Titanic Bursting at the Seams

[Aaron_2016]

Did the Titanic literally fall apart at the seams? The hull seams to have stripped off at the bottom quite significantly on the port side.

....and stripped away from the bottom on the starboard side as well.

Here is a photo of the Olympic's bottom. Does anyone know what these are and if they were vulnerable when the Titanic began to bend?

If the ship was bending, would the keel remain rigid and straight and cause the sides to peel open at the seams if she sank either bodily or head down?

Are ships ever built with a flexible keel or expansion joints on the keel/bottom to allow their vessels to bend in rough weather, like a high speed train turning a tight corner? Did they adapt the Britannic to avoid what happened to the Titanic as she broke apart?


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[Kyle Naber]

What is shown on the wreck is simply the result of the implosion and expulsion of major pieces of the stern. The breakup would have little effect on the final shape of the keel and hull plates. The only reason the Britannic did not break in two because it was not subjected to the same physics of the sinking.

 

[Kenneth M. Price Jr.]

Here's a picture of the model that represents Titanic's starboard bow. This is where the original damage was supposedly done. This is where there needs to be a 250-300 foot long "gash" or "split seam". I say "needs to be" since this scenario was written into the disaster hearings held in both the United States and Great Britain as the official cause of the Titanic to flood five compartments.

Now as of today there have been many dives to the Titanic wreck to recover artifacts. The "Big Piece" was raised and currently resides at the Luxor Hotel in Las Vegas. They have recovered hundreds of thousands of artifacts but they have never dug down through the silt to confirm that there is a mortal wound to the starboard bow.

For those of us who have always had trouble with the iceberg story from the beginning (thought problems that include: ice does not cut steel, steel does not tear separate or snap, the Niagara that ran into the same iceberg three nights before that made port, the Californian that just stood by, the lifeboats that were loaded so lightly even though the seas were totally calm, etc.) it would be nice to see that damage on the starboard bow in order to accept all of these anomalies. To accept even more of them, such as the ship broke herself apart in the act of sinking, sorry folks, I can't do it until the experts come through on providing some evidence of the original story being truthful.

I want to know how the vessel managed to damage five compartments with enough damage to fill them quick enough to get the Titanic to flood deep enough such that water would spill over the tops of the compartments. Five of them needed to be "holed". The ship only had 160 minutes to sink, therefore all of these 5 forward "damaged" compartments had to have a good sized hole. The chances of this happening is virtually zero. Don't expect all of us to accept that the Titanic broke herself apart as well because she sank. Steel ships sink and we have lots of examples. Since when do they rip themselves apart in the process? (shipwrecks on rocks, reefs, or hitting bottom in the Great Lakes don't count)
Cheers!

 

[Ioannis Georgiou]

the Niagara that ran into the same iceberg three nights before that made port,

The Niagara got damaged in a ice field and did not ran into the same iceberg. What is the source that it was the same iceberg? How do you know that?

I want to know how the vessel managed to damage five compartments with enough damage to fill them quick enough to get the Titanic to flood deep enough such that water would spill over the tops of the compartments. Five of them needed to be "holed". The ship only had 160 minutes to sink, therefore all of these 5 forward "damaged" compartments had to have a good sized hole. The chances of this happening is virtually zero.

Actually 6 compartments got damaged by the iceberg (and possibly a 7th one got a puncture). The water did not spill over the tops.

Regarding iceberg damage, this is one at the area of Boiler Room No. 6. With a 300 foot gash the ship would have sunk in about 30 Minutes.

 

[Jim Currie]

Kenneth,

We have ample evidence to show how many compartments were breached during the first 20 minutes after the ship hit the ice.
When water enters a compartment below the original waterline, it displaces the air in that compartment. There are three ways of determining whether a compartment is or is not breached. Sight, sensation or by measurement.
We know for absolute sure that water entered boiler rooms 5 and 6 and into the forward holds 1 nd 2 because it was seen or in the case of the holds, the effect of it was seen. ( Billowing hatch covers means air, air means displacement by water.).
As for sensation: every compartment in a ship has a vent or vents - even water tight ones have them. If a hand is placed over a vent and you can feel air leaving the compartment then water is entering that compartment.
The third method, measuring, involves the use of a weighted lead-line cord which is introduced to the compartment via specially designed Sounding Pipes. Every morning and depending on the ship evening, the ship's Carpenter would o round all sounding pipes and determine by "dipping" how much, if any, water or liquid there was in each compartment. He would record his findings in a special "Soundings Book". If he discovered a sudden increase in the sounding or obtained a sounding when before there was none, he would know the compartment was leaking. Now go look in the evidence and see how many compartments in Titanic were reported as leaking.

You express doubts as to the method by which the ship's hull was breached. You wrote," ice does not cut steel, steel does not tear separate or snap,". You are absolutely correct. However, steel bends. If you have two plate edges which are joined by rivets and you apply a sudden, heavy load in the area of join. When this happens, the two plate edges become distorted and attempt to move. The rivets also distort and if, as in the case of Titanic, there is also a shearing stress caused by the friction of steel against the joint, rivet heads will snap off and the joint will become compromised. Add to that, a water pressure of around 3/4 of a ton/ sq.ft. and you have the makings of an onboard high pressure, elongated jet of sea water in all of the effected compartments.

During the sinking process, Titanic sank in two ways...bodily because she was losing buoyancy and by the head because, sea-saw like, all the lost buoyancy was forward of the middle of the "see-saw" if you will. As long as the hull remained intact length-wise and the water level in each compartment was below the tops of the WT bulkheads, the ship would have remained afloat longer than she did However, too much of her length at the stern came up out of the water and was unsupported by it. The bending moment was too much for the hull and it failed. The result was a sudden and catastrophic inundation of thousands of tons of seawater. The hull "girder" totally failed. The bottom parted transversely in two places and the bit between was torn away.

Now do you understand?

 

[Doug Criner]

Here's a picture of the model that represents Titanic's starboard bow. This is where the original damage was supposedly done. This is where there needs to be a 250-300 foot long "gash" or "split seam". I say "needs to be" since this scenario was written into the disaster hearings held in both the United States and Great Britain as the official cause of the Titanic to flood five compartments. !

 

[Doug Criner]

Look at that model pix. It is obviously all wrong. The forward part of the ship broke off, and was found a considerable distance from the after portion.

 

[David G. Brown]

Something so obvious that it's never been commented upon, or not anywhere that I've seen. Notice there are large portions of Titanic's skin plating that seem to hang down almost like a theatrical drape being lowered to the stage. It's particularly noticeable in views of the port side of the stern section.

This drape effect is easily explained if the steel side of the ship was actually removed from the underlying structure. It would behave very much like the world's stiffest curtain. But, how could it have peeled awayf from the frames which supported it? Is that possible?

I'll hazard and answer to my question...just a guess, mind you...not fact...but, what if impact with the bottom jammed the sides upward. Movement of as little as a quarter inch can result in a plate shearing off a rivet head. And, if one sheared, then the resulting weakness would make it easier for the next, and that easier for the next until the skin was flayed from the frames, allowing it to sag like a curtain.

-- David G. Brown

 

[Dave Gittins]

A couple of points.

Ships have been known to break up on the open sea. A notorious example was the oil tanker Prestige, which broke up in 2002, making an unholy mess. Such things were not common in 1912, when ships were relatively small.

In the case of Titanic, it wasn't the heads of rivets that failed. It was the points, which are always the weakest part of a rivet. Rivets have been recovered with their points pulled off.

 

[Jim Currie]

Something so obvious that it's never been commented upon, or not anywhere that I've seen. Notice there are large portions of Titanic's skin plating that seem to hang down almost like a theatrical drape being lowered to the stage. It's particularly noticeable in views of the port side of the stern section.

This drape effect is easily explained if the steel side of the ship was actually removed from the underlying structure. It would behave very much like the world's stiffest curtain. But, how could it have peeled awayf from the frames which supported it? Is that possible?

I'll hazard and answer to my question...just a guess, mind you...not fact...but, what if impact with the bottom jammed the sides upward. Movement of as little as a quarter inch can result in a plate shearing off a rivet head. And, if one sheared, then the resulting weakness would make it easier for the next, and that easier for the next until the skin was flayed from the frames, allowing it to sag like a curtain.

-- David G. Brown

Simple physics, David.

When a ship sinks below the surface, whole of it or the whole of a part of it reaches terminal velocity on its way down to the sea bed. The whole part maintains that downward velocity until it comes in contact with an ungiving surface. The lowest extremity comes to a sudden halt. However, the bit above it is still moving at terminal velocity. The result is that whole tries to emulate a concertina or to be more nautical; a telescope. Since a ship is not by any means a homogeneous mass, weak parts fail first.

As I see t, when the stern section landed on the bottom, it is likely that the collapse of the structure would be more catastrophic. Because, if you look at the deck plans for "C".,"D" aft of the main engine room, you will find that both decks had large void spaces used as dining areas with little in the way of vertical sub divisions. These two decks would pancake. The side frames would buckle outward and the side shell plating would spring outward, The decks "E", "F" and "G" immediately below these areas would also want to collapse.

 

[Aaron_2016]

Are there any photos of other shipwrecks that show similar damage to their hull plating being stripped away from the bottom? My understanding is that survivors saw water coming from underneath the foot plates and this was possibly caused by the Titanic grounding heavily over a ledge of the iceberg which compressed the bottom upwards and cracked open the starboard side, and during the evacuation this length of stripped seams continued to pop open as the ship flooded and began to bend which led to more seams popping open until the sides tore away from the bottom and broke the ship in two.


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[Michael H. Standart]

>>For those of us who have always had trouble with the iceberg story from the beginning (thought problems that include: ice does not cut steel,<<

I would point out that nobody outside of the media of the day EVER asserted or implied that the iceberg 'cut' through steel. Impact damage alone was all it took. Very BAD things happen when 52,310 longs tons of mass moving at 21 to 22 knots gets into a shoving contest with something which is going absolutely nowhere when the ship tries to.

Icebergs have been crunching through steel plates and even caving bows in...like what you saw on the Arizona....for as long as there have been iron and steel hulled ships. Impact is demonstrably more than enough to buckle plates, sheer rivets and split seams and that was exactly what happened. The through hull damage...per Edward Wilding's testimony...amounted to no more that 12 or so square feet BUT it breeched six compartments and there was no way the pumps could keep up with the ingress.

It's not complicated and when you get down to the brass tacks, there was nothing else around which could have damaged the ship in this manner.

 

[Jim Currie]

Are there any photos of other shipwrecks that show similar damage to their hull plating being stripped away from the bottom? My understanding is that survivors saw water coming from underneath the foot plates and this was possibly caused by the Titanic grounding heavily over a ledge of the iceberg which compressed the bottom upwards and cracked open the starboard side, and during the evacuation this length of stripped seams continued to pop open as the ship flooded and began to bend which led to more seams popping open until the sides tore away from the bottom and broke the ship in two.


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Hello Aaron.

I truly think that the idea of bottom damage caused by the ship grounding on the iceberg is fanciful nonsense. I don't make that observation lightly.

When a flat bottomed ship grounds on anything, iceberg or sea bed, the position of her center of gravity rises instantly. Keep that in mind

The Center of Gravity ...C of G...is the point where all the weight in the ship acts vertically downward. There is another imaginary point called the Metacenter...M. Roughly speaking, this is the point through which the force of buoyancy act vertically upward. It follows that if this point is above the Center of Gravity, buoyancy will alway cause a
It follows that if the Metacenter position is above that of the Center of Gravity, buoyancy will alway push a heeled ship back to the upright position. If the points are in the same position, the ship will flop about. If G gets above M then the ship will heel over until the points coincide once again. In a very bad situation, the ship will keep heeling and eventually overturn. It follows that on a stable ship, M is always above the C of G. Now apply this Titanic grounding on the iceberg.

On Titanic, like most passenger ships, the distance between the position of the C of G and M is relatively small. Consequently, a very small upward shift of the position of G would have caused her to heel to one side or the other. If the upward movement of G was sudden as when grounding, she would have heeled equally as suddenly., That would have thrown not a few people out of bed.

As for the water coming over the boiler room bottom plates...if you look at the ship's plans, you will see that Titanic had a double bottom in the area in question. That double bottom has another name...cellular. This means that it was constructed like a honey-comb. The forces necessary to cause such a structure to be displaced upward as you describe would have caused the ship to bounce and heave as well as to heel violently to one side or the other. I have been on a ship which grounded as you describe We were making less than 10 knots at the time. It was so evident that I had one leg over the bridge wing ready to jump. It is a very scary event, I can l you. If anyone one wants to check, I'm sure it is recorded somewhere in the Canadian Maritime records. The ship's name was the MV Broompark...1960.

 

[Aaron_2016]

Thanks. I read that the Titanic struck the sea floor at the same speed she was travelling on the surface, so I figured if the impact with the sea floor could split open the sides and strip the hull plates away from the bottom edges quite significantly then perhaps the collision / grounding over the iceberg ledge would be sufficient to crack open the starboard side as there were reports of the ship heaving over to port during the collision with also accounts of the ship appearing to ground over the ice ledge. I google searched the MV Broompark. It says on Shipsnostalgia.com:

MV Broompark
Built: 1959.
Sunk 1981.
Foundered off Bermuda after sustaining heavy weather damage & flooding in Nos 2 & 3 holds.
Length: 468 feet / 2 Breadth: 62 feet / Draught: 27 feet
Tonnage: 8084 GRT / 3302 NRT / 10,365 DWT
Propulsion: Doxford oil 2SA 4cy 3500bhp 13 knots.

Sad that she went down, but as she was half the size of the Titanic and much lighter would it affect how the shock was absorbed and felt throughout the ship? My guess is, the smaller and lighter the vessel is, the stronger the collision will be felt. e.g. Similar to how a lifeboat moves up and down against the heavy waves compared to a much larger ship that reacts much lesser against the high waves.


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[Michael H. Standart]

>>I truly think that the idea of bottom damage caused by the ship grounding on the iceberg is fanciful nonsense. I don't make that observation lightly.<<

Actually, I suspect it's more of a distraction then anything else. You can ground a ship and damage some plates depending on what you run over and how fast you hit it that way, but with a double bottom such as what the Titanic had, so long as the inner hull isn't breeched, it may be an expensive annoyance but it's hardly a threat.

The through hull damage along the side however, THAT was a bird of a very different feather which was what killed the ship. When you have a ship designed to remain afloat with up to four compartments flooded and you have SIX which are breeched, you're going to have a bad day. I really don't understand why anybody is surprised by this.