IELTS JOURNAL 149 people. At design meetings in 1910, the shipyard’s managing director, Alexander
Carlisle, had proposed that forty eight lifeboats be installed on the Titanic, but
the idea had been quickly rejected as too expensive. Discussion then turned to
the ship’s décor, and as Carlisle later described the incident … ’we spent two
hours discussing carpet for the first class cabins and fifteen minutes discussing
lifeboats’.
H The belief that the Titanic was unsinkable was so strong that passengers and
crew alike clung to the belief even as she was actually sinking. This attitude was
not helped by Captain Smith, who had not acquainted his senior officers with
the full situation. For the first hour after the collision, the majority of people
aboard the Titanic, including senior crew, were not aware that she would sink,
that there were insufficient lifeboats or that the nearest ship responding to the
Titanic’s distress calls would arrive two hours after she was on the bottom of the
ocean. As a result, the officers in charge of loading the boats received a very
halfhearted response to their early calls for women and children to board the
lifeboats. People felt that they would be safer, and certainly warmer, aboard the
Titanic than perched in a little boat in the North Atlantic Ocean. Not realizing
the magnitude of the impending disaster themselves, the officers allowed
several boats to be lowered only half full.
I Procedures again were at fault, as an additional reason for the officers’
reluctance to lower the lifeboats at full capacity was that they feared the
lifeboats would buckle under the weight of 65 people. They had not been
informed that the lifeboats had been fully tested prior to departure. Such
procedures as assigning passengers and crew to lifeboats and lifeboat loading
drills were simply not part of the standard operation of ships nor were they
included in crew training at this time.
J As the Titanic sank, another ship, believed to have been the Californian, was
seen motionless less than twenty miles away. The ship failed to respond to the
Titanic’s eight distress rockets. Although the officers of the Californian tried to
signal the Titanic with their flashing Morse lamp, they did not wake up their
radio operator to listen for a distress call. At this time, communication at sea
through wireless was new and the benefits not well appreciated, so the wireless
on ships was often not operated around the clock. In the case of the Californian,
the wireless operator slept unaware while 1,500 Titanic passengers and crew
drowned only a few miles away.
K After the Titanic sank, investigations were held in both Washington and London.
In the end, both inquiries decided that no one could be blamed for the sinking.
However, they did address the fundamental safety issues which had contributed