Background Part 3 Shipwrecks

Experts seem to now agree that it is impossible to design a ship or even a boat that is totally unsinkable; one that Mother Nature cannot somehow conspire to cause the unexpected.  After all, it took a remarkable set of coincidental circumstances to do in the people on the Titanic, but, nonetheless, they did occur.

I had an experience with a supposedly unsinkable craft myself.  It was a simple 16 ft. outboard propelled runabout with a retractable canvas canopy and which, in prime condition, could manage to tow a single water skier.  I purchased it for fishing but never managed to catch a single one in the several years I used it.  A well respected brand, it came with complete underdeck Styrofoam flotation.  It was purported to be unsinkable.  I purchased it used; it was an older model.  To make a long story shorter—I was unaware there was a crack in the hull below the waterline.  For months on end I left it moored at the private dock near Sandpoint Idaho where I was renting a place on Lake Ponderay.  I didn’t notice the boat was gradually going lower in the water.  One weekend I went on an extended hiking excursion in the mountains leaving the canopy down.  While I was gone there had been a fierce rainstorm and when I returned I found the boat had sunk at the dock; the builder of this particular boat had mistakenly (I presume) used open cell foam instead of closed cell foam.

There have been countless shipwrecks over the centuries and it is not the purpose here to even touch on the matter.  I have read estimates that claim millions of shipwrecks have occurred and a great amount of information on the subject is available on the internet.   A few wrecks in the twentieth century and since have some relevance and are considered next. The sinking of the Costa Concordia is a contemporary example of a large passenger vessel unexpectedly sinking.

 

In particular, we will be looking at the extent of damage, type of damage, cause of damage, and the rate of sinking.  Only large ships are considered and only those with a relevance to the titanic sinking.. 

Costa Concordia

I’m sure most readers know that the Cruise ship Costa Concordia’s hull was subjected to forces well beyond design standards when the ship hit a rock outcropping which sliced open her port hull like a can opener.  The engine room was immediately inundated with sea water and the diesel-electric propulsion system failed due to this immersion.  Despite his other errors, the captain wisely used the emergency electrical power plant to enable the bow thrusters to turn the ship 180 degrees around.  However the bow thrusters could not provide forward movement.  Presumably, a fortuitous on shore breeze moved the ship some distance towards the safety of a nearby harbor area at the tiny Italian island and community called Giglio. Ironically this same breeze then pushed the ship against underwater rock outcroppings in the harbor shore puncturing the hull so that the ship capsized on its starboard side opposite the side where the initial damage was done.  (I have been unable to locate a forensic analysis so this is my hypothesis as to why it capsized on the starboard side.)

The relevance of the Costa Concordia sinking to the Titanic’s sinking lies in what scuba divers saw on the ocean bottom near the rock outcropping that had initially opened the hull.  Those readers who have seen these images will recall that the divers found a ribbon of the ships steel hull neatly folded in a serpentine/accordion fashion.  I remember it being about a foot wide; i.e. about ten times wider than thick.   As mentioned in the introduction, my exposure to forensic situations has been very limited so this plastic folding of steel while immersed in cold water was eye opening.  The forces necessary to do this must be rather large and the restraining conditions unique.  Amazingly, recent underwater expeditions to the Titanic’s stern have returned images of similar accordion bending of hull pieces; even images of sharp bends where the rivets didn’t fail.  I surmise from this that unusually high forces were exerted on Titanic’s stern shell as well.  The implications of this will be considered latter.

Andria Doria

Like other large passenger liners of her era, the English Queens, the American United States and the French Normandy, the Italian Andria Doria was steam turbine powered.  It sank as a result of a high speed collision with the Norwegian passenger liner Stockholm in fog off the US coast after she left the port of New York.  The Stockholm’s bow pierced the starboard side to almost the center-line; well beyond the Andrea Doria design specifications, which were in accord with established standards.  While both ships were using radar, radio communication was not used; a big factor in causation—both crews have been found to be at fault but no blame was ever affirmed in court and the shipping companies settled out of court.  The Andrea Doria stayed afloat for almost half a day and could have lasted even longer had there not been a design error with the omission of an automatically closing bulkhead door to the generator room bulkhead in the service tunnel.  The generators had to be shut down immediately and only emergency power was available which didn’t help matters any in the ships interior, especially with the exterior shrouded in fog.  The Norway was not endangered and helped in the rescue of passengers.  What is pertinent in this disaster is what happened during and immediately after the collision. 

Reportedly, the Andrea Doria steam-turbine engines continued to run after the collision.  This was in accord with what I have read concerning the instructions mandated to steam ship captains; one of the three which read to the effect: keep engines running in such emergencies.  But I have not read of boiler shut down procedure(s) initiated at the bridge in an emergency situation.  On the Titanic it is documented that the chief engineer in boiler room #6 ordered the boiler dampers closed following the alarm bell which announced watertight doors were closing.  I presume this was also the case on the Andrea Doria.

The captain of the Titanic seems to have followed the engine procedure as well; signaling “half speed ahead” after stopping the engines from full astern.  This maneuver continued for several minutes until it became apparent that moving forward increased the rate of sinking and the engines were silenced forever.  I have not read, so I must guess that this continuation was done to quickly reduce steam pressure in the boiler(s) and prevent an explosion.  There is no evidence of a boiler explosion on the Andrea Doria and it appears (perhaps because of this procedure) that ship boiler explosions are very rare indeed

[during peacetime that is; Erik Larson notes in his book the following: “[quoting a submarine captain following the torpedoing of a ship how the air forced out by incoming water] “…escapes with a shrill whistle from every possible aperture, and the sound resembles the shriek of a steam siren.  This is a wonderful spectacle to behold.”—[Larson continues]: Often at this point stricken ships gave one last exhalation as water filled their boiler rooms, causing a final explosion and releasing  a cloud of black smoke and soot, known to U-boat commanders as “the black soul””.  There is no mention of boiler explosion in the Titanic hearings.]

Underwater images of the Andrea Doria produced soon after the accident show the sunken hull (now port side up) to be relatively undamaged despite hitting the ocean floor at a non-negligible velocity.  This attests to the ship being well built, exceeding even today’s standards—a double hull and bulkheads up to “A” deck; and no evidence of boiler explosion.  However, impact damage from the collision and additional hull damage to the starboard side on impacting the ocean bottom seems to lessoned structural integrity and the ship’s superstructure and interior are now disintegrating into the mud.

The damage to the Andrea Doria was extensive.  The hull was split open to a width at least that of the Stockholm’s bow 40 ft. back; or I would guess a width somewhat less than maximum or about  sixty-five feet.  [Due to the rotation of the Stockholm after the collision the width may have been increased even more.]   Vertically, the gash was from top to bottom, including the double bottom from bilge to nearly the keel: a vertical height of about 100 ft..  The fireman’s tunnel was pierced, allowing an unknown flow rate (at least to me) of sea water into the tunnel.  Again for reasons unknown to me, this inflow proceeded unimpeded through the rest of the ship and caused her eventual sinking as noted previously. [Since the bulkheads rose to the bottom of “A” deck, the initial list to starboard of less than 20 degrees would not have caused sea water to flow over the top of the bulkheads as some have maintained.]

Despite the huge hole in the hull and damage to the double bottom, it took eleven hours for the ship to sink.   This length of time is undoubtably due to the fact that watertight bulkheads on either side of the gash retained their integrity and equally important, the bulkhead watertight doors were closed.  [I presume (since at this time I have not been able to verify) that these doors were hydraulically forced closed and not gravity operated like those on vessels of the Titanic generation.], 

Wilhelm Gustloff

So why is it that the Titanic disaster remains at the forefront of public attention for 100 years now and counting—for that matter why am I blogging about it.  One reason for it is rather obvious—the great drama-- with high society on board and their heroic and in some cases notorious conduct.   And there is mystery and, as mentioned, unusual degree of coincidence.  The interest is not necessarily do to the large number of people who did not survive, but instead perhaps the “who” that didn’t survive.  In terms of numbers alone it pails into insignificance compared to natural disasters where hundreds of thousands perish in an instant but are little remembered by the general public within a few years.  Even in terms of maritime disasters it ranks only as third.  The record number of victims is held by the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff.

The Wilhelm Gustloff, needless to say a German vessel, was a large passenger liner built just prior to WW II and was diesel powered (so no boilers of importance in this case) but its relevance is a bit more than in fatalities.   Overcrowded to the gills with refuges from the Russian front which was going badly for the Germans, the ship was torpedoed three times by a Russian submarine, one torpedo exploded in the engine room immediately disabling the vessel and it sank rather quickly drowning over 9,000 people, about half of them children, in the ice cold Baltic sea.

Despite the torpedo explosions, the hull lies broken but relatively intact.  As we all know now—not so with the Titanic where the hull is broken into widely separated pieces and a large portion of the hull is missing entirely.  Accurate information on the torpedo damage to the Wilhelm Gustloff does not seem to exist, but since the sinking time is approximate then speculative damage estimates may be allowed (I hope).  Three torpedoes strike the ship; one between the bow and the bridge, a second somewhere under the bridge, and the third hit the large engine room probably in the bilge region.  On average, torpedo damage (from torpedoes of that era) extended over an area with dimensions roughly thirty feet.  All three torpedoes may have detonated near the double bottom since the hull broke into three pieces presumably from the bottom up when the ship struck the ocean floor vertically upright,  It took the Wilhelm Gustloff seventy minutes to sink out of sight in less than 200 ft. of water.

Lusitania

In 1915, about three years after the Titanic sinking, another English large ocean liner went to the bottom; a victim, this time, of a German submarine; this was of course the Lusitania.  Sailing from New York to England, the Lusitania supposedly was carrying only passengers and ordinary freight (at least as far as the passengers knew).  Despite a German warning, the ship was fully loaded with ordinary passengers.  The freight was a different matter entirely—certainly not ordinary.   Not all the passengers were ordinary though, there were a few that weren’t; like the multi-millionaire A.G. Vanderbilt, but still nothing resembling the glamour aboard the Titanic.  The German military had proclaimed a war zone around the British Isles and any vessels, including passenger liners could be vulnerable to underwater mines and even submarine attack.  Most of the ordinary passengers would have been unaware of the warning and even those that were, like Vanderbilt, dismissed it because of the liners great speed (the Lusitania was then the fastest passenger vessel on the seas).

Cunard personnel lied to passengers that passage would be made at normal full speed in an attempt to assuage their anxiety if they had any.  Captain Turner had no such intent and some boilers were never lit.  Lusitania’s speed never exceeded 22 knots as a consequence.  Although it was publicly stated by the Brits that the speed reduction was to conserve fuel, I suspect there was another reason for shutting down boiler room # 4.  But was it boiler room # 4 in which the boilers were shut down?  

In short, speed didn’t matter and bad luck coincidences overwhelmed it in any event.  It took a major set of coincidences for a torpedo hit to occur to begin with.  Call it luck if you will—good for the Germans and bad for the English.  There were tremendous explosions initially, and at least one muffled explosion about  a minute later, that ripped apart the hull and the Lusitania disappeared quickly with over a thousand lives lost forever.

The relevance to the Titanic lies in the extent of damage done by the explosions on the Lusitania.  Despite sinking below crushing depth, the hull, although badly broken and distorted, is still relatively intact; intact despite the explosions and despite depth charge bombing by the Brits apparently to destroy evidence.  Again; this is not so with the Titanic. 

I have become so intrigued with the Lusitania sinking that I’m devoting a separate blog to it.  There are mysteries and unanswered questions still remaining after a hundred years.  There is a high probability they will never be solved or answered satisfactorily or conclusively.  Besides the boiler room # question there are others like why did Captain Turner not shut down the engines, why did it sink in eighteen minutes?  And there is the mysterious second explosion, the muffled explosion, and depth charging.  To read about my analysis of the Lusitania disaster, see my blog:

                                                  “lusitaniaconclusions.blogspot.com”

Oceanos

The cruise ship Oceanos was a relatively recent victim of a disastrous sinking, monetarily that is; a consequence of faulty design and poor maintenance.  Its relevance is that these were not factors in the Titanic sinking.  Despite accusations by some that the Titanic was poorly designed or improperly manufactured there is little evidence of this and I side with those who provide arguments to the contrary.  There are those who argue that the coal bunker fire was poorly handled (sort of a maintenance issue).  Many authorities disagree; and while I admit it may have hastened the end, in my analysis to be presented, other sources for the ship’s rapid flooding precluded the timely arrival of rescue ships anyway.

In the case of the Oceanos, the openings to the sea were evidently small initially.  But because the crew abandoned ship early on, portholes were left open so that the ship eventually sank.  Like the Andrea Doria, the sinking took place over a much greater time span than that for the Titanic.  Following a “muffled explosion” at 8:45 pm, the ship gradually took on water, the ship was stopped and the electric generator was shut down.  It took over six hours for the sinking when, at 3:30 the following afternoon, the Oceanos capsized and went down (on her starboard side of course) 

Britannic

Britannic was the last built and, in small ways, the largest of the three White Star liners—the Olympic the first built and smallest.  It, the Britannic, has the dubious distinction of still being the largest passenger liner on the ocean floor.   Besides the fact that Violet Jessop was on board, the interest in this disaster lies in the unexplained rapidity of its sinking from a single mine explosion.  Even though it sustained a hull opening not much larger than the Olympic sustained, within 55 minutes after the explosion the ship sank out of sight.   The Olympic barely quivered (see below). Because of the mystery surrounding this sinking, a separate blog is devoted to the Britannic and Violet’s involvement.  See my blog:

                                        “britannicconclusions.blogspot.com” 

Other Ships

Two other ships need brief mention and will also be considered latter on; the Audacious which was not a passenger liner and the Olympic which did not sink.

Audacious

Audacious was a British warship newly commissioned when it encountered a German laid underwater mine and rather rapidly sank much to the embarrassment of the British Admiralty.   It had a design flaw; longitudinal coal bunkers which were favored at the time as added resistance to shell bombardment but with unfortunate greater vulnerability to mines and torpedoes.  The ship quickly listed to starboard (another one) but then stabilized.  Now the relevance to Titanic: by coincidence, a nearby passenger liner could render assistance by sending lifeboats to rescue the sailors before the Audacious sank.  The liner was even involved in a futile attempt to tow the stricken warship to relatively nearby shallow water where salvage would have been possible.  There was no chance for this because the Audacious turned turtle amid a fearsome explosion which sent a geyser of water and chunks of metal hundreds of feet into the air.  One chunk of metal flew 800 yards and killed a sailor on a nearby ship.  Authorities at the time explained the explosion was due to armament falling as the ship capsized.  Despite the mortal wound the Audacious remained afloat for a considerable time; from 8:45 am when it struck the mine until 8:45 pm when it capsized and sank.

It is doubtful the Violet witnessed the violent ending of the Audacious.  In her memoir she reports seeing the sinking ship at sunset. The rescue of sailors took place before that time and Captain Smith would not have lingered around with submarines lurking.  By 8:45 pm the Olympic would have probably been many miles away precluding any eye and ear witness by Violet.  Nonetheless through some experience or other Violet would distinctly relate that there were underwater explosions in addition to the “roar”.

Olympic

The Olympic must again return to the spotlight because the damage it sustained in the Hawke collision is so pertinent to my analysis.  The Hawke although quite a bit smaller than the Olympic was reportedly traveling near its maximum speed; over 20 knots when it struck the Olympic near the stern (on the starboard side of course).   The Hawke had a reinforced bow for enemy ship ramming so the resultant hole in the Olympic’s hull was not negligible.

                                                                 TO BE CONTINUED