Slowing Titanic's flooding/sinking

[Augusto Félix Solari]

Would the Captain have made every attempt possible to save his ship? Survivors heard him order the passengers to the starboard side "To keep the ship up as long as possible". Would he also attempt to raise the watertight doors (maybe only a few inches) and allow the water to travel aft and thereby draining the water away from the bow as it travelled aft and reduced the downward trim? Would Thomas Andrews do everything in his power to keep the ship up as long as possible and come up with a procedure to filter the water out from one compartment and channel it into another compartment in an attempt to keep the ship steady and keep her afloat long enough for help to arrive?




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Yes, but this would have made the ship dramatically unstable given the free surface effect. It might have capisized.

 

[R.M.S TITANIC]

Could things in some areas of the ship stem the flooding, making titanic sink slower? I got this idea from a leaky pipe of which the water was being sucked up by toilet paper.

 

[Dan Kappes]

According to the real-time sinking video on YouTube, at 1:07 AM, suction pumps were assembled and activated in the flooded areas.

Did they have any success in keeping the Titanic afloat for a while, and how long did they actually prolong the sinking?

And did the unused open gangway door have any effect on the flooding once it went under?

 

[Kyle Naber]

I’m not sure about the pumps, so I’ll leave that up to someone else. The open door, however, was calculated to roughly have the same area as the damage caused by the iceberg on the other side of the hull. It was almost as if the ship had hit another berg on the other side. I think the open door probably wasted about 30 minutes of time which probably could have allowed for collapsible A and B to be launched properly.

 

[Scott Mills]

The lack of collision mats on board Titanic is puzzling. For many years, while I had brought it up off handedly here, I assumed that collision mats were a thing that may have been on warships, but not on passenger liners. Then, just recently read that the White Star Liner Republic, when it collided with a ship and foundered in 1907, not only had collision mats, but attempted (with not enough success to save the ship) to use them.

Now granted, Titanic was orders of magnitude larger than Republic, and attempting to place a collision mat from the deck of Titanic would have been extremely difficult, particularly if the sea was rough; however, the situation Titanic actually found herself in, foundering slowly on a perfectly flat sea, represented the best conditions one would hope for if collision mats were going to be used on a passenger liner at all.

 

[Mark Baber]

Why no collision mats

I read somewhere something about ships having what's called collision mats. Anybody here an expert on them and why didn't Titanic use them? Also, it's surprising she didn't have searchlights as I believe some other ships of the time did! Thanks, Michael.

www.encyclopedia-titanica.org

 

[David G. Brown]

Collision mats originated in the days of wooden ships and iron men. Muzzle loading canons fired more-or-less at point blank angle. That is, the round went on a straight horizontal track toward the enemy, or a least that was the intent. However wind and wave action often changed the point of impact. If the enemy ship were tossed upward, it could receive damage below its waterline. A temporary covering was made using a fothered sail dragged into position by human muscle and held in place both by lines and chains round the underbody and the pressure of water on the outside.

A fothered sail was typically made from still usable portions of worn out sails. Pieces of oakum and strands of "junk" (old rope) were worked through two layers of sailcloth to build up the mat's resistance to water. Since the size of the damage was usually rather small. collision mats could be fashioned in a size that sailors could handle even during battle.

According to DeKerchove's International maritime dictionary, these mats were not all that large, being from 6 to 15 feet square. Obviously, that's far too small to have done much good over the full length of Titanic's damaged hull. Even more of a problem, the distance from the open deck to the damage of Titanic was almost 100 feet. Compare that with the roughly 24 feet from deck to keel of the wooden frigate USS Constitution.

Oh, yes, then there is the problem of obtaining used sail canvass and working up a fothering. Oakum and canvass had pretty much passed from the world of iron ships and steam engines. Where would you get those materials on Titanic?

-- David G. Brown

 

[Scott Mills]

Collision mats originated in the days of wooden ships and iron men. Muzzle loading canons fired more-or-less at point blank angle. That is, the round went on a straight horizontal track toward the enemy, or a least that was the intent. However wind and wave action often changed the point of impact. If the enemy ship were tossed upward, it could receive damage below its waterline. A temporary covering was made using a fothered sail dragged into position by human muscle and held in place both by lines and chains round the underbody and the pressure of water on the outside.

A fothered sail was typically made from still usable portions of worn out sails. Pieces of oakum and strands of "junk" (old rope) were worked through two layers of sailcloth to build up the mat's resistance to water. Since the size of the damage was usually rather small. collision mats could be fashioned in a size that sailors could handle even during battle.

According to DeKerchove's International maritime dictionary, these mats were not all that large, being from 6 to 15 feet square. Obviously, that's far too small to have done much good over the full length of Titanic's damaged hull. Even more of a problem, the distance from the open deck to the damage of Titanic was almost 100 feet. Compare that with the roughly 24 feet from deck to keel of the wooden frigate USS Constitution.

Oh, yes, then there is the problem of obtaining used sail canvass and working up a fothering. Oakum and canvass had pretty much passed from the world of iron ships and steam engines. Where would you get those materials on Titanic?

-- David G. Brown

Dave,

I bow to your expertise on this matter; however, I am still puzzling over why the White Star Line's RMS Republic would have had 'collision mats' that they attempted to use in 1907.

Edit:

I just came across the following: during day 19 of the Board of Trade inquiry, Edward Wilding--a naval architect aboard Titanic for her trials--testifies about collision mats. He is of the opinion that they would not have been of any help to Titanic because of the size of the damaged area to the ship and the time and manpower they require to deploy; however, one wonders, given the little we know about the actual damage to the hull, if only part of the flooding could have been stopped or mitigated in key areas, would Titanic have lasted longer?

In any case, his testimony implies to me that Titanic did have collision mats on board her, but the witness's opinion, as stated above, was that they would have been of no utility.

See:
TIP | British Wreck Commissioner's Inquiry | Day 19 | Testimony of Edward Wilding, cont.

 

[David G. Brown]

Check out the notable lack of success with collision mats aboard the sinking Republic.

It would take more time than I have this morning to do the proper research, but there is some possibility that the ship was not outfitted with collision mats, but the ones employed were supplied by the U. S. Coast Guard. In any event the damage quite predictably proved greater than the collision mats could handle. The concept was already outmoded by the increasing size of ships.

-- David G. Brown

 

[Scott Mills]

David, see my edit to the original post. Edward Wilding's--one of the naval architects aboard Titanic during her trials--testimony on day 19 of the BoT inquiry seems to suggest, to me at least, that collision mats were present on Titanic; however, it was Wilding's opinion that these would have been no use given the extent of Titanic's damage, the number of crew it would take to place them, and the time it took Titanic to founder.

I would also note about the Republic, and this is neither here nor there really, that the rigging of collision mats was not attempted for hours until the entire ship had been evacuated except for the skeleton crew who stayed to try and save her. So who knows how useful they would have been if used at the outset?

But, I think it is a salient enough point in both the case of the Republic and Titanic that the time and efforts of the crew needed to rig such mats, was better used evacuating the ship first, and trying to save the ship second.

 

[Jonathan Granato]

My other [and thankfully final] new thought about the sinking is the wave that washed up onto the Officer's quarters and floated Collapsibles A and B away, was generated by the watertight bulkheads between the aft bow watertight doors and the hull shattering. Even though the pressure was relieved by the icecube tray effect of sea water spilling aft over the top of the E deck bulkheads, the bulkheads and the water pumps did a combined job of keeping the ship afloat for longer than the estimated time.

So many people mention that wave that I imagine that the bulkheads, never constructed to withstand so much PSI, catastrophically gave way all at once, causing the superstrure to lurch forward, causing the wave that signalled the beginning of the end.

 

[Jim Currie]

Hello Jonathan.

I suspect that the "wave" was simply the result of the fore part of Titanic taking its final dive. It was not so much a "Wave" as a seawater closing over the hole left when the bridge front went under.

 

[Scott Mills]

I think you are spot on, Jim. It was probably a combination of water suddenly occupying the space once occupied by the bridge and the the actual motion of Titanic downwards, which would have created the illusion of a 'wave' for those on Titanic as the spots they were standing were moving very rapidly towards the water.

The latter bit is a pretty simple illusion, and as anyone who has stood under a streetlight and looked up in a snow storm can attest, it is really easy for the human mind to briefly confuse the stationary object (the Earth) for the moving object (the snow). If one's brain is telling them that the surface they are standing on should be static (the ship) and that surface suddenly lunges downwards towards the water, it would be very easy to view the water as the thing coming up in a 'wave' to meet them.

I often think when reading testimony about those last minutes for the people struggling with collapsible A and B that it was much more the Titanic leaving them than it was them leaving Titanic as a result of a 'wave' washing them overboard.

 

[Jonathan Granato]

Thanks for your replies. I just spent over and hour typing out my thoughts about the final five or so minutes. Microsoft Paint saw fit to not save any of it. Tant pis pour moi!

 

[PeterChappell]

If you read the text below, you might understand more of what I am talking about...

View attachment 144

I copied this from a webpage -- credit for the above text goes to Jeffrey R. Charles.

There's a more detailed description of the pumps location and performance in this clip by Bill Saunder.

There were 5 ballast pumps (in blue) for moving water in compartments along the hull of the ship to correct the angle of the ship. Presumably the Engineers pumped water from the bow to the stern compartments in these tanks, but the amount would have been small in relation to the inflow. There were also 3 smaller bilge pumps (in red), which are used to remove water from the ship.

I'm not sure if the ballast pumps could be used as bilge pumps, but the latter were linked by a long pipe running the length of the ship. I recall one of the movies implied that the engineers rigged a flexible pipe from one of the pumps to remove some water from the flooded boiler rooms.

To get enough water into the Stern to balance the ship would have required flooding of compartments which contained electrical equipment. There was an emergency generator on D deck though.