10 causes of theTitanic tragedy

The "unsinkable" Titanic was sunk by an iceberg, but there are other reasons
why the tragedy that occurred 100 years ago this month was as tragic as itwas.
Even a century later, the case of the Titanic illustrates how technological
failures often result from a succession of omissions, missteps and bad luck
rather than one big mess-up.

"No one thing sent the Titanic to the bottom of the North Atlantic," Richard
Corfield writes in a Physics World retrospective on the disaster that caused
1,514 deaths on April 14-15, 1912. "Rather, the ship was ensnared by a perfect
storm of circumstances that conspired her to her doom. Such a chain is familiar
to those who study disasters it is called an 'event cascade.'"

The iceberg that the Titanic struck on its way from Southampton to New York is
No. 1 on a top-10 list of circumstances. Here are nine other suggested
circumstances from Cornfields article and other sources:

Climate caused more icebergs: Weather conditions in the North Atlantic were
particularly conducive for corralling icebergs at the intersection of the Labrador
Current and the Gulf Stream, due to warmer-than-usual waters in the Gulf
Stream, Richard Norris of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography told Physics
World. "Oceanographically, the upshot of that was that icebergs, sea ice and
growlers were concentrated in the very position where the collision happened,"
Norris said.

Tides sent icebergs southward: Last month, astronomers at Texas State

University at San Marcos noted that the sun, the moon and Earth were aligned
in such a way that could have led to unusually high tides in January 1912. They
speculated that the tides could have dislodged icebergs that were stuck in the
Labrador Sea, sending more of them toward the waters traversed by theTitanic
a couple of months later.

The ship was going too fast: ManyTitanicologists have said that the ships
captain, Edward J. Smith, was aiming to better the crossing time of the Olympic,
the Titanic' solder sibling in the White Starfleet. For some, the fact that the
Titanic was sailing full speed ahead despite concerns about icebergs was
Smiths biggest misstep. "Simply put, Titanic was traveling way too fast in an
area known to contain ice; that's the bottom line," says Mark Nichol, webmaster
for the Titanic and Other White StarShipswebsite.

Iceberg warnings went unheeded: The Titanic received multiple warnings about
ice fields in the North Atlantic over the wireless, but Cornfield notes that the last
and most specific warning was not passed along by senior radio operator Jack
Phillips to Captain Smith, apparently because it didn't carry the prefix "MSG"
(Masters' Service Gram). That would have required a personal acknowledgment
from the captain. "Phillips interpretedit as non-urgent and returned to sending
passenger messages to the receiver on shore at Cape Race, Newfoundland,
before it went out of range," Corfield writes.

The binoculars were locked up: Corfield also says binoculars that could have
been used by look outs on the night of the collision were locked up aboard the
ship and the key was held by David Blair, an officer who was bumped from
the crew before the ship's departure from Southampton. Some historians have
speculated that the fatal iceberg might have been spotted earlier if the
binoculars were in use, but others say it wouldn't have made a difference.

The steersman took a wrong turn: Did the Titanics steersman turn the ship
toward the iceberg, dooming the ship? That's the claim made in 2010 by Louise
Patten, who said the story was passed down from her grandfather, the most
senior ship officer to survive the disaster. After the iceberg was spotted, the
command was issued to turn "hard a starboard," but as the command was
passed down the line, it was misinterpreted as meaning "make the ship turn
right" rather than "push the tiller right to make the ship head left," Patten said.
She said the error was quickly discovered, but not quickly enough to avert the
collision. She also speculated that if the ship had stopped where it was hit, sea
water would not have pushed into one interior compartment after another as it
did, and the ship might not have sunk as quickly.

Reverse thrust reduced the ships maneuverability: Just before impact, first
officer William McMaster Murdoch is said to have telegraphed the engine room
to put the ships engines into reverse. That would cause the left and right
propeller to turn back ward, but because of the configuration of the stern, the
central propeller could only be halted, not reversed.
Corfield said the fact that the steering propeller was not rotating severely
diminished the turning ability of the ship. It is one of the many bitter ironies of
the Titanic tragedy that the ship might well have avoided the iceberg if Murdoch
had not told the engine room to reduce and then reverse thrust."

The iron rivets were too weak: Metallurgists Tim Foecke and Jennifer Hooper
McCarty looked into the materials used for the building of the Titanic at its

Belfast shipyard and found that the steel plates toward the bow and the stern
were held together with low-grade iron rivets. Those rivets may have been used
because higher-grade rivets were in short supply, or because the better rivets
couldn't be inserted in those areas using the shipyard's crane-mounted
hydraulic equipment. The metallurgists said those low-grade rivets would have
ripped apart more easily during the collision, causing the ship to sink more
quickly that it would have if stronger rivets had been used.
Otherresearchershavecontestedthatclaim, however.

There were too few life boats: Perhaps the biggest tragedy is that there were
not enough life boats to accommodate all of the Titanics more than 2,200
passengers and crew members. The life boats could accommodate only about
1,200 people which was still in excess of the 1,060-person capacity that was
the legal requirement for that time. "It seems that in 1912, in a way not
dissimilar to our own box-ticking, responsibility-avoiding culture today, lack of
effective oversight on the part of the authorities caused the consequences of
the disaster to be much worse than they might have been," Corfield wrote.

Do these 10 causes cover everything, or are there still more factors Im

forgetting? Are there some lessons still unlearned from theTitanictragedy? Feel
free to weigh in with your reflections on the Titanic centennial in the comment
space below.

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