Coal Fire
Ohio State University engineer Robert Essenhigh released a theory in November 2004 that claims a coal fire led indirectly to the iceberg collision. He claims a pile of stored coal had started to smoulder, to get control over that situation, more coal was put into the furnaces, leading to unsafe speeds in the iceberg-laden waters.
Essenhigh states that records prove that fire control teams were on standby at the ports of Cherbourg and Southampton because of a fire in the stockpile, and that such fires are known to reignite after they have been supposedly extinguished. He suggests that the Titanic actually set off from Southampton with one of its bunkers on fire, or that a spontaneous combustion of coal occurred after the ship left port. Such fires were a common phenomenon aboard coal-fired ships and one of many reasons why marine transportation switched to oil in the early 1900s. It is similarly theorised that such a bunker fire was responsible for the explosion of the USS Maine in 1898, by setting off her powder magazines.
Read more about this topic: RMS Titanic Alternative Theories
Famous quotes containing the words coal and/or fire:
“In those days, the blag slag, the waste of the coal pits, had only begun to cover the side of our hill. Not enough to mar the countryside nor blacken the beauty of our village. For the colliery had only begun to poke its skinny black fingers between the green.”
—Philip Dunne (1908–1992)
“For we are not pans and barrows, nor even porters of the fire and torch-bearers, but children of the fire, made of it, and only the same divinity transmuted, and at two or three removes, when we know least about it.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)