Titanic: Destination Disaster

1. Titanic: Destination Disaster By: Katia Pfister The Titanic Leaving Queenstown http://www.titanic-facts.com/titanic-ship.html

2. The Make of the Titanic: • It was to be the most luxurious, fastest, and the largest ship afloat • Include many features such as a Turkish bath, swimming pool, squash court, grand stairway and much more • Its hull was divided into 16 watertight compartments designed to stay afloat • This is why the Titanic was thought to be unsinkable

3. The Make of the Titanic Cont. • She was nearly 900 feet long • Stood 25 stories high • Weighed over 46,000 tons • Had turn of the century design and technology

4. The Titanic first set sail on April 10, 1912 April 14, the Titanic collided with a massive iceberg and sank in less than 3 hours. Damaging nearly 300 feet of the ship’s hull which allowed the water to flood 6 of her 16 major watertight compartments More than 2,200 passengers and crews were aboard 705 survived Passengers boarding the Titanic

5. Lifeboats • Lifeboat 7 with 28 people on board out of a capacity of 65 • Lifeboat 6 and lifeboat 5 minutes later were launched • Lifeboat 1 with 12 people • Lifeboat 11 overloaded with 70 people • Titanic carried total of 20 lifeboats with a capacity of 1,178 • At the time, the number of lifeboats required was determined by a ship’s gross register tonnage, rather than her human capacity

6. Total Deaths and Survivals http://www.ithaca.edu/staff/jhenderson/titanic.html

7. Passengers by Class http://www.ithaca.edu/staff/jhenderson/titanic.html

8. Titanic Passengers by Class http://www.titanicuniverse.com/titanic-survivors

9. 1st and 2nd Class Treatment: 3rd Class Treatment: • Better able to acquire safety information and privileges from the crew during intervening hours • Had accommodations closer to the deck and were able to get there more quickly • All children from the 1st and 2nd class survived • Were not allowed in on the boat deck until only a few boats remained • They were housed in a lower area of the ship called steerage • Only 34% of the children in 3rd class survived

10. Titanic Facts: Lifeboats • Titanic was supplied with only enough life boats to accommodate about half of its max. number of passengers • Some of the lifeboats lowered into the water were only half full • A few of the lifeboats drifted off to see before they were properly deployed

11. Why the lifeboats were somewhat filled? • Captain Smith, not trusting the davits to handle the weight of a fully laden boat, wanted them lowered only partially filled, but them to return to the ship to embark more passengers through a large access port on a lower deck • However, these instructions were either misunderstood or disregarded, because the boats did not stand by the ship • Many passengers were unaware that the ship was sinking until the last moment which is why many felt safer on the titanic than in a lifeboat

12. The Sinking: • Titanic struck an iceberg in the Atlantic ocean near the coast of Newfoundland shortly before midnight April 14, 1912 • Impact with the iceberg caused the hull to buckle and the vessel began taking on water • Neighboring ships in the area had reported ice floes, but the Titanic continued to travel at top speep • The band really did keep playing as the ship was sinking

13. Other Information • People aged 16 and 35 were the most likely to live- suggesting physical fitness was critical • Women aged 16 to 35 were more likely to live than other age groups, as were children and the people with the children • The passengers held to the rule of “women and children first”- meaning they were to be on lifeboats before the men

14. The Titanic Casualty Figures • If you were a man, you were out of luck • The overall survival rate for men was 20% • For women, it was 74%, and for children it was 52% • 3rd class women were 41% more likely to survive than 1st class men • 3rd class men were twice as likely to survive as second class men

15. Misconceptions • The Titanic may not have sunk if the captain and the White Star Line chairman had decided to stay put after the ship hit the iceberg and wait for rescue • According to crew members, the chairman was anxious to get the ship to New York and prove the Titanic was unsinkable • The forward motion of the boat caused further extra damage which increased flooding, and the pumps could not handle that much water

16. http://www.anesi.com/titanic.htm

17. http://www.anesi.com/titanic.htm

18. http://www.anesi.com/titanic.htm

19. http://www.anesi.com/titanic.htm

20. Titanic as a Social Disaster The difference between who lived and died was not in the time the ship sank, but rather the notice of their impending doom that the passengers had. On Titanic, many people thought the sinking was a joke and that the Titanic could not sink. After all, the ship was deemed unsinkable and only hit a little ice. They expected the life boats to come back after a short time which is why many of the ones first launched were partially full. The Titanic stayed afloat for 2 hr. 40 min, and human behavior differed accordingly. On the slowly sinking Titanic, there was time for socially determined behavioral patterns to reemerge." On the Titanic, the rules concerning gender, class and the gentle treatment of children — in other words, good manners — had a chance to assert themselves.

21. Titanic Disaster is a Social Disaster? What mattered when trying to survived the Titanic: gender, age, ticket class, nationality and familial relationships with other passengers The Titanic, where social norms seem to have prevailed and women and children had a better chance of surviving. More than 1,5000 people had died when the Titanic struck an iceberg and sank over the course of 3 hours in the freezing waters of the North Atlantic. Children aboard the Titanic were about 15% more likely to survive than adults and women had more than 50% better chance than men to make it out alive. Therefore: read the last slide

22. Cont. Therefore with the Titanic sinking so slowly… social norms reemerged: not only did women and children fare better, but upper class people were more likely to survive. Leadership played a large role during this disaster. The Titanic crew were more successful in maintaining order. They did this by following the “rule of thumb” women and children get out first. People might be in a state of panic but if they are reassured there is a system in place, they might be more likely to go along with the plan.