In this blog post, we will look back at the cause of the Titanic sinking and the impact of the tragedy on the development of marine safety technology.
Did you know that thousands of people who embarked on a dreamlike journey on the Titanic, the world’s most beautiful luxury cruise ship, lost their lives in an instant accident? The tragedy became even more famous thanks to the movie “Titanic,” which was made based on this incident. The Titanic was a super-luxury passenger ship built with the best technology and materials of its time in 1912, and was called the “dream ship” by people at the time. For Europe’s wealthy and adventurous, America was a land of new opportunities, and the Titanic was more than just a mode of transportation, it was a symbol of status and wealth. Thousands of passengers on board the Titanic expected a comfortable journey with the finest services and facilities as they crossed the Atlantic, but their dreams were shattered in an instant.
As you can see from the movie, only 710 of the 3,327 people on board the Titanic survived. The reason for the large number of casualties was that the Titanic’s lifeboats were insufficient, allowing only one-third of the passengers to escape in the lifeboats, and the ship sank too quickly due to the weak watertight bulkhead system that prevented the ship from taking on water. If the Titanic had more lifeboats, or if the Titanic had stayed afloat a little longer, more people could have survived, and the beautiful love story of the protagonists in the midst of the tragedy could have been preserved.
So why did the Titanic, despite being a super-luxury liner that used the most advanced technology of the time, go down so miserably? First, the regulations at the time were lax, allowing the Titanic to operate even though the number of lifeboats was too small. Second, the flooding in the actual incident was more severe than the waterproof bulkhead system was designed to withstand. Because maritime safety regulations in the early 20th century did not strictly regulate the number of lifeboats in proportion to the number of passengers on board, the crew and passengers, who were confident in the safety of the ship, were also unprepared for the situation of insufficient lifeboats.
However, the sinking of the Titanic led to a major change in maritime safety standards. Now, the law has been revised to require that the number of lifeboats be equipped to match the number of passengers on a passenger ship in order for it to function as a passenger ship. The design of the watertight bulkhead system and drainage system has also been strengthened. However, no matter how solidly a watertight bulkhead system is designed, it cannot completely eliminate the risk of sinking. This is because humans cannot predict nature. No matter how robustly a ship is designed, no one can know what strong natural phenomena it will encounter.
So engineers have developed this into a field of engineering, trying to prepare for risks through quantitative prediction with the utmost effort that humans can make. This risk prediction technique is called Formal Safety Assessment (FSA). FSA is a technique that quantitatively calculates the risk level of an incident using probability. Let’s take the Titanic incident as an example. First, the probability that the Titanic will hit an iceberg and damage part of the ship is P1. Then, the probability that the watertight bulkhead system will not stop the water from entering the ship due to the damage is P2. In this way, the probability that the water that has entered will damage the electrical, power, and engine systems inside the ship can also be determined. However, not all probabilities have the same impact. For example, the probability of a ship encountering an iceberg and being damaged is very low, but the impact of damage caused by an iceberg on sinking is very high.
In this way, FSA helps you analyze potential risk factors in advance and set practical priorities for problem solving. Let’s call the risk level of each incident S and assign a risk level to each of them. For example, if the probability of P1 is S1, you can calculate the risk level of the total incidents, which is called “risk” in the FSA technique and is expressed as follows.
Risk = Pn x Sn
(n is the number of cases, n=1,2,3…)
Through FSA, we can quantitatively calculate various dangerous cases, from the Titanic encountering an iceberg and suffering damage to the ship, to sinking and causing numerous casualties. By sorting the risks in order of magnitude, we can prioritize and design which systems to strengthen. For example, the probability of a ship encountering an iceberg and being damaged, like the Titanic, is low, but even if the probability of damage to the watertight bulkhead system is low, the risk is very high if it is damaged, so the risk is at the top of the list. Therefore, we can conclude that the watertight bulkhead system should be strengthened just in case.
If FSA techniques had been used in the design of the Titanic, the ship would have been more robust. If the watertight bulkhead system had been stronger and the ship had sunk more slowly, many more people would have survived. However, FSA techniques are inherently probabilistic, and it is impossible to predict with 100% accuracy. Probability is basically the number of uncertainties that cannot be predicted when a coin is thrown, such as whether the coin will come up heads or tails. Therefore, even now, safety engineers around the world are developing ways to reduce the errors that probability inevitably entails when calculating each risk to improve the accuracy of the FSA.
