Lessons from the Titanic From the comfort of our
modern lives we tend to look back at the mm of the twentieth century as a
dangerous time for sea travelers. With limited communication facilities, and
shipping technology still in its infancy in the early nineteen hundreds, we
consider ocean travel to have been a risky business. But to the people of the
time it was one of the safest forms of transport. At the time of the Titanic’s
maiden voyage in 1912, there had only been four lives lost in the previous forty
years on passenger ships on the North Atlantic crossing. And the Titanic was
confidently proclaimed to be unsinkable. Her builders, crew and passengers had
no doubt that she was the finest ship ever built. But still she did sink on
April 14, 1912, taking 1,517 of her passengers and crew with her.
The RMS Titanic left Southampton for New York on April 10, 1912. On board
were some of the richest and most famous people of the time who had paid large
sums of money to sail on the first voyage of the most luxurious ship in the
world. And with nine decks, she was as high as an eleven- storey building. The
Titanic carried 329 first-class, 285 second-class and 710 third-class passengers
with 899 crew members, under the care of the very experienced Captain Edward J.
Smith. She also carried enough food to feed a small town. RMS
Titanic was believed to be unsinkable because the hull was divided into sixteen
watertight compartments. Even if two of these compartments flooded, the ship
could still float. The ship’s owners could not imagine that, in the case of an
accident, the Titanic would not be able to float until she was rescued. It was
largely as a result of this confidence in the ship and in the safety of ocean
travel that the disaster could claim such a great loss of life.
Iceberg Locations Not Plotted In the ten hours prior
to the Titanic’s fatal collision with an iceberg at 11:40 pm, six warnings of
icebergs in her path were received by the Titanic’s wireless operators. Only one
of these messages was formally posted on the bridge, the others were in various
locations across the ship. If the combined information in these messages of
iceberg positions had been plotted, the ice field which lay across the Titanic’s
path would have been apparent. Instead, the lack of formal procedures for
dealing with information from a relatively new piece of technology, the
wireless, meant that the danger was not known until too late. This was not the
fault of the Titanic crew. Procedures for dealing with warnings received through
the wireless had not been familiarized across the shipping industry at the time.
The fact that the wireless operators were rather contracted workers from a
wireless company, made their role in the ship’s operation quite
unclear. Captain’s Over-confidence
Captain Smith’s seemingly casual attitude in increasing the speed on that
day to a dangerous 22 knots or 41 kilometers per hour, can then be partly
explained by his ignorance of what lay ahead. But this only partly accounts for
his actions, since the spring weather in Greenland was known to cause huge
chunks of ice to break off from the glaciers (冰河). Captain Smith knew that these
icebergs would float southward and had already acknowledged this danger by
taking a more southerly route than at other times of the year. So why was the
Titanic traveling at high speed when he knew Captain Smith was following the
practices accepted on the North Atlantic, practices which had coincided with
forty years of safe travel. He believed, wrongly as we now know, that the ship
could turn or stop in time if an iceberg was sighted by the lookouts.
There were around two and a half hours between the time the Titanic rammed
into the iceberg and its final submersion. At this time 705 people were loaded
into the twenty lifeboats. There were 473 empty seats available on lifeboats
while over 1,500 people drowned. These figures raise two important issues.
Firstly, why there were not enough lifeboats to seat every passenger and crew
member on board. And secondly, why the lifeboats were not full.
Low Priority Placed on Safety The Titanic had sixteen
lifeboats and four collapsible boats which could carry just over half the number
of people on board her maiden voyage and only a third of the Titanic’s total
capacity. Regulations for the number of lifeboats required were based on
outdated British Board of Trade regulations written in 1894 for ships a quarter
of the Titanic’s size, and had never been revised. Under these requirements, the
Titanic was only obliged to carry enough lifeboats to seat 962 people. At design
meetings in 1910, the shipyard’s managing director, Alexander Carlisle, had
proposed that forty-eight lifeboats be installed on the Titanic, but the idea
had been quickly rejected as too expensive. Ignorance of the
Impending Disaster The belief that the Titanic was
unsinkable was so strong that passengers and crew alike clung to the belief even
as she was actually sinking. This attitude was not helped by Captain Smith, who
had not acquainted his senior officers with the full situation. For the first
hour after the collision, the majority of people aboard the Titanic, including
senior crew, were not aware that she would sink, that there were insufficient
lifeboats or that the nearest ship responding to the Titanic’s distress (遇险信号)
calls would arrive two hours after she was on the bottom of the ocean. As a
result, the officers in charge of loading the boats received a very halfhearted
response to their early calls for women and children to board the lifeboats.
People felt that they would be safer, and certainly warmer, aboard the Titanic
than perched in a litde boat in the North Adantic Ocean. Not realizing the
magnitude of the coming disaster themselves, the officers allowed several boats
to be lowered only half full. Inadequate
Training Procedures again were at fault, as an additional
reason for the officers’ reluctance to lower the lifeboats at full capacity was
that they feared the lifeboats would buckle under the weight of 65 people. They
had not been informed that the lifeboats had been fully tested prior to
departure. Such procedures as assigning passengers and crew to lifeboats and
lifeboat loading drills were simply not part of the standard operation of ships
nor were they included in crew training at that time. As the
Titanic sank, another ship, believed to have been the Californian, was seen
motionless less than twenty miles away. The ship failed to respond to the
Titanic’s eight distress rockets. Although the officers of the Californian tried
to signal the Titanic with their flashing Morse lamp, they did not wake up their
radio operator to listen for a distress call. After the Titanic
sank, investigations were held in both Washington and London. In the end, both
inquires decided that no one could be blamed for the sinking. However, they did
address the fundamental safety issues which had contributed to the enormous loss
of life. As a result, international agreements were drawn up to improve
safety procedures at sea. The new regulations covered 24 hour wireless
operation, crew training, proper lifeboat drills, lifeboat capacity for all on
board and the creation of an international ice patrol. The number of lifeboats on the Titanic met the regulations for much smaller ships but not the Titanic.