vessels that sent ice warnings to the Titanic. On 14 April, at 7.50 p.m. Mesaba time, the wireless operator Stanley Adams sent the following message:

To Titanic
In Lat. 42 N. to 41.25 Lond 49 W to Long - 50.30 W saw much heavy pack ice and great number large icebergs also field ice. Weather good, clear”

Adams should have sent the message directly to Captain Smith. Titanic radio operator Jack Philips received the message, as it was, at 9.40 p.m. On Sunday evening,, Titanic's radio transmitter receiver was in range of the Marconi station at Cape Race in Newfoundland. Philips, alone at the Morris-code key, sent a pile of messages to the this Marconi station,Titanic time, while second operator Harold Bride slept in bed, Perhaps it was for these reason that neither one of them relayed this message to the bridge.

One way or another, the Marconi operators should have taken that message immediately to the bridge for the officers’ attention. The officers would have discovered from this message that a big ice problem lay right ahead of the ship. And in the middle of a moonless night -- yet. The officers might have shifted the course south again. They might have slowed down. They might have remained overconfident and continued barging into danger at top speed. They would not, however, have remained in the dark about the situation to the west.

As if one undelivered message is not enough in the Titanic list of incompetence leading to catastrophe, the Marconi officer heard another wireless message about icebergs around 11 p.m. Titanic time. A ship radio operator rather close by barged in with some loud message about icebergs. He did not use the proper hailing phrases. Philips, frazzled by all the work ahead of him, cut off the warning and continued sending his messages to Newfoundland.

This was the crucial mistake before the disaster.

Had Philips listened, he would have found out from Cyril Evans, radio operator aboard the Californian, that it was stopped for the night because its officers could see nothing but pack ice and icebergs on the western horizon. He would have found out that the message was loud because the Californian was close, which meant the Titanic was also close to the same horizon of pack ice and icebergs.


SPECULATION

One can only speculate what might have happened if the officers that night had received not one but two messages about the mess of ice Titanic approached at full speed ahead. Some officer might have ordered the ship on a more southern route, or slow down, or even stop until dawn’s light illuminated the scene. Titanic might have continued in to New York.


GOOD FROM BAD

The Titanic disaster resulted in 1913 in stricter international laws: lifeboats required for everyone on board, twenty-four hour wireless communications, and an international iceberg patrol. If none of these laws had come into effect, big ships would have continued to carry few if any lifeboats because the owners and builders would have considered the liners unsinkable. The ship builders and owners would have continued building massive unsafe passenger liners with minimalist safety features. Sloppy incomplete international laws would have overseen passenger liner safety – until some other unfortunately Atlantic liner might have wound up as [in the immortal words of Eastern Onion] "the biggest metaphor of the twentieth century. "


UNFORTUNATELY, SHIPPING HAS GROWN OVER CONFIDENT AGAIN

Robert Ballard, the explorer who rediscovered the Titanic wreck in September 1985, is on the record stating that Titanic was actually better built the a lot of modern ships. Contemplate, for example, a catastrophic accident happening to the world's largest passenger liner – Allure of the Seas, an aircraft- carrier-sized cruise ship that can hold 6000 people. How would its crew get everyone off in less than an hour, especially if it were listing at some crazy angle in rough seas or if well-trained, well-armed, sea-going terrorists attacked it en masse.