Ship-Safe Seas: Could the Titanic Disaster Happen Again?

Features | Technology

Better technology and vigilant monitoring have made the oceans safer, but fatal accidents continue to occur

By John Matson ?| April 5, 2012

THE LUCKY FEW: Some 700 people escaped the Titanic disaster, including the handful of survivors pictured above. The ship did not carry enough lifeboats to accommodate everyone on board. Image: National Archives

After the Titanic sank on its maiden voyage across the Atlantic, claiming more than 1,500 lives, the international community took swift action to prevent similar catastrophes.

Just over one month after the Titanic struck an iceberg late on April 14, 1912, the U.S. Navy dispatched the cruiser USS Birmingham to begin preliminary ice patrols of the North Atlantic, near where the wrecked ocean liner lay. By January 1914 an international conference produced the first of several conventions for the Safety of Life at Sea (SOLAS), dictating safety standards for mariners. Included in the 1914 convention was the requirement that ships carry enough lifeboats to accommodate all passengers and crew on board, a precaution that was not taken for the Titanic's voyage.

Those changes, along with the advent of superior technologies for navigation and communication, have made the seas much safer since 1912. As such, it is unlikely that the specific circumstances leading to the sinking of the Titanic will recur. But the ocean remains an unpredictable place, fraught with hazards.

Ice patrols from sea and sky
The first SOLAS convention addressed the proximate cause of the Titanic disaster: the danger of icebergs near the Grand Banks off the Newfoundland coast. The international agreement called for regular ice patrols, funded by a consortium of seafaring nations and carried out by the U.S. Those patrols, which continue today, have kept watch on the icebergs floating over the underwater plateau of the Banks, where transatlantic shipping routes cross the path of icebergs drifting down from Greenland.

Today's ice watchers, of course, have access to technology that did not exist in the early 20th century. Nowadays the U.S. Coast Guard's International Ice Patrol (IIP) monitors the Grand Banks with radar-equipped HC-130 aircraft. "It's certainly not the days of old where the guy's freezing his butt off on the lookout," says John Luzader, senior chief marine science technician with the IIP. Both the IIP and the Canadian Ice Service (CIS) fly reconnaissance flights over the iceberg-infested waters off Newfoundland, using all-weather radar and, when possible, visual confirmation to identify icebergs.

Together, the two patrol agencies issue a daily ice report, which defines the so-called iceberg limit. "We draw a line in the water and say, you should be safe to navigate beyond that line," Luzader says. "Inside that line, we say, 'there may be ice, and proceed at your own risk.'"

The iceberg bulletin also draws on satellite observations and reports from the crews of passing ships, which may have sighted an iceberg or simply picked up a stationary object on radar. Even if the iceberg in question has already been identified from the air, the ship reports can provide updates on an iceberg's position. In the absence of a recent sighting, the iceberg forecasters use a computer model to predict the bergs' drift and deterioration.

In nearly 100 years of operations, the IIP has established an enviable track record. "Since we've taken over ice patrol, nobody that's heeded our warning has struck an iceberg," Luzader says. (Less successful were the IIP's early attempts to destroy icebergs altogether. A 1959 article in The New York Times documented a failed attempt at an incendiary bombing campaign, which followed similar experiments with guns, torpedoes and explosives. Finally, the Times reported, the patrol "conceded that the icebergs had been more or less impervious to destruction by man-made means.")

But ice hazards have continued to doom ships beyond the Grand Banks. In 1959 a deadly accident occurred north of the zone monitored by the IIP. On its maiden voyage the Danish ship Hans Hedtoft struck an iceberg and sank off the southern tip of Greenland, claiming the lives of all 95 people on board. And in the Southern Ocean the Antarctic cruise ship Explorer sank in 2007 after ice punctured its hull; fortunately everyone on board was rescued.?

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