
The Titanic Was on Fire for Days Before the Iceberg Hit - Osiris30
https://medium.com/dialogue-and-discourse/the-titanic-was-on-fire-for-days-before-the-iceberg-hit-94fa26471dfa
======
tbirrell
Ah yes, another "TITANIC MYSTERY FINALLY SOLVED" article. And right on
schedule too!

If you Google "Titanic coal fire", the results page will be full of articles
positing this exact theory. This is neither new, nor correct. Anyone who has
studied this event at any length will know it was a death by a thousand paper
cuts. Trying to assign ultimate responsibility to a coal fire using a
106-year-old photo showing a black smudge is laughable and shows a fundamental
lack of understanding.

The fire in question wasn’t some blazing inferno that many undoubtedly
imagine, but rather it was more of a smoldering affair. This fire was in one
of many rooms that was built for the express purpose of containing this coal.
A fuel source that is known to self-ignite. To say that the fire effected the
ship is like saying burning a casserole in your oven will burn down your
house. Possible? Technically. Likely? Absolutely not.

Something this article failed to mention was that the fire was put out the day
before the Titanic sank. Coal fires were common on large steel ships like the
Titanic. The engineers and stokers were prepared for, and ultimately handled
the fire. It was part of their job, not some apocalyptic emergency.

As I said above, the Titanic was a death by a thousand paper cuts.
Unfortunately, it was a necessary death to give us the marine safety
regulations we have today. If any number of things had been just slightly
different on the Titanic, it would be a footnote in history and we would be
talking about a different ship that would have inexplicably had everything go
wrong, including but not limited to an irrelevant coal fire.

~~~
debt
They hit an iceberg going pretty fast and no one knows why they were going so
fast.

I think you’re glossing over the idea that the burning coals were thrown into
the furnace which in turn revved up the engine which caused the Titanic to
speed through the Atlantic and right into an iceberg.

~~~
tbirrell
The Titanic was going fast because they were trying to get to New York ahead
of schedule for the favorable publicity.

To say that the Titanic was careening out of control through the Atlantic
Ocean that by all rights should have been devoid of icebergs because some
lowly stokers were shoveling coal into a furnace faster than they should have
is both simplistic and flat out wrong.

~~~
debt
"The Titanic was going fast because they were trying to get to New York ahead
of schedule for the favorable publicity."

Yeah but the article is saying that's not the real reason it was speeding. It
was the coals in the furnace.

~~~
51lver
That's like blaming your fuel injectors for a speeding ticket...

------
foldr
This theory comes from a TV documentary broadcast in 2017 that's been pretty
thoroughly debunked:

[http://wormstedt.com/Titanic/TITANIC-FIRE-AND-ICE-
Article.pd...](http://wormstedt.com/Titanic/TITANIC-FIRE-AND-ICE-Article.pdf)

~~~
tantalor
From the article's conclusion:

 _Hypothesis:_ The fire played one final, deadly role in the disaster: the
fire-damaged bulkhead gave way, causing the ship to sink, and the enormous
loss of life.

 _Actually:_ Since the ship was doomed from the moment of the collision,
whether or not the bulkhead collapsed was more or less immaterial to the
timing of the disaster. Lives were not lost because it allegedly collapsed
early.

~~~
mannykannot
How long it stayed afloat was a critical matter. The RMS Carpathia arrived two
hours after the Titanic sank.

~~~
foldr
"Andrews knew about three-quarters of an hour before that rush of water in
Boiler Room No. 5 that the ship was doomed. Once the forward compartments had
filled, the ship’s bow would have been so low in the water that the flooding
of the next compartment aft, Boiler Room No. 5, would have been a certainty.
Whether or not the bulkhead held was of no major consequence in the eventual
sinking, or how quickly the ship sank."

The article goes on to show that it's far from clear that the bulkhead did in
fact fail, and that it's unlikely that the fire would have been intense enough
to damage it significantly.

~~~
mannykannot
This article is a criticism of a particular documentary (which admittedly
seems to have a number of false and dubious claims), and in some places seems
more determined to debunk the claims made in that documentary than to consider
whether a bunker fire could nevertheless have played any role.

If the documentary claims the ship was only doomed by the failure of the
bulkhead in question, then it is in error, but timing of the essence here: if
the ship stayed afloat for one more hour, it probably would have made little
difference, but an extra two hours probably would have.

The metallurgical discussion of the effect of fire on the bulkhead looks well-
grounded to me (though I know little about the matter), but it might be
somewhat moot if, as this article seems to acknowledge, the bulkhead may have
been deformed beforehand, as a consequence of a bunker fire at some point. I
am curious as to whether the strain on the hull, from having the stern lifted
out of the water, could have led to (further) damage to the bulkhead, creating
the reported rush of water.

------
qubex
It's actually well-known that there were fires in the Titanic's coal bunkers.
I remember first reading about this way back in the mid 1990s (1995-1997) when
I was somewhat obsessed with the subject. It's also been speculated for just
as long that the heat might've affected the hull's properties, though this
runs counter to the argument that the cold water might've contributed to
making the metal more brittle.

This is by no means extraordinary: coal bunker fires were rather common back
in the age of steamships. It was even discussed at the various admiralty
inquests into the loss of the vessel.

~~~
hinkley
Sometimes they don’t go okay.

I can’t seem to find the name but there was a town in Texas, coal delivery
ship shows up with fire in storage. They dock, open the hatches, fresh oxygen
causes the fire to spread. Then other boats catch on fire. Some explode. Throw
shrapnel into town. By the time the fires are out, hundreds are reported dead,
almost 40% of the town is left homeless.

~~~
dctoedt
You might be thinking of the 1947 Texas City disaster, which killed nearly 600
people. The fire, and the subsequent explosion after failed fire-fighting
efforts, were in a cargo hold containing ammonium nitrate, not coal. [0]

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_City_disaster](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_City_disaster)

~~~
hinkley
I’m not sure what story I’m thinking of. The pictures and events don’t look
right, but some Wikipedia lists about disasters don’t include anything else in
Texas that’s the right size.

The story I’m thinking of, the captain knew the coal was burning before he
docked, and went into port anyway to try to salvage the cargo. The subsequent
explosion was due to material on other boats.

I may have heard about this around the Tianjin explosion but more likely when
they were fighting the new coal depots on the west coast, someone brought it
up while talking about coal self igniting.

~~~
creature
Is it possible you're thinking of the Halifax Explosion? That killed hundreds
and destroyed a huge portion of the city, but that ship was carrying
ammunition.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halifax_Explosion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halifax_Explosion)

------
justin66
The author mentions a 56 year old coal fire in Pennsylvania for some reason.
It's not the most extreme example he could have reached for. The New
Straitsville mine fire in Ohio has been burning for 134 years, and is still
slowly spreading.

[http://www.ohiohistorycentral.org/w/New_Straitsville_Mine_Fi...](http://www.ohiohistorycentral.org/w/New_Straitsville_Mine_Fire)

~~~
fromthestart
> It is estimated that more than two hundred square miles of coal has burned

Why would they measure the amount burned in square miles??? How thick? This
measurement is meaningless!

~~~
burfog
At only 200 square miles, we can fix it. Assuming the area is square, the
perimeter is just 56.56 miles. We can go around with a tunnel boring machine,
replacing coal with a concrete-lined tube. We can dig a trench, like a road
cut or canal, lining it just as we sometimes line our road cuts and canals.

~~~
Synaesthesia
Yeah only 200 square miles

~~~
burfog
The best case is a circle, giving a perimeter of 50 miles. Some other projects
to compare it by:

94 miles total for the three bores of the Channel Tunnel

120 miles for the Suez canal, finished 149 years ago

51 miles for the Panama canal, finished 104 years ago with steam shovels

Clearly, we can do this.

------
yuchi
Not as much interesting, but was astonished to know that we know the name of
the Titanic paper boy. There’s a incredibly sad story on his death too:

[https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/6364763/edward-john-
parf...](https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/6364763/edward-john-parfett)

------
boomlinde
_> It’s unthinkable today that a tragedy of this magnitude could occur._

In terms of death toll, there have been worse shipwrecks in this century.

~~~
trashtester
I reacted to that, too, and it made me think.

Had this happened in 1919, I think it would have been forgotten already, as it
would seem pale compared to WW1. In 1912, people were quite innocent, so this
was seen as a big event.

Was WW1, at least in part, something that was allowed to happen before most
people had forgotten earlier big wars? Roughly 100 years had passed since
Napoleon, after all.

When authors today again consider Titantic to be "unthinkable", what does it
mean?

I consider it perfectly thinkable that something in our lifetime will trigger
a nuclear war, killing billions of people.

Especially if we start to take global stability for granted.

~~~
reaperducer
_In 1912, people were quite innocent, so this was seen as a big event_

Huh?

40 million people died in The Great War, which just ended. And there were
world events which killed people on a much larger scale than the Titanic
before that.

It's a very modern and naïve viewpoint to think people of years past were
"innocent," as if tragedy and large-scale loss of life is somehow a new
invention.

~~~
lazyasciiart
The Great War ran from 1914 to 1918.

~~~
reaperducer
Thanks for that. I knew the dates for WWI. For some reason I had it stuck in
my head that the Titanic was 1919, not 1912.

Still, my point stands — "innocent" is simply a false way to describe people
of that age.

------
mcguire
" _Another issue that has always caused confusion was the Titanic’s speed. It
was running at full speed when crossing the Atlantic Ocean, even when there
were warnings of icebergs in the area. There were rumors that the ship was
trying to break some kind of speed record, but the Titanic was not built for
speed. This mammoth ship was a luxury liner. Molony indicates that this could
have been caused by the fire-fighting activities. "_

I think Molony and the author need to do more research on transportation in
the late 19th and early 20th century.

Liners were the only way to cross the ocean. If you're in America and need to
do business in Europe, you take a ship. The faster that ship gets there, the
better.

------
jamieson-becker
The title is factually incorrect: the iceberg didn't hit the Titanic. The
historical record clearly indicates that it was just chillin' out.

~~~
farss
They may have meant the word 'hit' as a noun.

~~~
antongribok
If the title was "The Titanic Was On Fire For Days Before The Iceberg Hit it"
I would agree with the parent comment, however as it is now, I read it as you
would read "We hit an issue".

Clearly we didn't "hit" any issue, but we started experiencing an issue.

~~~
Dylan16807
"We hit an issue" is still using "hit" as a verb. And making it metaphorical
doesn't help the problem of the iceberg being the subject of that
interpretation.

Using it as a noun is like saying "before the hit" or "before the issue".
"Iceberg" is an adjective describing the type of hit.

------
paul_milovanov
Any sufficiently complex system has a hidden barely contained coal fire
burning somewhere. Working as intended.

~~~
Izkata
No, according to this the fire broke out in the coal storage. It's not
referring to the furnace.

~~~
paul_milovanov
Exactly; the furnace is where you'd expect it to break out, so it won't.
Somebody didn't write their integration tests for the coal storage though.

------
ollyhayes
Can someone explain the comment in the article about the ship going at full
speed because they were fighting the fire by throwing the burning coal in the
furnace?

I would have thought there would be some valve somewhere that can be opened to
vent excess power (steam?) into the atmosphere rather than being forced to
drive the propellers faster, is that an incorrect assumption?

~~~
dexen
Running out of fuel aside (as mentioned by _rypskar_ ), they may have also
needed to conserve the boiler feedwater[0].

The boilers need well distilled water to turn into steam without leaving scaly
residue all over the place. During normal operations the steam is routed
through engines where it expands and cools and eventually through condensers
where it condenses back into water to be fed to the boilers back again.

If they throttled the engines down, the excess steam would have kept
gathering, increasing pressure. They'd need to either lower the coal feed rate
- which they did not want - or blow off steam [1]. Ability to blow off steam
is a safety measure not meant for regular, extended operations. Think
"analogue of nuclear reactor SCRAM". It causes loud release of huge unseemly
clouds of steam, but more importantly it causes loss of the valuable distilled
water for the boilers.

Btw, operations of marine steam powerplants is surprisingly complex and
fascinating subject; consider having a look at this WW2-era navy manual [2] if
you ever wonder what it takes to run one such at top power or efficiency.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiler_feedwater](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiler_feedwater)

[1] perhaps they could route some of the steam directly from boilers to
condensers, but I don't think typical condenser installations are capable of
directly taking in HP steam

[2]
[https://archive.hnsa.org/doc/destroyer/steam/index.htm](https://archive.hnsa.org/doc/destroyer/steam/index.htm)

~~~
magduf
Given that all you need to create more distilled water is heat, I'm surprised
they didn't have a way of generating distilled water with excess heat from the
boiler.

~~~
kryogen1c
>all you need

Not at all that simple. As already mentioned in the thread, they had limited
fuel. Boiling 100s if not 1000s of gallons of water takes more fuel they
already don't have.

SWAG: they probably weren't just using distilled water. There was likely some
pH additive or other chemical treatment that water uses for a multitude of
factors (scaling, corrosion, erosion, foaming, etc etc) that gets lost if you
just vent water overboard - lost physically as volatile chemicals are vented
or lost logically as new water must be treated.

Also, the boiling process itself is much more complicated than a pot and a
fire. To achieve any reasonable amount of efficiency at all requires a
multistage process with heat reclamation. If you plan on transiting salt
water, the boiling process produces a thick, salty effluent that can be
difficult to pump and is strongly corrosive. The weight, complexity, training,
parts inventory, etc are all large costs. These are all hard sells for
relatively short voyages.

------
LeonB
I checked Snopes and it seems this is not entirely bogus. A bit speculative
perhaps.

[https://www.snopes.com/news/2017/01/06/coal-fire-sink-the-
ti...](https://www.snopes.com/news/2017/01/06/coal-fire-sink-the-titanic/)

~~~
Gibbon1
My grandfather mentioned having to deal with a coal fire in the bunker at the
high school he managed, over the winter break. If it'd been during the school
year he could have got 25 teenage boys to do it. But it was just him and the
maintenance guy shoveling out 20 tons of coal.

Smoldering coal bunkers had to be a common occurrence on steam ships.

------
mitchtbaum
The myths of invincible heroes and the factors and flaws of their downfalls
are instructive for any emerging leader, also of the fates of those who
journey through the seas of reflection and those in the fog without their
binoculars.

Sometimes ya gotta flip the script.

[https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/InvincibleHero](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/InvincibleHero)

[https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NoGearLevel](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NoGearLevel)

[https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ImprovisedWeapon](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ImprovisedWeapon)

------
patrickg_zill
One of my favorite short stories is Youth by Joseph Conrad, which has as a
central event a ship sinking because of a coal fire...

[https://www.gutenberg.org/files/525/525-h/525-h.htm](https://www.gutenberg.org/files/525/525-h/525-h.htm)

------
blablabla123
People must have felt that Engineering products gave humans god-like powers.
It must have been fun to completely ignore Physics.

~~~
black-tea
You can see that even when people drive cars. People will do really stupid
things like drive through deep puddles or over uneven ground because they
essentially trust the car to do what it does under normal conditions.

~~~
mook89
> People will do really stupid things like drive ... over uneven ground

Cars tend to be able to drive over uneven ground. I'd say that people only
used to driving on smooth asphalt underestimate this.

~~~
black-tea
I've seen people rip off entire pieces of bodywork because they've
overestimated this.

------
kerrsclyde
There was an excellent Channel 4 UK documentary about this,
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORUKjNZzPbQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORUKjNZzPbQ)

~~~
Tokkemon
It's been debunked.

------
trhway
>There were rumors that the ship was trying to break some kind of speed
record, but the Titanic was not built for speed.

not exactly. Longest hull means highest hull speed.

------
emmanueloga_
Something I learn quite recently and most Titanic articles tend not to
mention: "The Olympic-class ocean liners were a trio of British ocean liners
built by the Harland & Wolff shipyard for the White Star Line during the early
20th century. They were Olympic (1911), Titanic (1912), and Britannic (1915).

Unlike the other ships in the class, Olympic had a long career spanning 24
years from 1911 to 1935. " [1]

The Britannic was sunk by an explosion caused by a naval mine, apparently
planted by a WWI German submarine.

And the Titanic... well, we all know what happen to the Titanic, don't we...
:-P

1: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olympic-
class_ocean_liner](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olympic-class_ocean_liner)

EDIT: More wiki-trivia [2]

* The titanic was 269.1 m long.

* The largest ship these days (the Seawise Giant) is an oil tanker 458.46 m long.

* The largest passenger ship: the Oasis (362 m long).

2:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_longest_ships](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_longest_ships)

------
TACIXAT
Coal fuel can't melt steel ships.

~~~
mark-r
No need to melt it, just decrease the structural integrity so that when stress
was applied it would fail.

------
petee
This article keeps referring to the bulkheads as _watertight_ , which they
were far from...

~~~
steve19
The article says that delaying sinking would have saved lives.

Ships are frequently pumping out water. They don't need to be 100% watertight.

~~~
EADGBE
Even recreational boats do this. Modern ones. Today.

~~~
jsmith45
I mean any surprise really? Even if the hull of a recreational ship was
completely water tight, large waves or rain would cause water to enter the
boat, so having a way to get rid of that water is a good idea.

While boats usually add drainage to the deck, and try to minimize the water
that gets "inside" (say in the cabin, or the hollow hull of many small
motorboats) not all ingress can be avoided.

Combined with the possibility of anything below the waterline being even
slightly less than watertight, and it is not a surprise that a bilge pump of
some kind is pretty common equipment on most boats with an electrical system.

~~~
B1FF_PSUVM
In simpler times, bailing out was only done with buckets in boats (or even
ships) ...

------
jliptzin
This is neither new nor surprising; I remember reading about this years ago.
Apparently this was common for steam powered vessels back then, which is the
reason why they proceeded with the voyage.

------
trhway
It was a feature and not a bug - such slow burning starved of oxygen would
produce the coal burning with higher temperature and thus increase the power
produced per volume unit of the burner.

------
Aloha
We have proof that too many watertight compartments were open to the sea, that
alone doomed the ship, the coal fire is an also ran.

~~~
Tokkemon
Yup. Occam's razor here.

------
charmides
This piece talks about the subject, but can anyone explain in more detail why
they couldn't put out a coal fire on a ship?

~~~
Deestan
Not trying to be snide, but why do you type this into a comment field and wait
up to an hour for someone to summarize it for you rather than googling "coal
fire"?

~~~
charmides
I did and I still did not understand it well. I thought someone could explain
it better and it'd maybe start a dialogue. Thanks for a worthless comment.

------
amysox
Boy, what James Cameron could have done with _this_ news...

------
aisofteng
The short, stilting sentences make this article read like a fifth grade book
report.

~~~
cyberferret
It is possible the author ran his post through an SEO tool like Yoast. I know
we have that on our company blog (I didn't install it), and it is constantly
telling me to shorten my sentences for maximum SEO ranking. I usually ignore
it because by following its suggestions, it makes my writing read like a fifth
grade book report.

~~~
londons_explore
Short sentences help search engines 'understand' the text, because they can
easily parse each sentence to get direct meaning out of it. If your article
says 'Fire caused titanics sinking.", and someone searches Google for "Why did
titanic sink?", then Google can return that snippet of your article directly.
They can also look for similarities in meaning between your sentences and all
other sentences on the web to find contradictory information.

If you use long sentences with twists and turns and double negatives, it's
rare that such a direct match can be made to a search query, and your article
won't be returned.

------
nkg
Titanic 2: Backdraft.

