Not only “extended to the top” but “sealed at the top” would have been much better. As stated above, the water tight compartments were really open topped boxes. Submerge them enough and water would indeed pour from one to another like a giant ice cube tray.
But if they were sealed boxes (or sealable – water tight bulkheads and doors on the top as well as the sides) then water could enter but would stop when it could no longer displace air. The water level would rise, probably above the level of the leak, but once compression of the air balanced the water pressure, no more water would flood in. Any passengers and/or crew trapped inside would have been able to breathe and survive for a considerable time. Those people could even have congregated at any watertight hatch above the interior water line, opened it briefly to exit en mass, and shut it again. Some water would have entered, but would again have stopped once pressures equalized.
Of course, the costs in inconvenience (to both loading and within-ship movement) as well as capital outlay would not have been trivial. But the ship might actually have been unsinkable.
If I’m understanding you correctly, you’re under the same misconception my father was.
Is what you’re asking is why, for example, the E Deck watertight bulkhead didn’t extend all the way up to the “roof,” which would be the underside of “D” Deck? As if the “wall” (bulkehead) had an actual gap at the top?
Or are you asking why the watertight bulkheads didn’t extend all the way up to A deck? Or even the Boat Deck?
CannyDan: the kind of compartmentalization you describe is fairly standard on warships, and it’s still no guarantee against sinking. If you build a ship out of steel, and then poke enough holes (or a big enough hole) in it, it will, sooner or later, sink.
In warships, which can expect to sustain battle damage, there is much greater compartmentalisation and a good deal of effort is devoted to damage control, both in the form of active measures to shore up bulkheads, fight fire and counter flood, and passive ones like phoning the damage control centre for permission to open hatches and confirming that they are dogged down again after you passed through the compartment. Passengers won’t stand for being treated like that. They will leave doors open, will think of themselves before the ship, and won’t obey orders that might seem a bit dangerous. They’re paying for a pleasant sea voyage, not to re-enact Two Years Before the Mast. They will pretty well negate any design features that might save a ship full of disciplined sailors.
ExTank, warship compartmentalization is exactly what I had in mind. I admitted that it had costs, even insurmountable costs, in convenience and treasure, as Mk VII points out.
Nit pick regarding a “big hole”- one can in theory remove the entire bottom of a floating hollow steel container (a ship, say, or a simpler shape like a tin can) without it sinking, as long as an air bubble of sufficient buoyancy remains to float the weight of steel. (Capsizing is a whole different issue.) Water inside at or below the water line doesn’t constitute “weight” and won’t “pull the ship down”. Adding another hole, no matter how large or small, that allows the air to escape will indeed inevitably lead to sinking though, as water replaces the air. And fighting ships are certainly subject to multiple holes
It appears that all of the bulkheads go up as far as “E” deck, with the bow and stern areas having bulkheads that go up to “D” deck.
I’ve always assumed that the bulkhead “F” (between boiler rooms number 4 & 5), for example, does indeed reach the underside of “E” deck, meaning that flooding cannot proceed fore and aft until it gets above “E” deck, and that “E” deck itself was not watertight (meaning there were ladder/stairwells down from “E” deck into boiler room 5 that were not watertight).
To make “E” deck watertight would have added a lot of weight (and cost) high up in the ship, as well as constricting crew, cargo, or passenger traffic.
How do we find similar drawings for modern cruise ships?
The brittle qualities of steels at freezing (and not so freezing) temperatures were not well understood at this time. The ship was not the only on with this problem.
Yah…true. The bulkheads were a HUGE factor in the sinking. But it was also the hull plates and the rivets that were used. From what I’ve read and seen, especially from Dr. Robert Ballard, the rivets used were cheaper than the ones that were actually going to be used. Being cheaper made them more brittle and inseffiecient.
Remember the engineers who designed the Titanic class said they were “Virtually Unsinkable”.
The press didn’t like weasel-words, so they printed “Unsinkable”.
This was the first civilian ship to have ANY anti-flooding compartments.
Best laid plans of mice and men…
(these lessons need to be considered in the great rush to autonomous cars…)
I remember it as the rivets were more brittle than the plating but they were as planned. Substandard implies that they didn’t meet spec. I believe the problem was the spec for the rivets was different than that of the steel. Which has already been mentioned suffered from unexpected brittleness in cold temperatures.
The rivets apparently failed even before the plates did, at least at the collision points.
