Farewell, Titanic by Charles Pellegrino

Author:Charles Pellegrino
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781118191293
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Published: 2012-01-10T16:00:00+00:00

SEPTEMBER 19, 2001

RUSSIAN RESEARCH VESSEL KELDYSH

120 MILES FROM THE TITANIC

We received a drawing by fax from my daughter Amber's second-grade class at P.S. 26 in Queens. At a memorial service in the school auditorium, the children's chorus had chosen the song “My Heart Will Go On” from the film Titanic. How does one get the thought out of one's head of children singing that theme, for parents lost?

SEPTEMBER 21, 2001

RUSSIAN RESEARCH VESSEL KELDYSH

Jim Cameron discovered what is presently the only large piece of debris found forward of the bow section: the steel hatch cover that once stood on the forecastle, capping the number 1 cargo hold. He found it lying upside down, about seventy meters directly in front of the Titanic's prow, with a V-shaped whack, or pucker, on one side.

The well-deck cranes and the pressed-back foremast were completely undamaged by blunt-force impacts, which meant that the steel lid had not lifted off near the surface and banged around the well deck during descent—which in turn meant that the same bending and compression of the bow section that blew down all of the steel-bolted tables in the firemen's mess and recreation room, all in the same direction, had popped the hatch like a cork during that same small fraction of a second. Flying straight up, the hatch cover could not have traveled very far, not much more than about ten feet before, almost instantly, the column collapse and the down-blast impacted the center of the bow and struck out laterally.

What began, ever so briefly, as a vertical ascent of the hatch cover would have been converted immediately into lateral motion as the cargo hatch, along with hundreds of floor tiles and personal items jetting out of the upper deck windows and trailing down in the slipstream, became part of a radial surge cloud. The single, V-shaped dent in the hatch cover was consistent with the diameter of the vertical steel post that supported the anchor crane on the tip of the bow, suggesting that the hatch collided with the post on the ship's prow, then continued straight ahead for nearly three hundred feet.

The strange journey of the number 1 cargo hatch cover conveyed some sense of the volcano physics we were beginning to explore. Yet the crash of the Titanic's bow on the bed of the Atlantic, I reminded myself, involved only a fraction of the forces waiting to be studied in New York.

Ken Marschall's mapping of the buckling points near and around the bend of the well deck revealed that the rows of steel plates tended to ripple and warp, shattering only at the points where the aftermost part of the bow section tried to telescope forward under the well deck. At the very end of the bow section, where the decks had been stacked on one another by the down-blast, the starboard and port sides rippled outward more like thick slabs of rubber than like steel.

The stern deep-hammered itself into the earth at even greater velocity; there, just

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