Titanic Probabilities

  Titanic Probabilities 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.   But the chairman of White Star Lines, Bruce Ismay, got in a lifeboat with women and 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 the critical path. Had any one of these critical mist...

  The coal fire in Bunker  #5  was not put out before Titanic left Belfast, seriously weakening the plates on the starboard side where the iceberg hit.   Of the 160 men hired to stoke the boilers with coal, only 8 stayed on after seeing the fire on board.   The high court judge, Lord Mersey, investigating the sinking, dismissed these claims as irrelevant. 1 in 1000 A few days before Titanic set sail, Second Officer David Blair was replaced by Charles Lightoller, and in Blair’s haste to leave the Titanic, he forgot to hand the key to the binoculars locker to Lightoller for lookouts to use in the crow’s nest. 1 in 10   Failure of Captain Smith to reduce speed from 21.5 knots (almost full speed) despite repeated warnings of icebergs (Smith was clearly eager to please his boss, Bruce Ismay, who wanted to set a record time for crossing the Atlantic) 1 in 10 Failure of Captain Smith to order crew to use tools and break into locker containing bino...

The Californian’s radio operator, Cyril Evans, shut his radio off at 11:30 PM after being told to “Shut up!” Therefore, he could not receive the subsequent SOS calls nearby. (Captain Stanley Lord, commanding the SS Californian, ordered the ship to a full stop for the night to avoid collision with an iceberg.) 1 in 20 Spotting of iceberg by lookouts in the crow’s nest was too late to avoid a collision, but early enough (37 seconds) to commence evasive maneuver which compounded damage beyond survivability - a 230-foot-long tear in the Titanic’s hull, flooding six separate compartments (Four flooded would not have sunk her.) Had the lookouts been posted on the bow, forty feet lower, they might have seen the outline of the iceberg against the faint horizon sooner. The ship’s searchlight should have been lit to illuminate the path ahead, even though it was not standard procedure. It was, after all, a moonless night with no waves washing against ice floes. 1 in 10 Watch officer throwing...