Posted by James Pepper on March 25, 2000 at 16:44:50:
In Reply to: lifeboats posted by mark on March 25, 2000 at 16:13:21:
You should check out Encyclopedia Titanica for these questions. This page is more concerned with detail on the ship. The Californian was close enough to save the ship. Whether they were able to get eveyone off the ship fast enough is another story. Since it took a half an hour to re-string a lifeboat onto a davit, the question is, did they have enough time to lower the people into the boats if a ship was there, right next to her? Probably not.
And if the lifeboats returned to get the people out of the water, did they have enough time to get back from pulling away from the ships to row to the people and get them out of the water, would they survive the exposure to the water. Probably not.
Of course, more people would have been saved, but not all.
These questions should be addressed on another board.
The time it takes to restring a lifeboat was found in a discussion of the topic in Engineering just after the sinking. I was looking for any references to the lifeboats and how they were constructed. Research into these questions often lead to photographs of lifeboats and the ships they were on.
The restringing of lifeboats was one of the principal reasons why Britannic's davits were made the way they were. Harland and Wolff wanted to use Wire instead of rope on the Welin Davits on Titanic, but the Board of Trade did not approve of this practice, since it was so new. Wire makes it easier to restring the boat after one has departed. There is not tangled rope to deal with and it can be rewound easier. Wire davits would have saved more lives on Titanic if they had more boats.
Since Harland and Wolff and Welin Davit had board memebers on each other's boards, the relationship with Welin Davit made the board of trade not recommend more davits on Titanic and her sisters. Harland and Wolff wanted to put more boats on the decks but were over-ruled, because it would raise the standard on all ships requiring other ship lines to be forced to update. This would be a finanical burden that would hurt rival lines. The board of Trade considered this just an excuse to sell more Davits and they were right, but it would have made the ships safer. If Titanic were regarded as a merchant vessel, not a liner, but a cargo ship, she would have had more boats based on her size. Also the Board of Trade was concerned with the thickness and strength of her upper deck since each boat brought with it about 2 tons of equipment. There was discussion of removing the promenade of Titanic and Olympic to accomodate davits on the lower decks. At this point H&W dropped the more boat idea. The strength of the upper deck was solved on Britannic by making the ship wider.
Sincerely,
James Pepper