Lets not forget most of these ships are in warm waters…If titanic would have sank off the coast of costa rica and everyone had life jackets on and stayed together they could had just floated around untill ships came to rescue
They are top heavy because they can. For two ships of similar form, the bigger is more stabile, because widening increases the stability way faster than increasing the height can ever decrease.
Are any cruise ,lines offering a “Tiatanic Sinking” cruise (April 14, 2012-the 100th anniversay of the sinking)?
That would be kinda neat.
In the Yarmouth Castle incident quoted upthread the fire started in only one place, the inquiry found, but it spread rapidly via the air circulation system (and the layers-thick paint on the walls was flammable.
And in that case, there was no water pressure in the fire-fighting system at all. Bad situation all around.
Wouldn’t that be like showing “Airplane!” or “Cabin in the Sky” on a commercial airline flight?
Thanks for the correction and clarification.
I picked up a copy of Michael Crichton’s Airframe in a bookshop at Heathrow before a transatlantic flight. It wasn’t until we had almost touched down that I figured out why the guy across the aisle was giving me dirty looks.
Regarding the loss of the Costa Line ship off Tuscany:
-evacuation procedures: none or poor (check)
-loss of power to the bridge shut down all navigation capability (check)
-officers confused about gravity of even (captain abandoned ship before all passengers evacuated) (check)
-extreme list of ship prevented launching half the life boats (check)
-no calls to local coastguard? (I cannot confirm this)
It appears that I was prescient…I forsee a big increase in cruise ticket costs (marine insurance rates going up).
Yeah, I want to start a thread on this, but life duties get you busy elsewhere.
I do agree with you on this one, AFAIK there was a recent sinking of a ship under similar circumstances close to Greece and there were new inflatable life boats that were deployed quickly, a very nice development that unfortunately was not available in this new disaster: however, the bad news for the future is that the ship also began to go tits up like on the recent disaster (they are really that top heavy, the Titanic did not have that issue, if the shape had been designed like the boats of today I’m afraid that the casualties would had been worse) many passengers **also **could not get to the life boats because the inclination of the ship and the delays by the crew prevented access to the lifeboats even when they were deployed early.
On both recent incidents the reason why there were few casualties is because air and rescue ships were available.
It is clear that even after 2 or more incidents like this the ship lines are not changing this clumsy way of dealing with evacuations, so I do think it is high time to get other authorities to order (not just request) them to do changes and to enforce them constantly.
I hope considerable attention is given as to why the ship ran aground in the first place. Safety procedures are valuable, but if it hadn’t struck the rocks, neither lives nor property would be at stake.
“For want of a shoe, the horse was lost.”
Just to be picky, Bismarck may have been sunk by torpedo fire from HMS Dorsetshire. They were preparing to scuttle but as Bismarck sunk prompty upon Dorsetshire’s final torpedo attack, no one really knows for sure.
Of course, your main point remains wholly correct; Bismarck took an absolutely amazing amount of damage before she finally went under. Thousands of years of marine engineering has given us the ability to keep ships afloat pretty reliably.
It looks like all but perhaps 20 of the 4000+ people on board survived, so it seems that the evacuation procedures worked pretty well. Granted, the ship was only just offshore, but all the accounts of chaos I’ve seen have been from passengers who likely have no frame of reference with which to judge the efficiency of the procedures.
Not what I have read so far, several had to be rescued by air or picked from the ocean, and many life boats could not be used as the ship turned sideways.
Warships are designed to absorb a certain amount of battle damage and exhibit much greater subdivision of compartments than merchantmen, which are primarily commercial vessels designed to turn a profitable voyage. Passenger ships are even less likely to tolerate having to go through multiple compartments and being compelled to dog down hatches after them every time.
And yet the survival rate is very high. I’m not sure it’s wise to pre-judge what actually happened here.
Uh, I already mentioned that the point here is that it was thanks to the rescue ship being present is that we did not get more casualties, if you have a cite that shows that they put all the passengers in the life boats and many needed no rescue from the sea you may had a point.
I’m happy for the survival rate, but the implication does remain: the survival rate will be used in an attempt to prevent the changes that are needed to be ready when there is no outside help available.
Well, these things will looked at in the inquiry, and by the various regulatory authorities. The only real facts we have are: almost everyone survived, not everyone got off on a lifeboat (I’m on my phone so can’t link, but the photo of the ship with the lighthouse in the foreground shows most of the lifeboats deploying before the ship rolled) and there was a catastrophic navigation cockup.
But the delay did cause several lifeboats to not be launched at all or not reachable (in the previous recent disaster many lifeboats that were released had no passengers in them as the passengers could not reach them, once again because of the boat tipping over) and several passengers did swim away, it was thanks to the fact that the ship was on shallow water and close to shore that more passengers survived.
Ironic, isn’t it? If the ship hadn’t been in such shallow water close to the shore, she wouldn’t have been wrecked in the first place.
Agreed. I wonder if the ship holed some distance away, and tried to make port? Just speculation though.