Marilyn & Jeremy,
Here is a link to and article I wrote dealing with the whole Bunker fire issue:
You may also find this thread of interest, as it deals with the damage to and flooding of the boiler rooms:
encyclopedia-titanica.org/cgi-bin/discus/show.cgi?tpc=5919&post=20649#POST20649
also:
Fireman John Dilley (Shulver)
Tom,
Chief Bell's "My God, we are lost",
qoute. Is pretty questionable. The source of the
quote is Everett's 1912 book
Wreck and Sinking of the Titanic, page 102:
quote:
Another story told by members of the Titanic's crew, was of a fire which is said to have started in one of the coal bunker of the vessel shortly after she left her dock at Southampton, and which was not extinguished until Saturday afternoon. The story, as told by a fireman, was as follows:
"It had been necessary to take the coal out of sections 2 and 3 on the starboard side, forward, and when the water came rushing in after the collision with the ice the bulkheads would not hold because they did not have the supporting weight of the coal. Somebody reported to Chief Engineer Bell that the forward bulkhead had given way the engineer replied: 'My God, we are lost.'
"Then engineers stayed by the pumps and went down with the ship. The firemen and stokers were sent on deck five minutes before the Titanic sank, when it was seen that they would inevitably be lost if they stayed longer at their work of trying to keep the fires in the boilers and the pumps at work. The lights burned to the last because the dynamos were run by oil engines."
There's a lot of things wrong with this quote: 1) it's third hand, at least, 2) sections 2 and 3 were in boiler room #2, 3) bulkheads do not collapse simple because they do not "have the supporting weight of the coal", 3) the firemen and stokers did not operate the pumps, 4) the dynamos were not "run by oil engines". I give very little credence to this quote, or much else in Everett's book for that matter--it is full of demonstrable errors of fact.
George,
I agree with you that the flooding of boiler room #5 occurred very late in the day, for the same reason you give,
Tom & George,
I am going to stick with a bunker door failure as the best explanation of what Barrett saw. I agree that the water contained by the bunker in question would only place a few feet of water on the deck, but the doors line up well enough with the gaps between the boilers to cause quite a torrent when a door first failed. And that's all that Barrett reports, a great rush of water through the passage between the boilers. (By the way, given that Barrett was the only one to survive the event, who reported to Bell?)
I agree that the water level was probably at the top of the bulkhead, but I'm going to give H&W credit for being able to design a WT door that could handle the pressure. After all, the WT door on the
Olympic proved that the things were up to the job when she collided with the Hawke. That leaves us with one other possibility, that the bulkhead itself failed catastrophically, like so much wet cardboard and without a bit of notice. The problem with that idea it that it is not just one bulkhead that we are talking about, it is three (the WT bulkhead and the bulkheads that form the fronts of the bunkers). They were massive things, and tied together by large beams, the aft bunkers in BR#6 were probably full, forming what amounts to a huge dam supported by steel plates. I just don't see how such a structure could fail without a whimper.
Cal