Titanic Fact 15: Reponse
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| Titanic's crows nest |
The crew members only had about 37 seconds to respond after seeing the iceberg. The ship was ordered to try and go around it. The iceberg then hits Titanic along the starboard side. If the ship was going a knot slower or if crew members had seen the iceberg a few moments sooner, the ship could have missed the iceberg. The night Titanic hit the iceberg, the crew didn't have binoculars and it was a moonless night.
A few more facts regarding the time between spotting the berg and hitting it:
ReplyDelete1) They were actually about a minute out from the berg when it was first spotted.
2) Murdock waited about 30 seconds before giving any orders. If they were going to barely miss it turning away actually would have pulled the berg into them where as maintaining heading would have been the better option. On a different ship Murdoch was faced with a similar decision and decided to maintain heading and avoided colliding with another ship because of this.
3) Murdoch wasn't actually supposed to be on the Titanic. The captain wanted him on the ship as 1st officer and demoted a few officers to get him on board. Instead of demoting every officer one was relieved of duty. That officer just happened to have the keys to the cabinet with the binoculars on him and left the Titanic in a hurry because he was so upset. When he left he still had the keys on him.
4) The binoculars wouldn't have been used to spot obstacles. The lookouts would scan the horizon with just their eyes. When they spotted an obstacle they would take out the binoculars to determine if the obstacle was directly in their path or not. This could have allowed Murdoch to make a faster decision.