civil engineering disasters- The Titanic

On April 14, 1912, the R.M.S. Titanic collided with a massive iceberg and sank in less than three hours. At the time, more than 2200 passengers and crew were aboard the Titanic for her maiden voyage to the United States. Only 705 survived. According to the builders of the Titanic, even in the worst possible accident at sea, the ship should have stayed afloat for two to three days. This article discusses the material failures and design flaws that contributed to the rapid sinking of the Titanic. In addition, the article addresses the changes that have been made in both the design of ships and the safety regulations governing ships at sea as a result of the Titanic disaster.

 

At the time of her construction, the Titanic was the largest ship ever built. She was nearly 900 feet long, stood 25 stories high, and weighed an incredible 46,000 tons [Division, 1997]. With turn-of-the-century design and technology, including sixteen major watertight compartments in her lower section that could easily be sealed off in the event of a punctured hull, the Titanic was deemed an unsinkable ship. According to her builders, even in the worst possible accident at sea, two ships colliding, the Titanic would stay afloat for two to three days, which would provide enough time for nearby ships to help [Gannon, 1995].

On April 14, 1912, however, the Titanic sideswiped a massive iceberg and sank in less than three hours. Damaging nearly 300 feet of the ship's hull, the collision allowed water to flood six of her sixteen major watertight compartments [Gannon, 1995]. She was on her maiden voyage to the United States, carrying more than 2200 passengers and crew, when she foundered. Only 705 of those aboard the Titanic ever reached their destination [Hill, 1996]. After what seemed like a minor collision with an iceberg, the largest ship ever built sank in a fraction of the time estimated for her worst possible accident at sea.

The two pieces of the Titanic lie 2,000 feet apart, pointing in opposite directions beneath 12,500 feet of water. The bow section remains mostly intact, although the damaged portion of the hull is covered with a 35-foot high wall of silt and mud that plowed up when the Titanic hit bottom, so the point of fracture can not be seen. The stern section is a tangled wreck, as implosions occurred during the descent due to air trapped within the structure succumbing to the increased water pressure at greater depths. Between the two sections is a wide field of debris [Hill, 1996].

For 73 years, the Titanic remained undisturbed on the ocean floor. On September 1, 1985, oceanographer Bob Ballard and his crew discovered the wreck of the Titanic about 350 miles southeast of Newfoundland, Canada [Gannon, 1995]. Since then, four more expeditions have visited the Titanic. In 1991, the first purely scientific team visited the site. The dive was called the Imax dive because the purpose was to create a film for Imax theaters. The Soviet submersibles used in the dive were capable of staying submerged for twenty hours and were equipped with 110,000-lumen lamps. With this equipment, scientists were able to take pictures of the Titanic wreck and eventually uncover new evidence into the cause of the Titanic disaster. 

The tragedy claimed the lives of over 1,500 people. But was the sinking of the Titanic an engineering failure? Many factors contributed to the catastrophe: removing half the amount of lifeboats originally planned for the ship, and cruising in high speed in an iceberg-prone environment. As for the engineering point of view: several rivets of the 3 million rivets that held the Titanic together were recently recovered and tested, and found to be made of low quality iron, which on impact caused them to fall apart. This might have contributed to the event. Another engineering fault was that the 16 watertight compartments that kept the boat afloat, were not individually sealed, but rather connected near the ceiling. This enabled the water to spill from one compartment to another and sink the boat