541 Titanic%2Breading
541 Titanic%2Breading
541 Titanic%2Breading
The sinking of the RMS Titanic was one of the worst maritime disasters in history. On April 14.,.1912,
at 11:40 p.-m., the 'unsinkable' luxury ship hit an iceberg and sank in just under three hours with the
loss of aiound 1500 lives. There are many different descriptions of the disaster by the surviving
passengers and crew, but few people doubt that human error played a part in the tragedy. Let's look
at some of the things that went wrong.
On the night of Sunday, 14 April 1912 the temperature was near freezing and the ocean was
completely calm. Surviving 2nd Officer Charles Lightoller later wrote, "the sea was like glass". The
ship;s course had been chnged by the captain, but other than this, he saw no reason to slow down.
Th owner of the ship, Bruce lsmay, was also on board and had instructed the captain to speed up in
order to break the retord for a transatlantic voyage. The captain agreed, but perhaps if he had known
of the messages the ship had received in the radio room, he would have acted differently. According
to a ship aneO called the Mesaba, lots of large icebergs were in the area. These messages did not
reach him.
There were three teams of lookouts on board keeping constant watch for obstacles in the ship's path,
but as Charles Lightoller said at the British inquiry, "Everything was against us, there was no moon,
no wind, no binoculars and with the dark side of the iceberg facing the ship, the lookouts were
powerless."
When the alarm was finally raised the crew acted very quickly but it was already too late to save the
ship. \Mthin twenty minutes of the collision the ship had flooded, so the captain ordered the lifeboats
to e prepared, fill'ed with women and children, and lowered into the water. This didn't go well,
regultions about the number of lifeboats a ship should carry were already out of date when the
Tiianic set sail, and even if the evacuation had been better organised, there wouldn't have been
enough boats to hold everybodY.
Meanwhile, the crew were sending out distress signals. The first message was "sinking, need
immediate assistance," and then'iSOS". Several ships responded, including the Mount Temple,
Frankfurt, and the Titanic's sister ship, Olympic, but they were too far away. The closest ship to
respond was the Carpatha, which arrived in about four hours, too late to save everybody.
Various distress flares launched from the sinking ship were also ineffective, including those seen by a
ship called the Californian, whose captain, Stanley Lord, had ordered his crew to stop the ship for the
nigirt because of the icebergs. \Mren Captain Lord was informed of the flares he failed to respond
be=cause he did not think thy were important. Nor did the crew of the Californian wake their radio
operator, who had gone to bed for the night-
And what of Bruce lsmay, who many believe acted without regard for safety by requiring an
unprepared ship to sail t such speed in spite of the danger? History tells us that he survived, but
from the lifeboat turned his back on his beautiful ship as it sank'
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