A Coal Fire May Have Helped Sink the ‘Titanic’ – IOTW Report

A Coal Fire May Have Helped Sink the ‘Titanic’

As Lazlo (the tipster) says, “if we’ve learned anything at all from Rosie O’Donnell it’s that  fire can’t melt steel.”

A new documentary claims the Titanic’s hull was weakened before it struck an iceberg.

 

24 Comments on A Coal Fire May Have Helped Sink the ‘Titanic’

  1. Here we go again. Coal, that damn coal, sunk the Titanic. LBJ had JFK shot. Bush bombed the World Trade Center. The Russians scuttled
    Killary Klinton. FDR encouraged the Japanese to bomb Peril Harbor.
    The world is flat. Nobody landed on the moon, the film was shot in Arizona. And on and on. Trump will ever, evah, be President.
    Gimmeafookenbreak!

  2. Am I right? , No shit. I’m not a metallurgist, and I don’t play one on TV. But I did take a quick spin around the internet reading these experts opinions. I read at least 5 times “by todays standards”. Hold the f up. That was 1912. So then I searched “Hull Material Composition”. Answer, had to much sulfur. Really? Was it similar to 1018, 4330 Vac Melt, or was it non ferrous, 303, 304, 17-4 ph?

    When it comes to metal I know my shit as do a couple others here. Jethro comes to mind. Bottom line the head muzzy at Minnesota’s premiere college should be able to tell me whether that hull plate was stainless steel (400 series has sulfur) or a 1018 Cad plated.
    Bottom line I’m pretty sure the son of a bitch hit a huge ice cube. No matter what it was built from in 1912.

  3. Coal fires were a lot more common that we know, maybe it was both!
    Of course the word is flat, look up into the sky at night and count the number of flat stars, planets you can see, case closed!

  4. the coal fire weakened the steel, but more importantly it weakened the rivets. The rivets popped on impact with the iceberg and flooded 3 or 4 areas that they couldn’t seal off…

  5. Anonymous, you’re missing the point. No different than any other vessel in 1912. State of the art back then. You can’t compare technology from 1912 to now and blame the rivet or hull material. The hull was punctured by an iceberg. Even if the hull was made out of Balsa Wood.

  6. Am I Right? @. You know what my theory was all these years? I’ll tell you. The TITANIC was built in Belfast N.Ireland. The riveters, allegedly,
    spelled out “No Pope” through out the hull. They were anti Catholic Protestants. One of the officers on the liner is alleged to have said “even God couldn’t sink her.” Well that sorta pissed God off, and you don’t ever want to do that. So He said phuckit, and put a huge iceberg in her path which ripped her hull well below the waterline. This caused water to pour in and flood the ship right down to the engine room where the stokers feeding the fires to drive the engines were forced to abandon their posts. The fires eventually went out and so did the lights on the TITANIC. Then she split in two and sunk, or sunk and split in two? Being that she was “unsinkable” there were not enough life rafts for the misfortunes in steerage. God Acts in strange ways. Anyway, that’s my theory and I’m stickin’ to it.

  7. Hey don’t take anything I write to heart I’m a frigin’ moron. I had to drop out of school in the ninth grade to work on our farm. I was just being a smart ass.

  8. To get coal to fire you need lots
    of ventilation, methinks those coal
    lockers had jack and shit for ventilation.
    Too lazy to re-run Trump hate mail so
    they make up non-news.

  9. The coal storage was below the waterline, right? Single hull vessel. I doubt if a coal fire against the hull could weaken it, since on the other side was a heat sink known as the entire friggin’ ATLANTIC OCEAN!

  10. I worked directly with coal in transfer and storage situations for nearly two and a half decades. It’s sometimes boggled the imagination when it spontaneously ignited in the bunker, the hot spot buried under tons of more coal, with virtually no ventilation. Sometimes the outside of the bunker would glow cherry red from the heat.

    Dangerous shit, those coal fires. And this was before Powder River Basin coal came into play. PRB is so volatile it would usually arrive already on fire in the barges.

  11. They put out the coal fire by burning the coal in the burning bunkers first and moving the rest to the port side. When the ship hit the berg, it should have rolled to starboard fairly fast. Instead, moving the coal to the port side kept the ship from rolling, and allowed them time to get passengers off. That is the theory based on new models, anyway.

  12. I once sat next to a dead-heading pilot shortly after a newsmaking plane crash. As I asked him about the cause he cryptically said “It’s NEVER just one thing.” He was right.

  13. @Corona

    The hull plates weren’t ‘pig iron’. That is too brittle to form into plates and wouldn’t stand up to being riveted to the frames. It would crack and shatter.
    Pig Iron isn’t used as raw material for anything it’s feedstock used to make other forms of iron and steel. At the time of the Titanic construction pig iron was a barely refined version of iron ore, full of slag and other impurities. It just simplified shipping raw metal stock to the steel mills from the mines.

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