The Titanic goes down in about 20 minutes, 100 years ago...

[Liberal In Texas]

4. The lifeboat regs hadn't been changed since 1894.

At that time the regs were based on a ship of 10,000 tons. The biggest ship in 1894 was half that size. Titanic was over 46,000 tons. The regs were never updated, and there was no provision to increase the number of lifeboats in proportion to increased weight.

Ironically, Alexander Carlisle the ship's original designer had proposed 64 boats (enough for every person on the ship), then cut that to 32 and davits to accommodate them. White Star's Ismay cut that to 16 wooden boats and 4 emergency collapsible lifeboats, which exceeded the Board of Trade law. (Data from: 1912 Facts About Titanic, Revised Edition 2003 by Lee W. Merideth)

The lack of oversight by the Board of Trade, in the words of Sir Alfred Chalmers of the Board he rationalized:

I considered the matter very closely from time to time...I found it was the safest mode of travel in the world, and I thought it was neither right nor the duty of a State Department to impose regulations upon that mode of travel as long as the record was a clean one...as ships grew bigger, there were such improvements made in their construction that they were stronger and better ships...that that was the road along which the shipowners were going to travel, and that they should not be interfered with...the voluntary action of the owners was carrying them beyond the requirements of our scale, and when voluntary action on the part of shipowners is doing that, I think that any State Department should hold its hand before it steps in to make a hard-and-fast scale for that particular type of shipping. http://www.encyclopedia-titanica.org/item/4865/

This is very much like the arguments we hear today. That regulation should be relaxed or abolished. That private enterprise will regulate itself.

Clearly, with over 1500 people dead, that did not work. Again, this is a classic cautionary tale I like to use in arguments with righties when they bring up the self-regulation meme.


Survivors aboard one of the
collapsible lifeboats.
(Note the canvass sides.)