I kinda agree with this sequence of events. It portrays the break up starting at the moment the bridge went under. This matches lots of testimonies. But, what do you think that caused the breakup if the weight of the stern up in the air wasn’t the cause?
I tend to think that something, either exploded or imploded amidships and caused the following destruction of the forward and aft tower sections.
The next morning, once rescued by the Carpathia, Major Peuchen saw the barber’s pole floating in the water and assumed that a great explosion had to have happened for the pole to break free from its fastenings. The barber shop was located in the aft Grand Staircase at the C deck landing, so the destruction of the stern section surely started at the surface.
Remember, the people always mixed facts and conjecture, and the man who saw the barber pole did exactly that. He was correct in knowing where the barber shop was, and correct that something major had to have happened besides the ship merely flooding and sinking. He used the word
explosion as his guess. We now know that the ship did break up, so that corrects his language. Any massive break-up would have easily caused such flotsam to show up.
The only other thing that could have exploded was a boiler. However, that is really difficult to do. You have to lose feed (feedwater) to the hot boiler for long enough for the boiler to overheat, then re-establish feed suddenly enough to flash that water to steam instantly; so the "explosion" is actually just a huge expansion of steam in a space that is too small for it to exit easily. That's why it is frequently called a "steam explosion". In the case of
Titanic, the boilers of Rooms 3 through 6 were flooded by that time, so the boilers were cold iron. The No. 1 boilers had not been lit. The boilers of Room 2 were still hot, as evidenced by the ship's lights being on (heat provides steam, which provides electricity). If by some crazy circumstance one of those hot boilers lost feed, then got it re-established (why would any of that happen??), and exploded, it would have been a localized explosion that blew the weaker ceiling (decks above it) upward, not the strong keel downward. It also would have harmed the boilers next to it. None of that is true, as evidenced by the intact boilers at the broken end of the bow section.
If by some other craziness the remaining engineers (who were likely trying to pump out floodwater) had lit one or more of the No. 1 boilers, and caused an explosion in one of them, we would have seen a destroyed boiler on the ocean floor. All of those boilers are intact. The keel pieces were so strong (5 feet thick; a grid of steel beams; inch-thick sheathing on the outside; so it was a 3-dimensional ) that a boiler explosion could not have blown two whole sections out of the bottom of the ship.
Implosion occurs when a trapped volume of air in some kind of tank, compartment, vessel, etc. gets enough pressure on the outside of the vessel to suddenly and catastrophically blast it inwards like an inward-directed explosion. It's not the same as a mere crushing in, as the guy on "Mythbusters" illustrated (and incorrectly called 'implosion') when he pulled a vacuum on a gallon gas can. The
Titanic was still on the surface, so it was not deep enough to cause the pressures needed to implode anything.
The keel was too strong to fail in compression or in bending modes. And the two keel pieces on the ocean bottom illustrate neither of those. It had to have failed in buckling mode. The only question was whether it buckled inward or outward. Inward would have torn up the edges due to all of the frames being attached there, and the edges are not tore up. Also, inward would have smashed together the mating point of the two pieces at the bottom skin, and that is not so, either. So as much as I'd like to believe the two pieces buckled inward, the evidence says that they buckled outward. See the attached diagram.
