Ch4 titanic fire..

Slowboat35

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Fire?
Er - Titanic...she hit an iceberg...
Both Max and Titanic were caused by incompetent crew failing to carry out normal procedures, but how does fire come into either?

Or is this a typo?
 
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nigel1

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It's well known that there was a fire in the coal bunkers. It's been speculated that may be the reason why the ship was going at full speed in order to get into port and have assistance to exinguish the fire. Another theory is that the fire could have caused the hull steel to become brittle and weakened, so that the damage from the iceburg was worse than it would have been with no fire.
 

Biggles Wader

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Seen the bunker fire story before and I think it is a red herring. The Titanic sank because she hit an iceberg while going at full speed. The damage caused flooding that exceeded the design parameters and glug glug. Why she was still going at full speed in an ice field at night is not really relevant. Hubris was quite normal then, as it still is.
 

Salt'n'shaken

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I watched the documentary on the fire a couple of years back. Found the explanation wholly plausible with quite a large amount of supporting evidence that the fire was raging before she left.

We'll never know for sure, but I was left pretty convinced that it was a major factor in the disaster and led to her sinking rapidly.

I'm no conspiracy theorist, but there was a fair bit of evidence for the covering up of the fire, both while it was burning and afterwards.
 

Slowboat35

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The whole point of conspiracy theorys is that they are made to sound plausible. But just because something could or might have happened is not reason to accept that it did.

The first question to ask, surely, is why was nothing known of this until some TV doco a century later?
 
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Norman_E

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Seen the bunker fire story before and I think it is a red herring. The Titanic sank because she hit an iceberg while going at full speed. The damage caused flooding that exceeded the design parameters and glug glug. Why she was still going at full speed in an ice field at night is not really relevant. Hubris was quite normal then, as it still is.
Quite right. Bunker fires were commonplace in the era of coal fired steamships. They were usually dealt with by removing as much coal as possible from the bunker in question, and damping down adjacent compartments. The idea that is often touted that Titanic was trying to set some sort or record is ludicrous because the ship was not designed for speed. Cunard had much faster ships. Titanic and her sisters were designed to cover the North Atlantic route in six days, allowing two ships to run a regular weekly service each way, starting at the same time on the same day each week.

One issue not always appreciated is that because Titanic had an inadequately sized rudder the order to stop the turbine engine which was the central one that provided prop wash may have been what doomed the ship.
The actual situation was starboard engine full forward, port engine full astern, turbine stopped and rudder hard over.. A better plan might have been port and starboard full astern, turbine half speed forward to slow the ship more and give the rudder some help.
 

dombuckley

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I watched the documentary on the fire a couple of years back. Found the explanation wholly plausible with quite a large amount of supporting evidence that the fire was raging before she left.

We'll never know for sure, but I was left pretty convinced that it was a major factor in the disaster and led to her sinking rapidly.

I'm no conspiracy theorist, but there was a fair bit of evidence for the covering up of the fire, both while it was burning and afterwards.
The fire was in the stokehold between boiler rooms 5 and 6, located directly below the forward funnel. A fire there would not affect the results of the impact, which was spread across all five forward compartments, including the two forward cargo holds. Also the stokehold was directly below the first class swimming pool: if the fire had reached the temperatures they claim, the water in the pool would have been literally boiling, but there is no report of any such incident.

Sorry, but pure bunkum.
 
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