That reminds me of a study I saw regarding whether they would have been better off leaving the watertight doors open so that the ship would flood more "evenly" (since it was doomed either way). Starts out better, ends up worse, when the ship tilts to and eventually collapses on one side.
Titanic question.
- Thread starter Vanyel
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Which is precisely what happened to the Andrea Doria on July 26, 1956 after colliding with the Stockholm.
Wiki:
For it's day the Titanic was quite an advanced ship technically. With it's compartmented hull, which was designed to keep the ship afloat with four compartments breached. Unfortuantly six were breached. Who knows if it had been designed more like other ships of it's period it might have sunk faster. Many factors were invovled in the Titanic disaster. The ice field being more south that year, a calm ocean, the rudder being too small, the central engine not being a reversing enginge, not enough lifeboats, the lookouts not having binocualrs etc...
It's easy to sit back over a century later with hindsight and say they should have done this. Perhaps they should have thrown the port enginge into reverse and kept the starboard enginge in forward. But with seconds to react could we honestly say we would have done anything differently?
And yet they only managed it with an additional trick and because they were in San Francisco bay during daytime, not in the North Atlantic during the night.
But that's not the issue. The issue is whether or not it's fair to condemn the White Star for not taking enough precautions before the ship's launch -- e.g., not having enough lifeboats.
And the answer is: Yes. Yes, it is. The Titanic was not the first ship in history to sink; they should have known better than to fall for their own arrogant advertising slogans about unsinkable ships; and it was greed and hubris that led them to think there was no way they'd need lifeboats. That the law did not force them to is no defense, because the law itself was manifestly unjust. This is not hindsight, this is common sense.
Not in that move, apparently. They had been slogging around in that water for the better part of an hour without obvious ill-effects.
Yeah, safety regulations weren't as advanced, the accident changed the industry and on and on, but the basic arithmetic of the number of souls aboard to the capacity of the lifeboats is pretty damning. It's basically saying the plan was to write off a certain number of lives in a worst-case scenario. And if the law didn't require it, well, as they say, the law is an ass.
Different times. They had enough for the upper class people, 'steerage' wasn't as big a concern. It's not that far removed from 'interesting' conditions in factories, child labor, or slavery. It would have been great if humans weren't such shitheads, and ancient Rome was fully up to code with 2013 safety regulations and morality, but it was a different time, things have changed.
Even then, several things went wrong. Should have been able to float until help came, but too many damaged compartments (due to ANOTHER big list of things that went wrong; training, undersized rudder, speed, etc). Nearby boats shut off radio or missed flares. Crappy organization led to liferafts being half full, or fights that meant the raft never left the boat to begin with. And yeah, not enough boats.
The way the abandon ship procedure was handled, even if there were enough seats so that it was 1:1 with passengers, you'd have still lost hundreds of people. Does that mean that you need 150% of max capacity? Does any current cruise ship carry that much liferaft space? Doubt it. They DO have enough now, though, and practice the drill when you start a cruise, and a dozen other things that came out of accidents like Titanic.
Sure, not the first time a boat had sunk, but not a real strong case there. Sounds callus, but especially when you go back in time a bit, human life was a bit 'cheaper' than it currently is. Accidents happened, people died. It took a HUGE disaster like Titanic to get enough attention to really take it seriously and do more of the things that needed to be done to reshape the industry. White Star was no more or less negligent than anyone else at the time.
We've been having accidents with fires for thousands of years, but it really wasn't until the Cocoanut Grove fire in Boston in 1942 that we started taking the kinds of precautions that would prevent these big disasters. Things that are 'obvious' now and that we take for granted, like: lighted exit signs (that don't run off of main power), doors that swing OUT vice swinging in at the exits, options other than revolving doors, no flammable decorations, no locking/chaining shut exit doors. All obvious now, but ALL things that went wrong in that fire, and have since been corrected.
Not the first time tragic fires had happened, but took that big event, and public attention, for it to get the momentum to force changes to the laws.
Even then, several things went wrong. Should have been able to float until help came, but too many damaged compartments (due to ANOTHER big list of things that went wrong; training, undersized rudder, speed, etc). Nearby boats shut off radio or missed flares. Crappy organization led to liferafts being half full, or fights that meant the raft never left the boat to begin with. And yeah, not enough boats.
The way the abandon ship procedure was handled, even if there were enough seats so that it was 1:1 with passengers, you'd have still lost hundreds of people. Does that mean that you need 150% of max capacity? Does any current cruise ship carry that much liferaft space? Doubt it. They DO have enough now, though, and practice the drill when you start a cruise, and a dozen other things that came out of accidents like Titanic.
Sure, not the first time a boat had sunk, but not a real strong case there. Sounds callus, but especially when you go back in time a bit, human life was a bit 'cheaper' than it currently is. Accidents happened, people died. It took a HUGE disaster like Titanic to get enough attention to really take it seriously and do more of the things that needed to be done to reshape the industry. White Star was no more or less negligent than anyone else at the time.
We've been having accidents with fires for thousands of years, but it really wasn't until the Cocoanut Grove fire in Boston in 1942 that we started taking the kinds of precautions that would prevent these big disasters. Things that are 'obvious' now and that we take for granted, like: lighted exit signs (that don't run off of main power), doors that swing OUT vice swinging in at the exits, options other than revolving doors, no flammable decorations, no locking/chaining shut exit doors. All obvious now, but ALL things that went wrong in that fire, and have since been corrected.
Not the first time tragic fires had happened, but took that big event, and public attention, for it to get the momentum to force changes to the laws.
But it wasn't ancient Rome, it was 1912. The Progressive Era, Oliver Twist, The Jungle... the reform mindset had already made its way into the culture. And most people today don't generally give a pass on slavery, especially in the 19th century, just because times were different.
And steerage being treated differently as far as safety seems even worse in light of the fact that the lines made more profit from the them than from the "upper class" passengers.
But 1:1 was still likely to save more lives than a lower ratio.
they actually had more life boats than the minimum requirement
But Jack was a third-class male passenger. The odds weren't in his favor to begin with.
Bingo.
Third-class passengers were very much treated differently and even prevented in getting to the boat deck by the closing of the gates between the third-class section of the ship and the boat-deck.
Exactly.
No. Immoral times, perhaps. But the Progressive era was well under way. There were plenty of movements fighting for egalitarianism and equal rights. There is simply no excuse for this kind of class bias and negligence.
All true. Yet more evidence of the White Star Line's negligence and incompetence.
So what? This is merely evidence that the powerful, the people who defined the cultural values of the era, were immoral. It is not a reasonable argument that there's anything "unfair" about blaming the White Star Line for the deaths aboard the Titanic.
"Everybody else done it" is not a valid excuse. All this means is that Cunard and the other lines were also immoral.
Congratulations, you have proven that the British and U.S. governments were also negligent and incompetent in addition to the White Star Line. All this means, of course, is that the government and corporate elite were quite corrupt when it came to their regard for human life.
Would the Titanic disaster have gathred as much interest, had it say been it's thirty-fourth voyage instead of it's maiden voyage?
For it's day the Titanic was one of the safest vessels, it just suffered damge beyond which it was designed to survive. That still applies to a certain degree today. Even with all the modern safety features we have should a ship suffer damage beyond that which it is designed to survive it will sink.
For it's day the Titanic was one of the safest vessels, it just suffered damge beyond which it was designed to survive. That still applies to a certain degree today. Even with all the modern safety features we have should a ship suffer damage beyond that which it is designed to survive it will sink.
No, but you can't single in on a specific aspect of the time period while ignoring the bigger picture. Things WERE different. While certain practices are not acceptable by today's standards, singling out people that were behaving according to their cultural norms (and not being negligent/evil as compared to that culture) doesn't accomplish much. Slavery = bad, everyone's on board. Not hard to look back and identify the 'bad guys' as opposed to those that simply were a product of the time, though. How much effort do we put into discussing the evils of, say, Thomas Jefferson?
How bad are WE going to look in a hundred years, compared to whatever passes for morality/standards then? Bunch of racist, classist, sexist, homophobes. Driving around poluting the shit out of the environment despite having the ability to do better, and killing thousands of people on the roads every year. In 100 years, I'm sure they can point out the obvious things we were doing wrong...
And 5:1 would have saved even more, but no one's advocating for that being the reasonable number. Why not an entire lifeboat per person, so everyone can ensure that a boat doesn't leave without them?
Disasters like Titanic were the experience that led us to understand how this works. Prior to that, they just didn't consider it would happen like this. It won't/can't sink, it'll take forever, there will be plenty of time to shuttle everyone to safety aboard another ship or land, etc. Obviously disproved all of those BAD assumptions that night, so we went back to the drawing board and came up with better. Since these things hadn't even occured to them, how can you fault them for it?
Doors that open outward to let people escape a fire seem obvious, but the people who installed doors to open inward (or rotating doors) weren't evil/negligent for doing so. It just took some glaring examples to highlight the huge flaws of that design, understand why it happened, and make changes so that it didn't happen again.
Titanic was the big game changer here. If it was the 2nd or third big disaster and changes hadn't happened, you'd be right to be all over them. As they were the ones to prove the flaw, hard to whack them for not planning for something they didn't think could happen.
It helps us understand how truly immoral those cultural norms were, and how much more we've progressed since then. I consider that important.
Not enough. For all his rhetoric about liberty and about how slavery itself was evil, that didn't stop him from living off the backs of hundreds of people -- nor did it stop him, as historian James Lowen points out in his book Lies My Teacher Told Me, from being unusually cruel in punishing his slaves even by the standards of the Virginia slaver aristocracy.
I already think quite a lot about our culture is immoral, so I'm perfectly comfortable making that judgment today. And I'd be thrilled if society so progresses in another hundred years that nobody then can believe how barbarous we often are today.
Thank God!
Why shouldn't we fault them for a failure of imagination and for hubris? I don't consider "We didn't think of it" to be a good excuse.
I see the point and agree with it to an extent. But I'm not singling people out for their societal outlook, I'm just saying there were people who were responsible for other peoples' safety and made the decision to not provide the minimum necessary to evacuate their ship in a best-case evacuation. I don't feel unreasonably judgmental for saying that choice was appallingly indifferent to human life.
But that's taking it to the absurd. In the situation we're talking about, even a slow, orderly, even-keeled sinking would have put a lot of people in the water. Lifeboat capacity for every soul aboard was certainly not an unreasonable standard at the time.
I think most of us got his point the first time around. But sometimes arrogance overtakes common sense. We could no doubt find many examples of arrogance overtaking safety.
How about a more recent disasterthe Challanger Disaster. Morton-Thiokol,who manufactured the SRB's for the space shutle, whose engineers recommened against launching the Shuttle Challanger in cold tempatures. But manangment decided it was worth the risk, and we know what happened. And part of the aftermath was the shuttle couldn't be launched below a certain tempature.
How about a more recent disasterthe Challanger Disaster. Morton-Thiokol,who manufactured the SRB's for the space shutle, whose engineers recommened against launching the Shuttle Challanger in cold tempatures. But manangment decided it was worth the risk, and we know what happened. And part of the aftermath was the shuttle couldn't be launched below a certain tempature.
True -- the same story, repeating itself throughout history. It never should have come to the destruction of the Challenger, but it did. So I think it's perfectly reasonable to keep talking about what these political and economic actors did wrong in the past, if we're to ever have any hope of learning from their mistakes.
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