The Lifeboats on the Titanic.

One of the most famous set of celebrated Lifeboats in the world has to be those on the Titanic. The main reason they are famous is that there was simply not enough of them. The Titanic’s sinking is a catalogue of errors and missed opportunities coupled with the typical hubris of the owners and the senior staff. One thing that wasn’t wrong with the lifeboats was the fact that they used a Davit Crane system to lower the boats into the water. These were based on two radial arms and allowed the boats to be gently lowered into the water. The only problem with this was that the staff on the Titanic were not suitably training in how to use them or what their suitable capacity was. Such an issue will not occur if you need a modern Davit Crane such as the ones available from https://www.gmh.co.uk/transition-piece-davit-cranes/.

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As we all know RMS Titanic hit an Iceberg on its maiden Voyage and promptly sank. The reason we focus on it is that it was specifically designed to be able to resist such accidents and was even termed “unsinkable”. But, in a classic example of “Why worry about something that isn’t going to happen”, and therefore do nothing about it, whilst attempting to break the Atlantic crossing record the Captain of the Titanic ignored the warnings of Icebergs ahead and decided against slowing down and being cautious. He ordered them to plough on.

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As bad luck would have it the Titanic scraped along an iceberg which it had narrowly avoiding hitting head on (which some have speculated would have been better as all that would have happened was that the prow would have been severely damaged). This ripped a huge gash below the water line opening up all the bulkhead compartments letting all the water in.

The crew began to evacuate the ship, in something of a sense of disbelief. The law of Women and children first was observed but the rule of social class was of course in effect, and this rule only seems to relate to the children of those in first and second class with a reported 66% of those in third class dying. It is also interesting to note that more men survived than woman and a good part of that were from the crew. Even if they had filled all the lifeboats that they had that night they would have still only got just over half the people on the boat off it. There was plenty of space for more and they were not expensive. The lack of lifeboats has been attributed to the substandard rules for maritime safety at the time and also because White Star company could plainly not be bothered.