Boat deck resurfacing

[Bill Vanek]

I went to several original sources, such as the Titanic Inquiry Project testimonies. I left alone any testimony that was ambiguous, or that ran together events that were clearly separate as evidenced by the multiplicity of other testimonies. I also didn't believe Joughin's late-in-the-sinking testimony, because he had been spending an hour getting drunk. He was helping himself to the Lounge Bar at the No. 3 funnel when the ship first broke and he heard the rush of feet going aft. He then joined those people, and the rest of his story is muddled and conflicting.

 

[Seumas]

Joughin being drunk is a myth.

Whilst survivor Paddy Dillon claims that he and his doomed shipmates did indeed go for a drink in the first class areas, Joughin was in one of the pantries when he heard the ominous noises

 

[Bill Vanek]

Joughin being drunk is a myth.

Whilst survivor Paddy Dillon claims that he and his doomed shipmates did indeed go for a drink in the first class areas, Joughin was in one of the pantries when he heard the ominous noises

His testimony illustrates serious impairment and the downplaying of how much he had to drink.

6036. And about being down by the head, could you tell at all?
- I did not notice anything. I did not notice her being much down by the head.

6058. (The Solicitor-General.) You said this vessel took a lurch to port and threw them in a heap. Did she come back; did she right herself at all?
- No, Sir.
6059. She took a lurch and she did not return?
- She did not return

6247. When you found your boat had gone you said you went down below. What did you do when you went down below?
- I went to my room for a drink.
6248. Drink of what?
- Spirits.
The Commissioner:
Does it very much matter what it was?
Mr. Cotter:
Yes, my Lord, this is very important, because I am going to prove, or rather my suggestion is, that he then saved his life. I think his getting a drink had a lot to do with saving his life.

6253. It has been stated that she turned practically perpendicular. I want to ask your opinion about that, because I think it is very important. Did you see the propellers come out of the water at all?
- She was not far out of the water at any stage that I saw.
6254. So that to say that she stood up like that --(showing)--would be wrong?
- It would be absolutely wrong.

Although he tried to speak authoritatively, he was wrong about things. He said that the port list never corrected, but it did. IF he were less than sober, he could have mistaken the stern's second rising (fully lighted, very steep, with people falling) for a port list supposedly 'chucking' people. He says he didn't think that the ship ever got to any kind of steep angle, but there are plenty of reliable (read: unimpaired) people who saw very steep angles.

It's extremely likely that he had more to drink than he let on. The first time he spoke of going to his room for a drink, he said he "had a drop". When pressed later, he said he had "half a tumbler". So, knowing that he went to the pantry on Deck A, right at the 3rd funnel, and right adjacent to the 1st-class lounge's bar, does anyone believe that he went to that spot for "a drink of water"? I think that he ran out of spirits in his room, and went to tank up by getting into the bar. That would explain how he got things muddled in his testimony. And if you want to bet that half a tumbler of alcohol consumed nearly an hour before the ship sank was what saved him, I'll take that bet, and wager on him having drunk a lot more than that.

Mythology always has roots in reality. In this case, there's plenty enough to think that reality is stronger than the mythology.

 

[Seumas]

Sorry but that's a deeply flawed analysis.

There are quite a number of respected historians of the disaster who have studied all this in much more detail than you or I ever have and who do not believe that Charles Joughin was drunk. It was exaggerated by the newspapers and set into popular imagination by the films.

Joughin's testimony has several problems but you ignore the fact that a great many people who were still on the ship or in the lifeboats gave testimony that was just as, indeed if not more confusing or contradictory than Joughin's.

IF he were less than sober, he could have mistaken the stern's second rising (fully lighted, very steep, with people falling) for a port list supposedly 'chucking' people. He says he didn't think that the ship ever got to any kind of steep angle, but there are plenty of reliable (read: unimpaired) people who saw very steep angles.

Ever considered what he was caught up in ?

It was an extremely frightening, tense situation where his life was in danger, he spent time swimming in water that was below freezing and had to spent a couple of hours shivering atop Collapsible B before Boat 12 took them off and reached the Carpathia. He wasn't exactly taking notes as it went on.

Having been through all that, It's highly understandable that he may have become confused about what he saw, heard and felt. So were many dozens of other survivors in the same situation.

Although he tried to speak authoritatively, he was wrong about things.

That's not really a good argument when the exact same goes for Lawrence Beesley, Charles Lightoller, Joseph Boxhall, Archibald Gracie, George Rowe, Harold Bride..... the list goes on and on. It even goes for Captain Arthur Rostron of the Carpathia.

It's extremely likely that he had more to drink than he let on. The first time he spoke of going to his room for a drink, he said he "had a drop". When pressed later, he said he had "half a tumbler".

He admits to having had one glass of the old uisge-beatha, so what ? Mix it with water ("a hot toddy" - mixing it with hot water on a freezing cold night was popular then) and you do indeed have "half a tumbler" or thereabouts.

So, knowing that he went to the pantry on Deck A, right at the 3rd funnel, and right adjacent to the 1st-class lounge's bar, does anyone believe that he went to that spot for "a drink of water"?

Circumstantial. Proves nothing.

I think that he ran out of spirits in his room, and went to tank up by getting into the bar.

What you or I or anyone else think happened is completely irrelevant.

It's what the written evidence and the fast decaying evidence on the seabed tells us what happened that is relevant. There is not the slightest evidence that Joughin ever set foot in the first class bar.

That would explain how he got things muddled in his testimony.

What explains it is that a human being was in an extraordinary life threatening situation and was frightened, confused and realising that in the coming minutes he would be now engaged in a terrifying fight for his very life.

Charles Joughin (who had a wife and two children at home in Southampton who were dependent on him) now had to work out just how the hell to survive this mess rather than pausing to accurately note every blessed thing that was happening around him.

You must also consider that giving evidence at both the inquiries with all the officials, the press and the morbid public all looking on must have been an unpleasant experience. With such pressure upon one, it's understandable that things may have slipped his mind or he didn't express himself too well.

How did Charles Lightoller, Harold Bride, George Rowe and Joseph Boxhall and many other men and women offer problematic, objectionable accounts of what happened to them ? Were they all drunk too ?

And if you want to bet that half a tumbler of alcohol consumed nearly an hour before the ship sank was what saved him, I'll take that bet, and wager on him having drunk a lot more than that.

Why would you take a bet on something that's impossible to ever prove ? That's ridiculous.

We don't know if he had half a tumbler of water, half a tumbler of alcohol (which would likely have rendered him paralytic) or a half tumbler mixed with alcohol and water. It's quite clear he was not drunk though.

The whole idea that Joughin survived because the alcohol kept him warm is just another myth of the sinking. Had he been as hammered as public imagination wrongly thinks he was, it's likely he would have died quite quickly in the water, there is an old thread on here that explains it.

Joughin was sober as he left the ship and swam to the temporary safety of Collapsible B. It's time the lazy myth of "the drunk baker" was scuttled for good.

 

[Kyle Naber]

Joughin’s testimony of the plunge is in alignment with Eva Hart. She described the ship at a “terrifying” angle, breaking apart, heeling over, and sinking straight down (never rising again or straightening out after the break).

 

[Ioannis Georgiou]

His testimony illustrates serious impairment and the downplaying of how much he had to drink.

It's extremely likely that he had more to drink than he let on. The first time he spoke of going to his room for a drink, he said he "had a drop". When pressed later, he said he had "half a tumbler". So, knowing that he went to the pantry on Deck A, right at the 3rd funnel, and right adjacent to the 1st-class lounge's bar, does anyone believe that he went to that spot for "a drink of water"? I think that he ran out of spirits in his room, and went to tank up by getting into the bar. That would explain how he got things muddled in his testimony. And if you want to bet that half a tumbler of alcohol consumed nearly an hour before the ship sank was what saved him, I'll take that bet, and wager on him having drunk a lot more than that.

If he really was looking for more to drink he could have gone to any other room than running up on A Deck to the Lounge Pantry. (We have Dillon who stated that he went with others into the 1st class smoking room where they got drinks.)

Although he tried to speak authoritatively, he was wrong about things. He said that the port list never corrected, but it did. IF he were less than sober, he could have mistaken the stern's second rising (fully lighted, very steep, with people falling) for a port list supposedly 'chucking' people. He says he didn't think that the ship ever got to any kind of steep angle, but there are plenty of reliable (read: unimpaired) people who saw very steep angles.

There are a lot of other survivors who were wrong about different things, Joughin is no exception. Also according to his newspaper account that he jumped off the ship and lost consciousness several times. And a fellow crew member mentioned that he (the baker) jumped off the ship just before the "big explosion".

 

[David G. Brown]

How does a hull girder manage to rise to a high angle when the design criteria and modern computer analysis shows the breaking strength could only support approximately half of the alleged high angle break?

Put simply, it doesn't matter if the maxing stress occurred at 40 or 45 degrees if the maximum stress the hull could support without failure was in the 15 to 20 degree angle. Titanic was bound to unzip prior to the proposed high breaking angle of maximum stress.

Also, not many people on this board have any experience carrying passengers for hire on a sailing vessel. As someone who has doe so for at least 20 years of my career, I can tell you that non-sailors react with trepidation when the deck heel reaches 20 degrees and many become of step shy of terrified at 20 degrees heel. There are other sailors on this board who have sailed for enjoyment. They know that 20 degrees is just "getting in the groove" and nothing to worry about if the boat is properly ballasted. Based on rreality, I wold say most of Titanic's passengers were queasy from the slight list to starboard and became seriously flummoxed by the roll to port.

As far as trim goes, people tend to be less upset by positive trim by the bow. Negative bow trim is more likely to raise fears. The down trim by the bow was about 15 degrees when Lightoller stepped into the drink and noted the crow's nest was still above water. You can measure this angle with a grade school protractor. If we assume the tippiing point as midway from the center screw to the crow's nest, we are looking at a positive trim by the stern kf some 20 feet. That's the height of a 2-story tract house by way of comparison. I would guess that several tons of bronze hanging over your head might just be a tad frightening. And, to a sailor it would mean the ship had lost all means of propulsion making self-rescue impossible.

And then came the crunch of doom.

-- David G. Brown

 

[David G. Brown]

Oh, on the subject of resurfacing decks -- we once coated the wooden (white pine) decks of a schooner with a non--skid material consisting of rubberized paint and beach sand. One passenger got into an argume with us over those decks. "They're made of concrete," he claimed. "You can see that. They're not wood." Sometimes its not worth winning the argument. We've had a wonderful sea story to recite over and again.

-- David G. Brown

 

[Kyle Naber]

Put simply, it doesn't matter if the maxing stress occurred at 40 or 45 degrees if the maximum stress the hull could support without failure was in the 15 to 20 degree angle. Titanic was bound to unzip prior to the proposed high breaking angle of maximum stress.

Maximum stress is 23 degrees, not 40-45. On a computer screen or a protractor doesn’t put into scale how scary 20 degrees was in real life.

This rendition shows 23 degrees. To someone in a lifeboat flat on the water, this angle would seem pretty monumental, even though 20 degrees on paper doesn’t seem like much.

 

[Rennette Marston]

The Titanic corrected her port list when the bridge began to plunge. This would create the impression that the bow resurfaced when she actually was listing on her starboard side as she rapidly went down. At this time, survivors noted that they heard four "explosions" from the Titanic - which were probably the boilers imploding and the steel plates bending, twisting, and breaking apart. This caused the bow to completely separate from the stern, lurch forward, and sink. The stern lurched upwards at an angle of 25-30 degrees and broke again - this time between the 3rd and 4th funnels at the aft grand staircase and the engine room. She settled back with a heavily pronounced list-to-port and floated for a few minutes. Then she "keeled over," corkscrewed and sank.

 

[Kyle Naber]

That seems like a pretty acrobatic scenario. It’s quite possible that the port list evened out when the bridge went under, but nothing on the wreck indicates a break due to explosion. Most claimed that the ship went down whole, so the break would probably be somewhat on the subtle side of things.

 

[Rennette Marston]

Maybe, but in my above post, I said that the "explosions" heard were likely the boilers imploding and rivets popping and steel plates bending and cracking - which is supported by the wreck. So no, the ship did not actually explode. As for the survivors who claimed the ship sank in one piece, most of them were in lifeboats that were far away from the Titanic and they were rowing towards a mysterious light in the horizon slightly off the bow's portside, so they were not in a good position to tell what was actually happening to the Titanic in her final moments because they were looking at the prow and not at the full profile of the ship.

Go to 2:20.

Now imagine this scenario at a much larger scale - this time with large heavy burning hot boilers situated at the bottom of the ship coming in contact with icy cold water. It would have been catastrophic for the Titanic's riveted iron hull.

 

[Bill Vanek]

No boilers imploded. The boilers of Boiler Room 1 were unlit. The last remaining lit boilers were in Boiler Room 2, as all of the others had gotten flooded by that time. Those boilers of Room 2 are clearly seen in the photos of the wrecked bow section, and they are intact.

So boiler implosions did not break the ship. The ship broke from having gotten to about 12 degrees tilt. And the keel would have kept the ship together unless the keel failed in buckling mode. Buckling would have caused 2 pieces to fold like a drawbridge...and we find 2 pieces of keel on the ocean floor, with their twisted skins consistent with an outward buckle where they had connected.

Once the keel had buckled, nothing else was strong enough to keep the ship together; it was doomed to go into two pieces eventually. I believe that the "plunge" talked about by so many witnesses (both on and off the ship) meant a forward movement of the ship as it went down, and that it pulled down the still-buoyant stern half, down as far as the 4th funnel, as observers said. This could readily happen with the internal decks and hull shear strakes still intact around decks C and D (the ship being split open above that location, and crushed together below that location due to the missing keel pieces). Once enough of the buoyant stern went under, the buoyancy would have halted the plunging. At that time, nothing would keep the stern from pivoting relative to the bow, because the strongest thing (keel) was broken, and everything else was weaker. Now the shear strakes would break with a tremendous clatter (which matches the testimonies of a second loud event), and the last internal decks would pull apart in tension. The result would be that the bow half pulls loose and plunges, while the stern half floats for a bit before turning on end and going down (much testimony of all of this). So the ship broke in 2 stages: once in initial cantilever, and then after it went to a high angle in tension and the tension got released.

 

[Rennette Marston]

Thanks for clarifying. I thought the boilers did implode because, if my memory serves me right, some of the boilers in boiler room #2 (as seen from the wreck) look deformed. But I do believe that by the time the bridge began to plunge the strain on the hull was so great that the ship twisted and broke in two - the bow leaning slightly to starboard and the stern leaning more heavily to port and leaning upwards. I might be wrong, though.

 

[IvanZagric1990]

Hello after a long time!

The boilers in boiler room 2 have imploded, as can be clearly seen in the more detailed photographs. But they did not implode during but after the sinking of the ship and not in a dramatic way. Damage caused by implosion is visible only on the upper part of the boiler, in area or above the heating pipes. The cause of this damage is the fact that the boilers were about 3/4 full of water. In the upper 1/4 there was steam (or air after steam was released and fires drawn out). Since the water is incompressible, and the external pressure on the boilers increased as the bow traveled toward the bottom, that upper part of the boiler was a “weak point” that had to give way.
The boilers were designed for an operating pressure of 215 psi (15 bar). I guess they could withstand a little more pressure, maybe 275 psi (19 bar), so my thoughts are that the top part of boilers imploded somewhere below 200 meters (650 feet) from surface.
The cylinders of reciprocating engines are damaged in a similar way, but damage to them was much more violent because they were dry inside.

Sorry for non perfect english, I hope you understand what i mean.
Cheers from Croatia. Ivan