I know the Titanic had traditional lifesavers on board but those are intended for you to hold onto while still being in the water, which meant anyone who used them would have died from hypothermia eventually. I was thinking, if the inventor of those large inner-tubes that are intended for you to be able to put your entire body over it with just your butt barely touching the water, if he had been transporting a bunch of those prototypes in a container on the boat and right when the ship hit the iceberg started to inflate them and throw them into the water, would that have saved a bunch of people? Even if you had been in the freezing water, would you have survived by climbing onto the innertube and getting your entire body out of the water?
And not just “cold”, but undergoing the extreme physical shock of immersion in near-freezing water. People who’ve fallen into cold seas have reported being physically immobilized after less than a minute. Death ensues within a few minutes, usually less than 15.
There was quite a bit of floating buoyant debris around the site. Many of the people in the water tried to hang onto it or climb onto it to keep themselves afloat. Cold shock and hypothermia got them anyway.
The best solution I’ve seen was to lash the boats together to create a more stable platform that could handle more people. you could do the same with the inner tubes and use them as pontoons for material floating in the water.
Kinda like when you hear that fire does not kill people, the smoke does (mostly).
With the Titanic it was not drowning, it was freezing (hypothermia) that got most people who made it into the open water (as opposed to those who died in the ship…nothing would save them).
When I was taking scuba lessons we learned how fast the human body loses heat in water (much, much faster than in air). In the near freezing water where the Titanic sank hypothermia comes in a matter of minutes. It is very fast.
Why do you think this would have been easier to do with inner tubes than with all the pieces of floating debris that were actually in the water and were actually clung to and climbed on by survivors?
The problem in the aftermath of the Titanic’s sinking was not lack of suitable flotation materials that could have kept a lot more people out of the water. The problem was people becoming incapacitated by cold shock and hypothermia very shortly after entering the water.
This. According to Wikipedia, the ship finally disappeared from view at 2:20AM, and the Carpathia didn’t show up until about 4:00AM. Once the ship sank, a person would have started by swimming through 28F seawater to reach one of the OP’s recreational donuts, then trying to climb aboard. If fortunate enough to achieve that, they would then have had to survive 100 minutes soaked head-to-toe in air temps not much warmer than the water, while having already been significantly chilled by their time in the water. Very slim odds.
It’s pretty much a rule in “wilderness” survival.
Get drenched in cool, not even cold, temperatures? Strip, you’ll be warmer naked than you will be wearing that heat sink.
(Wearing wool or similar synthetics being the only, sometimes, exception.)
Given that the air temperature at the time was about 40F, and they were already chilled from their swim, even stripping off wet clothes probably wouldn’t have stretched their survival time to 100 minutes.
Not just a minor nitpick. Of course they would have had to be stored uninflated-- you’re not going to keep hundreds of inflated inner tubes around.
There was, I think around 2 1/2 hours between iceberg collision and final sinking, which seems like a lot of time to pump up the inner tubes, but no one took the iceberg collision very seriously for a pretty long time. And once it became clear that it’s a choice between pumping up inner tubes or death, I doubt there’d be a 1 to 1 ratio of hand pumps to tubes. Can you imagine pumping up a tube and then sharing the few hand pumps around in all the final chaos? People would be fighting over the pumps. I doubt a dozen would manage to be inflated.
Would a modern wet suit have done any good? Suppose you could bring 1000 wet suits on board and had people put them under their clothing. Could that have enabled them to hang on until the Carpathia arrived?
