Fire in boiler real reason for Titanic's sinking: Documentary

January 01, 2017 20:12

The real reason for Titanic's tragic sinking that claimed over 1,500 lives in 1912 was a fire in the ocean liner's boiler room and not simply a collision with a giant iceberg, a new documentary has claimed.

The Titanic's hull was fatally weakened by a fire that had been smouldering in the coal bunker in the boiler room since she left the shipyard in Belfast, Irish journalist and author Senan Molony has claimed in the documentary.

Photographs of the ship with a dark mark on her hull before she left Southampton -- at the same spot the iceberg struck -- support the theory, Molony, who has spent 30 years researching the disaster, was quoted as saying by The Times.

He claimed that J Bruce Ismay, president of the company that built the ship and the man forever branded a coward for taking one of the few lifeboat places, knew about the fire but downplayed its significance in the aftermath.

In Molony's documentary, 'Titanic: The New Evidence' to be broadcast on Channel 4, he suggests that the prolonged fire subjected the partitions, or bulkheads, in the hull to temperatures in excess of 1,000C, making the hull so weak and brittle that what should have been a minor collision became a catastrophe that killed more than 1,500 people.

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