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What part of the wreck would you most like to see?
QUESTION:What would
normally happed to each type of log? Were there requirements for how
long they were kept and where?
ANSWER: Ah, yes, the bunker door. My question would be: how deep would a bunker full
of water be when spread out over the area of the boiler room floor? And why
would its depth increase, if the only inflow was "as from a fire hose",
which the pumps had been discharging for over an hour?
Boiler Room #5 measured 57 feet fore-and-aft. The forward bunkers occupied
about 8 feet of this dimension, and extended from the tank tops (7 feet
above the keel) to "F" deck, about 40 feet above. I believe it is reasonable
to assume that the bunker was full to the top, so it can be imagined that if
you simply took the volume of the bunker and laid it out across the floor,
it would be about feet deep, and most, if not all, of it would have drained
down through the perforated flooring to the space below.
If this had happened, it would have been regarded as a major inconvenience
to the crew working there, but not a catastrophic deluge, as is often
portrayed. The breach in Boiler Room #5, which had initially filled it to a
depth of ten feet, had been offset by the action of the pumps by the time of
the collapse, demonstrating that they were more than capable of staying
ahead of the inflow. If it had been the bunker (or its door) that broke, the
crew would have had the compartment dry again in another half-hour. This
leads me to conclude that it was not the bunker that failed, but the
bulkhead into #6 itself, or the watertight door in that partition. It was
the loss of this barrier that caused Chief Engineer Joseph Bell to exclaim,
"My God, we are lost!" And it was at that moment that the ship's bow-down
trim, which had all but stopped a half-hour earlier, resumed the inexorable
increase that ended at 2:20.
Now the question becomes: why did a bulkhead system (including the door),
which was probably designed with a 50% overload factor, fail?
Could it have been weakened by the bunker fire? Entering the compartment
might shed some light on this question.
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