Titanic Probabilies "By DeerSlayer"

[ChemEngrMBA]

http://TitanicProbabilities.blogspot.com


The sinking of the RMS Titanic resulted from a most unlikely culmination of events which cascaded one upon the next, ultimately ending with the loss of 1,514 passengers (710 were saved) and crew, not to mention a newly launched ocean liner.  The oversights and mistakes of Titanic's captain, Edward Smith, extended from well before the great ship was launched May 31, 1911 in Belfast, Northern Ireland, to the time the ship's band played Nearer My God to Thee, around 2:10 AM on April 15, 1912.  Notwithstanding the adage of  "women and children first," only 56 of the 109 children survived.

Perhaps what sets the Titanic's sinking apart from the thousands of others over the centuries is the astounding, indeed head-slapping mistakes that experts in their fields made, each one compounding the previous one in this critical path.  Had any one of these critical mistakes (or in some cases, simply random events) not taken place, virtually all of these many hundreds of passengers and crew would have survived, and perhaps the Titanic as well.




Note this interesting warning sign just left of the flag at the stern:




Let's consider the a priori probability of the litany of errors, oversights, and shortcuts, all of which are my own personal estimates.  If you choose to change a few or even many of my estimates such that you increase the likelihood by as much as six or eight orders of magnitude, still the tumultuous fiasco would remain one in 50 billion trillion.

Before he was given command of the Titanic on this, his final voyage before retirement, Captain Smith commanded the RMS Olympic, which on September 20, 1911, collided with the HMS Hawke, damaging one of Olympic's three driveshafts.  In the urgency of returning the Olympic to service, White Star Lines, its owner, scavenged one of the Titanic's driveshafts to replace Olympic's.  The Titanic's maiden voyage, scheduled for March 20, 1912, was thus delayed to April 10.  Nobody could possibly have known that this separate collision between two other ships would be Event One in the critical path which would culminate with the sinking of the Titanic and the tragic loss of so many innocent people who were simply traveling to America..

My estimate of the probability of Captain Edward Smith causing the minor but critical collision of the RMS Olympic, one of only two ships in White Star Lines, which delays construction and the launch date of the other White Star Lines ship, the Titanic, which Smith will subsequently command, and sink through compound foolhardiness
1 in 10,000.
 (One of Titanic's driveshafts was removed and installed in Olympic to get it promptly back into service)

[Applewood]

The Titanic was a tragedy of epic proportions, but if any good came out of it, it was that it ushered in a lot of changes.  Now cruise ships have to have enough lifeboats for everyone. There must be a radio operator on duty 24/7.  There is an international ice patrol to monitor icebergs in the North Atlantic.  And now cruise ships have so much modern technology (they don't have two guys in a crow's nest without binoculars looking for icebergs).  Chances of such a calamity happening again are slim to none. 

I was reading something recently about J. Bruce Ismay, who was president of the White Star Line at the time of the tragedy.  He was on the ship during the disastrous voyage but he saved himself by getting into a lifeboat, while a number of women and children perished.  Ismay was accused by the press of being the villain in the tragedy, and even though inquiries into the disaster exonerated him of wrongdoing, his life was never the same again.  Family, friends, colleagues -- all distanced themselves from him.  He became a pariah. 

[berdie]

The Titanic was a tragedy of epic proportions, but if any good came out of it, it was that it ushered in a lot of changes.  Now cruise ships have to have enough lifeboats for everyone. There must be a radio operator on duty 24/7.  There is an international ice patrol to monitor icebergs in the North Atlantic.  And now cruise ships have so much modern technology (they don't have two guys in a crow's nest without binoculars looking for icebergs).  Chances of such a calamity happening again are slim to none. 

This was absolutely a tragedy. But usually some kind of good results from any bad. Maybe this is what the good is.

I read not long ago that had the ship had hit head on instead of on the side it wouldn't have been so catastrophic.

[ChemEngrMBA]

 Ismay was accused by the press of being the villain in the tragedy, and even though inquiries into the disaster exonerated him of wrongdoing, his life was never the same again.  Family, friends, colleagues -- all distanced themselves from him.  He became a pariah.

And rightly so.  He reduced the number of lifeboats from 46 to 16. That single step doomed hundreds.
He reduced the height of the bulkheads.  That doomed the ship.
He got cheaper rivets and thinner steel.  He probably influenced Captain Smith to go 22 knots, at night, with iceberg warnings.  Idiocy from all quarters.  The CAPTAIN didn't order his engineers to break into the binoculars locker and retrieve essential binoculars?  They didn't even fill the lifeboats that they did launch, much less overfill them by 10 and leave the life jackets behind for buoyancy underneath rafts to be assembled from wooden doors and furniture.