ROGER ANDERTON <r.j.ander...@btinternet.com> wrote: > Titanic sounds to me a conspiracy fact - it left port with a fire in its > coal bunker that could not be put out - that sounds to me that didn't want > the Titanic to survive the journey. > There were many coal bunker fires in the ships of that era. They never sank a ship as far as I know. Trying to sink a ship by that method would be incompetent. It would almost certainly fail. It would only work if you managed to arrange many other improbable events, such as sailors ignoring the fire -- something they never did. And making the fire undetectable, which is impossible, because bunkers were equipped with thermocouples, and bunkers were checked regularly, because everyone knew fires were common. Or making the fire impossible to put out, which it would not be. Or simultaneously inveigling the captain to go along with the conspiracy and ignore iceberg warnings. That would be impossible because it was impossible to know there would be icebergs, and without them, even a large fire would cause no harm. Also because the captain would never agree to such a thing.
It is also a conspiracy theory because you have no idea who might have arranged it; there is no solid evidence that it happened; and fires of this nature were common and caused by spontaneous combustion, so there is no reason to think anyone set it -- assuming there even was a fire. In short, this is a conspiracy theory. No written evidence, no known people involved, no motivation, and if the event occurred it is highly unlikely it would cause serious damage. A series of unfortunate events that happens - is usually arranged by > someone to happen. > Nope. Just about every major industrial accident in history, from the Titanic to Three Mile Island to Fukushima, was caused by a combination of unfortunate events. These systems have multiple fail-safe protection. One failure cannot destroy them. It takes multiple failures. One person -- or even a group of people -- could not arrange to have the right combination of failures because no one knows in advance what has to fail. For example, no one would deliberately add sulphur to the steel in the Titanic, because no one at that time knew what effect that would have, and no one would even know the sulphur was in the steel. Without the sulphur there would have been no tragedy. A person who surreptitiously arranged for sulphur would have no way of knowing the embrittling effects of extreme cold it has, and no way to influence the captain to ignore an iceberg warning years later. Most ships never struck an iceberg or anything else, so even if they had been brittle (without anyone knowing that fact), it would never have caused any harm. (Note that some of what I wrote here is not well documented. I know a thing or two about ships of that era because my father was a fireman on one, albeit with oil instead of coal. There were still many coal fired ships when he sailed.)
