[HN Gopher] "Titanic" Disaster: Report of the Committee on Comme...
___________________________________________________________________
"Titanic" Disaster: Report of the Committee on Commerce, US Senate
(1918) [pdf]
Author : miobrien
Score : 79 points
Date : 2022-09-17 12:29 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.senate.gov)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.senate.gov)
| toinewx wrote:
| the report says
|
| - the titanic did not beak in two parts
|
| - there was no substantial suction
|
| So the movie is inaccurate
| Comevius wrote:
| Some passengers got this wrong, but the Titanic did broke in
| two. It's hull girder couldn't tolerate much bending, as the
| water filled the front of the ship, it started to break after
| the stern was up 15 degrees. One passenger claims that he even
| heard when it first snapped. Many witnessed the ship breaking
| in two and sinking. Later we found the wreckage that also
| confirmed it.
| adamj9431 wrote:
| The movie is right. Some survivors said it broke in half, many
| didn't. It was thought it went down in one piece until the
| shipwreck was discovered in the 1980s.
| scoopertrooper wrote:
| If so, then the video footage of the Titanic in two pieces on
| the ocean floor must also be inaccurate.
| itcrowd wrote:
| My little trivia for the Titanic has always been that Violet
| Jessop was on board, surviving three accidents from sister ships:
| Titanic, Olympic and Brittanic!
|
| Go read the wiki, it's amazing:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violet_Jessop
| russfink wrote:
| The sister ship, Olympic, was refitted after the accident and had
| a long career to 1935. It had its own set of illustrious fatal
| incidents. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Olympic
| akvadrako wrote:
| There is a new podcast _Did Titanic Sink_ that suggests it was
| actually the Olympic that sunk instead of the Titanic and the
| ships were switched for insurance fraud reasons.
|
| https://www.rnz.co.nz/programmes/did-titanic-sink
| hef19898 wrote:
| That cinsiracy theory is as old as the Titanic. Besides
| involving the intentional killing of hundreds if people, it
| never made sense for a ton of reasons. It was alos debunked
| hundrds if times by now...
| haunter wrote:
| I actually like the recommendations parts and already talks about
| encryption!
|
| >The committee finds that this catastrophe makes glaringly
| apparent the necessity for regulation of radiotelegraphy. There
| must be an operator on duty at all times, day and night, to
| insure the immediate receipt of all distress, warning, or other
| important calls. Direct communication either by clear-speaking
| telephone, voice tube, or messenger must be provided between the
| wireless room and the bridge, so that the operator does not have
| to leave his station. There must be definite legislation to
| prevent interference by amateurs, and to secure secrecy of
| radiograms or wireless messages. There must be some source of
| auxiliary power, either storage battery or oil engine, to insure
| the operation of the wireless installation until the wireless
| room is submerged.
|
| Also the HTML version is here
| https://www.titanicinquiry.org/USInq/USReport/AmInqRep01.php
| londons_explore wrote:
| Nearly all those recommendations have effectively been
| implemented in modern boats... Not sure if the law requires it,
| or boat designers just see it as a sensible design.
|
| Quite impressive for someone to read an incident report and
| actually implement the recommendations - so often they sit in a
| filing cabinet forever.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| > Quite impressive for someone to read an incident report and
| actually implement the recommendations - so often they sit in
| a filing cabinet forever.
|
| That's not really true. There is a saying when it comes to
| transportation regulations, "Safety regulations are written
| in blood." That is, nearly all safety regulations are the
| result of analysis after a tragic accident.
| londons_explore wrote:
| Oh yes, but nearly all accident reports make perhaps 30
| recommendations, any one of which would probably have
| averted the disaster that just happened, of which only
| perhaps 3 are implemented. The other 27 usually get skipped
| because they're too costly/politically unpopular/no longer
| seem important after some other changes have been made to
| prevent reoccurance.
| frutiger wrote:
| Genuine question, as I have no domain knowledge: is it
| usual that 10% of recommendations are adopted and 90% are
| ignored?
| [deleted]
| londons_explore wrote:
| I have no maritime knowledge, but I do handle a lot of
| incident reports. Yes, it's common for there to be 30
| recommendations and 3 get fully implemented. Perhaps a
| few more get part implemented or people talk about doing
| them and it goes nowhere.
| kevincox wrote:
| Based on my work in software systems yes.
|
| Generally when I write a postmortem there is a long list
| of modifications that could solve the problem. However
| they all have different costs, different effectiveness,
| different specificity and may overlap in different ways.
| This means that the high-cost, highly-specific
| modification may not be worth implementing when a lower
| cost and very broad modification can cover that same
| class of problems (even if not quite as effectively).
|
| As an example you may have two recommendations:
|
| 1. Queue the requests and add many retries so that if a
| problem occurs in the future the requests are not lost
| and the problem can be fixed or allowed to resolve
| itself.
|
| 2. Add a second implementation of the process using
| different technologies and dependencies and fail over to
| it if the first implementation fails.
|
| If this specific type of request is not very latency
| sensitive 2 is likely not worth it even though it is an
| improvement over just doing 1. 2 might be the better
| solution as well however 1 would greatly mitigate not
| only the specific request that had a problem this time
| but all similar requests in the system so 1 is good to do
| even if 2 is done for the other types of request.
|
| In the end I would say that both are good recommendations
| however the logical business choice is just to do 1.
| [deleted]
| nostrademons wrote:
| That's probably how it should be. Every regulation has a
| cost. If you want to manage that cost efficiently, you
| should look at the set of recommendations as a portfolio,
| compare across multiple accidents, and implement the most
| cost-effective recommendations that will prevent the most
| accidents.
| tialaramex wrote:
| SOLAS. International maritime law requires a _lot_ of stuff
| to ensure the Safety Of Life At Sea. SOLAS is initially a
| treaty which happens because of Titanic, but was updated
| repeatedly and eventually moved to a model where the safety
| rules change and you either keep up or you need to explicitly
| say "Nope, our country hates safety now". Unsurprisingly
| nowhere civilised wants to do that.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOLAS_Convention
|
| SOLAS doesn't make a lot of requirements of recreational
| vessels but in practice you'll have a Digital Selective
| Calling VHF radio much like SOLAS requires a container ship
| to have, because either local laws require it or just it was
| really annoying without it as you can't talk to anybody. DSC
| has automated Mayday. So it's practical to teach children how
| to activate it at about the same age you teach them to make a
| 911/ 112/ whatever phone call. The radio will make Mayday
| radio calls, automatically giving its location (unless it
| doesn't know) and its identity, and explaining that there's a
| problem, but it doesn't know what the problem is. Somebody
| will come investigate, because SOLAS _also_ made explicit
| what is obvious to most mariners, that you should always come
| help people. The ocean will definitely kill us if it gets a
| chance, so by the Golden Rule we should all pitch in to save
| others.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_selective_calling
|
| SOLAS also requires float-release EPIRBS which are beacons
| that a COSPAS/SARSAT satellite can see from space, and again
| transmit their identity, so a shore-based emergency response
| co-ordinator can see e.g. this beacon is registered to a
| medium sized power yacht named "Example", we don't know
| what's wrong with it, but its beacon is activated, so either
| it sank or its in trouble and the beacon was activated
| manually (or somebody fucked up). The owner's satellite phone
| doesn't answer, he gives a home number, his wife answered and
| said he's fishing with two friends, due back this evening.
| hef19898 wrote:
| In aviation and maritime transport the implementation of
| those recommendations and findings are the reason they are
| among the safest means if transport.
| InCityDreams wrote:
| In moder boats, maybe. In modern life? Not so much >There
| must be definite legislation to prevent interference by
| amateurs, and to secure secrecy of radiograms or wireless
| messages.
|
| Update that to 'the interwebs', and we are [still] sadly
| lacking.
|
| /!totc
| United857 wrote:
| IMO we've done a good job of securing the transport layer,
| most attacks these days are exploiting data at rest on the
| client or server.
| dwheeler wrote:
| What I especially appreciate are the recommendations at the end.
| The Titanic was a disaster, but the good news is that it was
| carefully analyzed and changes were made to greatly reduce the
| impacts of problems in the future. For example, laws were changed
| changed so that there had to be enough lifeboats for everybody on
| the ship.
|
| Currently software developers are often not learning from
| previous security disasters. I hope that will change in the
| future. There are already efforts to start writing up about
| important problems, and that will be a start.
| akira2501 wrote:
| > Currently software developers are often not learning from
| previous security disasters. I hope that will change in the
| future.
|
| Current security disasters are typically exclusively financial
| or social and don't involve the death of those impacted. So, in
| a certain sense, I hope this doesn't change in the future.
| mgkimsal wrote:
| > Currently software developers are often not learning from
| previous security disasters.
|
| Perhaps some developers aren't, but many are. It may also be
| that their recommendations or efforts are ignored or overruled
| ("that'll make things too slow/costly/etc").
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Most importantly, Titanic-like disasters involving numerous
| losses of life generally prompt regulation or lawsuits at the
| very least. There is a significant financial incentive not to
| let accidents happen.
|
| Data breaches or misuse of personal data is not punished (at
| least not in the US), neither by the government nor by the
| market. There is no financial incentive there.
| InCityDreams wrote:
| There is a significant financial incentive not to let
| [cost-ineffective] accidents happen.
| vegetablepotpie wrote:
| The regulation to have life boats for all was the trigger for
| the capsizing of the Eastland in 1915. The addition of
| lifeboats cased the ship to be too top heavy and it flipped
| over while boarding. This killed 844 passengers, more than the
| passengers killed on the Titanic [1].
|
| While it's important to have backups in failure cases. It's
| important to also consider the impact backups have in
| contributing to other failure cases.
|
| Another example, people often wonder why airlines do not equip
| passengers with parachutes in the case of a crash. The answer
| is that people do not know how to use them, and would likely
| injure or kill themselves. Furthermore, they wouldn't help in
| the period of flight where accidents are most likely to happen,
| which is take off and landing [2].
|
| Disasters are a systems problem. And when looking to mitigate,
| we need to consider the efficacy of the mitigation and the
| total influence of mitigation's on contributing to the
| likelihood of other failure cases.
|
| [1] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/eastland-disaster-
| kil...
|
| [2] https://simpleflying.com/commercial-planes-parachutes/
| NoSorryCannot wrote:
| More than 1500 people died when Titanic sank.
| tialaramex wrote:
| Lifeboats in particular were probably the wrong fix, not
| because of Eastland, which was just an unsafe ship and would
| doubtless have found some other excuse to kill everybody, but
| because lifeboat maintenance and testing causes injuries and
| occasionally deaths, while in the modern era the need to
| evacuate passengers to lifeboats grows smaller.
|
| I think MAIB (the Marine [edited: this said Maritime but
| that's wrong] Accident Investigation Branch, a UK government
| agency) wrote a report about this at one point. In coastal
| waters particularly the ship's master is realistically never
| going to encounter a situation where abandoning to lifeboats
| is the right choice. Fire is the most likely reason to
| consider it, but modern vessels _should_ be able to contain
| plausible fires well enough to reach safety, even if as a
| result the ship is damaged beyond economic repair. Just
| loading the passengers into lifeboats and putting the
| lifeboats into the sea is a pretty fraught endeavour, you
| will probably injure either a passenger or crew member doing
| it - and that 's before any risk from being in a tiny boat
| out at sea.
| WastingMyTime89 wrote:
| Blaming the new regulation for The Eastland capsizing is
| verging on dishonesty. The boat was poorly designed and had
| already nearly cap sized in 1904 and 1906. It was bought for
| a bargain in 1914 because it was known to be unsafe. The
| addition of the new six lifeboats was only one modification
| amongst many which were done without due care and merely the
| straw that broke the camel back.
| arbuge wrote:
| Page 3 states that the cost of the Titanic, "fully equipped", was
| 1.5m pounds sterling.
|
| According to:
|
| https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/monetary-policy/inflation/in...
|
| this equates to around 120m pounds sterling today.
|
| It seems to me that there's no way you could construct anything
| like her for that amount of money today. I wonder what gives.
| PKop wrote:
| Possibly the true rate of inflation is under-reported
| retcore wrote:
| In the nineties the UK basket of consumer goods used to
| calculate inflation suddenly included a well specified PC.
|
| Not only was this PC a vastly disproportionate weight in the
| new calculation of deemed essential domestic goods, but
| strangely the specification never was upgraded and so the
| effect on calculated inflation was strongly negative.
|
| Consider this was masking inflationary signals for well over
| a decade before ZIRP took over the economy...
| dboreham wrote:
| Inflation isn't a scalar.
| mwint wrote:
| Can you elaborate? I'm intrigued, always thought of it as a
| scalar
| tzs wrote:
| Different things have different price changes over time.
|
| For example, in 1973 a 2N2222 transistor was $0.79 at Radio
| Shack.
|
| Today, a single 2N2222 is $1.29 at Jameco. It's $0.95 at
| AmplifiedParts.com. It's $7 for 100 of them at Amazon.
|
| If we go by the price of 2N2222 transistors and use the
| price for single units at Jameco we get inflation of 1% per
| year over the last 50 years.
|
| In 1977 the price of volume I of Apostol's "Calculus" in
| hardback was around $20. Now it is $153 on Amazon, for the
| same book. By "same book" I don't just mean hardback. I
| also mean the same content. It was on the 2nd edition in
| 1977 and Apostol saw no need for any further revisions.
|
| Using Apostol volume I as our yardstick inflation has been
| 4.6% per year over the last 45 years.
|
| The most complete way to represent inflation would be as a
| vector whose components are the inflation for each
| individual good or service.
|
| To get a scalar for inflation they take another vector that
| represents how much of each good or service that some
| hypothetical typical consumer consumes and combine them to
| get what the overall inflation is for a typical consumer.
| dylan604 wrote:
| I've never looked into how the pastDate -> currentDate
| valuations are calculated. I've seen things like "adjusted for
| inflation" type notes, but is that just for the single number
| of the total? Do the adjustments take into consideration how
| much extra labor costs now vs then? Do the adjustments consider
| raw material price increases, etc?
| cardiffspaceman wrote:
| You can look up the Wikipedia article on almost any
| comparable ship and see how much it cost to build. I have
| done that for several examples, and I would guess that a
| passenger ship compliant with all current regs and standards
| and carrying ca. 3500 guests would cost ca. USD$1 billion. So
| that's roughly the adjustment for inflation. Also adjustment
| for the new regs and updated regs since Titanic.
| dylan604 wrote:
| $1B USD is a long way off from the PS1.2m -> PS120m I
| replied to though. That 1.2->120 just seemed way too low
| which is why I asked.
| iggldiggl wrote:
| My regular go-to for getting a feeling for the value of old GBP
| and USD prices is measuringworth.com, which gives a range of
| values based on not just the regular consumer price index-based
| inflation, but also some additional indices, like the evolution
| of wages and GDP. As measured by the latter two, the cost of
| the Titanic might have been rather more like somewhere between
| 600 to 1,500 million pounds:
|
| https://www.measuringworth.com/calculators/ukcompare/relativ...
|
| (Edit: Somewhat funnily, it seems one of the help pages on
| measuringworth.com actually uses the example of the Titanic:
| https://www.measuringworth.com/tutorial4.php)
| jessewmc wrote:
| Actually I bet you wouldn't be too far off. Random googling
| seems to suggest that the average cruise ship today is under $1
| billion: https://gangwaze.com/blog/how-much-does-a-cruise-ship-
| cost
|
| These are _much_ bigger ships than the Titanic, and with much
| more sophistication, complexity, luxury, etc.
|
| If ships were still as simple today as the Titanic was I
| imagine 120m pounds would actually be pretty close.
| profile53 wrote:
| Labor laws, mostly.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| like how if someone looses a hand in your factory, they get
| compensation?
| profile53 wrote:
| Yeah, or the fact that hard hats are required, people are
| required to be paid more than 50 cents an hour, you can't
| force 1 employee to work 80 hours a week continuously, etc.
| All of that adds to costs. For good reason, don't get me
| wrong, but the cost of labor in the western world has
| exploded over the last 100 years.
| billfor wrote:
| "Woman and children first", but especially first class :-)
| thamer wrote:
| The report mentions the ship making a C.Q.D. call, which I wasn't
| familiar with.
|
| The name comes from the earlier telegraph "CQ" call for alerts,
| named after the French word "securite", abbreviated as "secu"
| which is how the letters C and Q are pronounced in French. "D" is
| added to indicate distress. Sending a CQD call means sending the
| letters C,Q,D in Morse code; this practice was later supplanted
| by SOS.
|
| Wikipedia has a page with more information:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CQD. It mentions the Titanic
| disaster: "Harold Bride, the junior radio operator, suggested
| using SOS, saying half-jokingly that it might be his last chance
| to use the new code."
| varenc wrote:
| You can find the full report, along with the appendices with the
| list of crew and passengers, here:
| https://books.google.com/books?id=twnY7_eFDuQC&pg=PA7287&lpg...
|
| The tables are also more nicely formatted in this version. And
| Google has kindly performed OCR as well.
|
| You can download a PDF of the entire 1912 congressional record,
| of which report is a small part, here:
| https://books.google.com/books/download/Congressional_Record...
| jasonhansel wrote:
| A classic case of correlated failures. If you have multiple
| redundant systems, but anything that damages one system is _also_
| likely going to damage others, then a failure is much more
| probable than you would expect based on the level of redundancy.
|
| In this case the redundant systems were the watertight
| compartments. The engineers thought the ship wouldn't sink
| because it was unlikely for _five_ of them to fail at the same
| time. But they forgot just how likely it was that any incident
| (e.g. an iceberg collision) that damaged one compartment would
| likely also damage many others.
| Comevius wrote:
| I mean the Titanic suffered a 100 meters long side-swipe
| damage, no redundancy could account for that. No one thought
| that the Titanic was unsinkable, it's just that no one thought
| that anyone would smash the ship against an iceberg at that
| speed, because why would they. Unfortunately the clear,
| moonless sky effectively camouflaged the iceberg due to the low
| contrast and false horizon. Even ships today would maintain a
| lower speed at night when needed despite having a radar and
| access to satellite images, but the Titanic had to cross the
| ocean faster than the Olympic did before.
| jasonhansel wrote:
| Yeah, no redundancy could account for it, which is why
| confident predictions that the Titanic was uniquely unlikely
| to sink due to the presence of redundant systems were so
| ridiculous.
|
| Keep that in mind next time you think your system is ultra-
| reliable because you have 50 instances of every service, but
| they're all running in us-east-1.
| togs wrote:
| So in other words, redundancy requires subsystems' Pr(failure)
| to be independent of each other.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-09-17 23:01 UTC)