Bad Rivets doom the Titanic?

[alfredo]

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/15/science/15titanic.html?_r=1&hp=&pagewanted=all&oref=slogin

Researchers have discovered that the builder of the Titanic struggled for years to obtain enough good rivets and riveters and ultimately settled on faulty materials that doomed the ship, which sank 96 years ago Tuesday.

The builder’s own archives, two scientists say, harbor evidence of a deadly mix of low quality rivets and lofty ambition as the builder labored to construct the three biggest ships in the world at once — the Titanic and two sisters, the Olympic and the Britannic.

For a decade, the scientists have argued that the storied liner went down fast after hitting an iceberg because the ship’s builder used substandard rivets that popped their heads and let tons of icy seawater rush in. More than 1,500 people died.

[TlalocW]

1. I had always heard...

That the Titanic sank and lost so many people because they tried to avoid the iceberg. If they had rammed it head on, some people would have died; many more would be injured, but any damage would not let in the amount of water that the gashes the iceberg put on the side did when they tried to dodge it.

TlalocW

[alfredo]

4. But there was no gash, just separated plates.

[1]

6. exactly! which is why...

when you are driving down that deserted road, and a raccoon or a skunk or a squirrel appears in the headlights you do NOT swerve to avoid it.

if you DO NOT swerve, a small animal bites it (sometimes with some stink).

if you DO swerve, there is a very much greater chance that YOU will bite it. or suffer some injury or damage to your car.

i love all little furry creatures and all...

but furry creatures? don't stop on my road, you roadkill you...

[GreenTea]

7. !!

[1]

8. i'm just saying... n/t.

[pansypoo53219]

9. depends.

if the deer goes thru the windshield....

so far i have swerved. hit only a rabbit. but he wanted to die. luckily one raccoon in SD was racing and i was doing 80. we both lived.

[1]

10. i said "little" furry creatures...

a deer, a bison, an elephant, a blue whale, etc.

different scenario...

[sandnsea]

31. No, you don't swerve for the deer either.

Better for it to hit the windshield than for you to roll down the middle of the highway.

[Sequoia]

26. Dumb squirrell.

He ran across the road and stood in the middle then he rans back in front of me...splat.

[tblue]

2. Oooh. Fascinating. Really. So there were media/PR cover-ups even then.

Greed and marketing sleight of hand jeopardized public safety. The more things change...huh?

[babylonsister]

3. Gads! Rivets.

Rivets. Hard to believe considering the Titantic was supposed to be so superiorly engineered.

[trotsky]

16. Engineered, probably. Built to those engineered specs, no.

Shoddy materials and poor workmanship will doom the best engineering.

[alfredo]

17. it was built to specs except for those rivets. This had to be a mid level

decision. Seeing they can't get all the rivets they need from the usual channels, they went to other suppliers. Those other suppliers did not make a high quality iron. It had impurities (slag) that weakened the iron.

[Brigid]

20. I'm surprised that this would get past Thomas Andrews.

He had a reputation for being a stickler for detail and a top-notch naval architect.

Thomas Andrews is a hero of mine. :)

[alfredo]

21. It was those under him that probably went with the bad rivets,

and, i just learned, thinner plates. The design might have been sound, it was the cutting of corners that might have sealed their fate.

On Olberman they said the ship was going full steam in an area known to have icebergs.

[Liberal In Texas]

22. There was a fire on board in a coal bunker when it sailed, that had been burning for a week.

Besides driving into an area of known icebergs, the company did some negligent things. The captain and crew knew about the fire, but kept it from a Board of Trade inspector. Had they disclosed the problem, the ship probably would not have been allowed to sail.

It has been speculated that the fire could have weakened the steel in the watertight bulkhead between boiler rooms #5 and #6 and the Tank Top, the top of the double hull. If the weakened bulkhead failed during the sinking, it could have contributed to how rapidly the ship went down.

This level of negligence and cutting corners on safety (number of lifeboats, no transverse bulkheads, no double hull - only double bottom, etc.) was not unusual for that time period. It is remains a cautionary tale about why corporations need regulation and accountability.

There are so many "IF's" in the Titanic story that when put together, resulted in over 1500 people losing their lives.

[alfredo]

23. Looked like an accident waiting to happen, and the "unsinkable"

marketing was just a preemptive strike to counter any whistle blowers.

[TankLV]

25. to be fair - actually - they had MORE than the required lifeboats mandated at that time...

a lot of the regulations were changed AFTER the sinking because they were found so deficient...

can't blame the company for FOLLOWING REGULATIONS...

nobody thought it was necessary at the time...

[Liberal In Texas]

32. The lifeboat regs hadn't been changed since 1894.

At that time the regs were based on a ship of 10,000 tons. The biggest ship in 1894 was half that size. Titanic was over 46,000 tons. The regs were never updated, and there was no provision to increase the number of lifeboats in proportion to increased weight.

Ironically, Alexander Carlisle the ship's original designer had proposed 64 boats (enough for every person on the ship), then cut that to 32 and davits to accommodate them. White Star's Ismay cut that to 16 wooden boats and 4 emergency collapsible lifeboats, which exceeded the Board of Trade law. (Data from: 1912 Facts About Titanic, Revised Edition 2003 by Lee W. Merideth)

The lack of oversight by the Board of Trade, in the words of Sir Alfred Chalmers of the Board he rationalized:

I considered the matter very closely from time to time...I found it was the safest mode of travel in the world, and I thought it was neither right nor the duty of a State Department to impose regulations upon that mode of travel as long as the record was a clean one...as ships grew bigger, there were such improvements made in their construction that they were stronger and better ships...that that was the road along which the shipowners were going to travel, and that they should not be interfered with...the voluntary action of the owners was carrying them beyond the requirements of our scale, and when voluntary action on the part of shipowners is doing that, I think that any State Department should hold its hand before it steps in to make a hard-and-fast scale for that particular type of shipping. http://www.encyclopedia-titanica.org/item/4865/

This is very much like the arguments we hear today. That regulation should be relaxed or abolished. That private enterprise will regulate itself.

Clearly, with over 1500 people dead, that did not work.

Again, this is a classic cautionary tale I like to use in arguments with righties when they bring up the self-regulation meme.


Survivors aboard one of the
collapsible lifeboats.
(Note the canvass sides.)

[dflprincess]

28. It remains a lesson we apparently need to be told

over and over again - and still we don't learn.

[TankLV]

24. there was something inherently defective in the chemical composition of the steel plates, too...

made them unnecessarily brittle...

[alfredo]

29. I heard something about them being brittle, and that they were thinner

than what the designers called for.

[LaPera]

5. Republican ideology at it's finest - Profit before lives or safety!

Life to them, (whatever "republicans" were called or known as back then in England) and they still see it this way now, is cheap, on the battlefield, or for their profit margin.

Nothing has changed, just them rewriting history to disguise their greed.

And while they lived, paid off inspectors, lied, cut corners, deregulated and made money....they continued on with their grand merry greedy lives at the expense and on the backs of the workers, their customers & the tax payers....

But ALWAYS placing the blame elsewhere!

Sound familiar?

[alfredo]

13. Greed has always been with us. It is up to us to prevent the greedy from

ruining it for the rest of us.

[Thothmes]

11. In my opinion, this argument has some value only if there is proof

that other ships built during the same years, had been built with better rivets in them. Harland and Wolff had a reputation at the time of being one of the best ship builders in Britain. The Royal Navy had large numbers of their warships built by this yard for decades before the Titanic and many decades after the Titanic.

[alfredo]

12. It was a bad decision to go with smaller, less experienced foundries

that caused the problem. Also they were building three super liners at the same time. That ambition might have led to the crisis that led to using inferior producers. In the article, the ship builder used higher quality rivets in the center section of the ship. Those plates and rivets held. Only the rivets that used poorly forged iron rivets failed.

they have the evidence from the ship builder archives and chemical analysis of the rivets.

[Thothmes]

18. What they dont have

is how many of these rivets were used in commercial ship construction at that time by British Shipbuilders. It is not unusual for the ship building trade to use different materials in hull construction, depending on what the engineers believe to be the more critical applications.

[alfredo]

19. Also the titanic used thinner plate that the specs called for.

I heard on Olberman that it was night, they were approaching a known iceberg region, but they continued at full steam.

[tabasco]

14. Nope. Bad driving.

That was a big damn icberg.

[alfredo]

15. The berg didn't have it's headlights on.

[TankLV]

27. don't forget the rabbit that scurried in front that they swerved to avoid...

without hitting the dear on the other iceberg...

and those pesky whales and dolphins swimming all around created quite a distraction I heard...

[alfredo]

30. Don't forget the cellphone and the kids in the back seat.