Hey yall

I have a question about the number of life boats. All I've read and heard is that so many deaths were caused from the lack of life boats. That if there were enough for everyone, more lives would have been saved. I've yet to see anyone mention the fact that even with the number of life boats they had on Titanic that night, they still couldnt load them all. My question is how could anyone figure that if there were more boats on board, more lives could have been saved if they couldnt even load the ones they had? Sure, more lives may have been saved, but by only a few. What do yall think?

Jessica

every lifeboat on the titanic was loaded they just weren't loaded to capacity There was 20 life boats on titanic 2 emergency 14 wooden and 4 collapsibleQuote: :pint: :hammer:

most of them werent even half full.

yeah i have a list of how many people were in each boat

that would be interesting :pint:

The lifeboats were always an interesting question. Andrews concerned about the lack of capacity went back to the drawing board and designed an improved boat davit that allowed each boat station to launch 3 to 4 lifeboats. Noone seemed certain afterward if the redesigned davits were actually installed or not but they are on the model of the ship in the White Star offices. The documentary I saw this on a few years back also covered the paper trail concerning the number of boats. There was a sincere push with Andrews leading it to put enough boats for everyone on the ship but red tape and desire not to 'clutter up' the boat deck seems to scuttled it.

The boats that went off half empty were really the fault of disorganization amoung the crew on the boat deck.
Could they have gotten everyone off if the improved davits and extra boats were there? Hard to say, they would certianly have saved many more. The improved davits operated by swinging back in to hook up another boat then swing out again. A time consuming process. They didn't have time to launch the collasable boats at the end (Lightoller's crew literaly had the boat they were working on float off with them as the ship sank) so I think all other things being the same they wouldn't have managed to get all the boats away. However if the crew had been better organized and practiced at boat drills they might have.

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i've seen that somewhere.

This is what I was thinking. Unless the crew had done some drills and been more organized and efficiant in loading and releasing the boats, more life boats wouldnt have made that much of a difference. Even if the crew could work faster, like you said, swinging the davits back and forth was time consuming and though they could have saved many more, they still wouldnt have been able to launch all the boats.

Jessica

they were supposed to have a boat drill that same day. thats why the boats werent filled all the way, some say. it was because they thought it was a drill.

I've heard two reasons for the half filled boats. One was that most of the passengers gathered on one side of the ship. The other side was almost empty and they had trouble finding people to put in the boats. Instead of trying to find more they just launched the boats as is. The other reason was some of the officers were afraid to load the boats to capacity fearing that they would overload them. I've never heard the boat drill theory before, it seems a little suspect to me since the collision occured late in the voyage.