The titanic was the largest ship in the world when it set sail from Southampton to New York in 1912 and was designed in such a way that it was meant to be ‘unsinkable’. More than 1,500 people died when the ship, which was carrying 2,224 passengers and crew, sank in the Northern Atlantic Ocean on April 15, 1912 after colliding with an iceberg during her maiden voyage.
The ship’s excessive speed didn’t give the crew much time to avoid the iceberg. According to published records, the crew was getting radio reports of icebergs from other ships. Then, why was the ship picking up speed through dangerous icy water and barreling head-first into an ice field, despite warnings to slow down? Why did the unsinkable ship sink so suddenly?
More than a century on from its fateful voyage, experts are still discovering more about what happened on board the Titanic. Journalist Senan Molony, who has spent more than 30 years researching the sinking of the Titanic, published new evidence that the sinking of the Titanic may have been caused by an enormous fire on board, not only by hitting an iceberg. He presented his research in a Channel 4 documentary entitled: Titanic: The New Evidence, screened on New Year’s Day in the U.K.
Molony studied rarely seen photographs taken by the ship’s chief electrical engineers before it left Belfast shipyard. Mr. Molony said he was able to identify 30-foot-long black marks along the front right-hand side of the hull, just behind where the ship’s lining was pierced by the iceberg. He claimed that the sinking of the Titanic may have been caused by an enormous fire on board. Experts subsequently confirmed the marks were likely to have been caused by a fire started in a three-story high fuel store behind one of the ship’s boiler rooms.
(To be continued) (Floro Mercene)