Cabin fittings....fixed?

[Arun Vajpey]

In second and third class cabins of the Titanic, were fittings line beds (or bunks), tables, washbasins etc fixed to the floor? If so, how firmly?

I am asking this in relation to other threads about the not-yet flooded cabins at the stern of the ship during the final plunge. Anything movable would have slid forwards during the gradual sinking by the head in the first 2 hours and 15 minutes of the sinking; so, even when the ship took that sudden lurch and started sinking rapidly, there may not have been too many things 'flying around' as thought by some?

This might also mean that anyone in such cabins might have remained alive and conscious till their space was actually flooded.

 

[Kyle Naber]

Most objects wouldn’t have slid down towards the bow until survivors heard a huge thundering, roaring sound just before the breakup. Yes, objects like dishes and wheeled carts may have shifted throughout the sinking, but mainly, they wouldn’t have shifted around until the very end when the slope became a bit extreme.

 

[Arun Vajpey]

Understood. But in passenger cabins, particularly third class ones, I am guessing that most things would have been bolted to the deck and would not have shifted at all. Smaller items like passenger luggage etc might have moved but they would have started doing to before the final plunge. The point I am trying to make is that if there were people inside those cabins, there might not have been objects flying around to knock them unconscious or worse like some others have conjectured. In other words, they could have remained conscious and aware for up to a minute after the stern sank beneath the surface due to the air pockets within the cabins before the water got past all the obstacles and reached them.

 

[Kyle Naber]

Yes, the furniture in lower classes probably wouldn’t have been able to move, but passengers deep in the stern would not have survived for a second longer after the poop deck went under. That was when large, underwater implosions seemed to shake the whole ocean as the air pockets literally burst inwards, immediately killing people within them.

 

[Arun Vajpey]

Yes, the furniture in lower classes probably wouldn’t have been able to move, but passengers deep in the stern would not have survived for a second longer after the poop deck went under. That was when large, underwater implosions seemed to shake the whole ocean as the air pockets literally burst inwards, immediately killing people within them.

I find the "implosion" bits rather difficult to comprehend, particularly in relation to the sinking stern. Why would the air pockets "burst inwards"?

I am a retired scuba diver and have visited over 25 ship wrecks around the world. Some, like the San Francisco Maru in Truk Lagoon, lie 50 metres deep. Most wrecks that I have seen are due to war damage - torpedoes and bombs - while others are due to collision with reefs, intentional scuttling etc. Most would have had large air pockets within them when they went down but none showed any signs of explosion or implosion due to pressure build-up. AFAIK, the wreck of the Lusitania, around 100 metres deep, does not show such damage either.

I realise that the wreck of the Titanic is far, far deeper and that there is some evidence of implosion but my question is at what stage of the sinking - more precisely at what depth - could it have occurred? When the ship split in half, the deck spaces in the unflooded stern section would have been exposed, yes. But there still would have been a few intact bulkheads between the split section and the extreme stern of the ship. My thinking is that it would have taken the flooding sea some time - perhaps as much as a minute - to traverse all those remaining bulkheads and other obstructions to reach and flood the rearmost spaces after the stern sank. During that time the trapped air in the stern would have been compressed and built-up pressure, which in theory might have resulted in an explosion rather than implosion. In reality, it is probably likely that the water rushing in through open portholes and other spaces equalised the pressure changes to some extent and so the implosion would not have occurred till the stern sank to perhaps 200 metres or more before the outside water pressure became too much for the hull.

That is my conjecture, anyway. Can someone please explain this further?

PS: I have posted this as a separate thread too so that those with more knowledge of water pressures at such look at it.