Most people are pretty familiar with the tragic story of the Titanic. Let's take a step back for a second: The Titanic was a British passenger ship that was set to travel from Great Britain to New York. It was the largest passenger ship on the water at the time.
When it set out in April 1912, the crew expected it to be smooth sailing. After stopping to dock at a few other locations, the ship headed northeast toward New York. On April 14, the ship struck an iceberg 375 miles of the coast of Canada.
The Titanic began to gradually fill with water as people climbed into the lifeboats. Because the crew and passengers were unprepared for such an emergency, the ship's atmosphere became hectic. Also, due to the "women and children first" protocol, many people were left on the sinking ship and eventually died.
Until now, historians thought that was the entire story. Now, however, one expert is claiming that the iceberg isn't what really ruined the Titanic.
The New York Times reports that Senan Molony, an Irish journalist who has spent more than 30 years studying the doomed ship, is claiming that the demise of the ship was due to a fire started long before the iceberg came into play.
Molony claims that "fresh evidence indicates there was a fire in the ship’s hull, which burned unnoticed for almost three weeks before that fateful night."
Molony says that the fire started near the ship’s boiler rooms, which damaged its hull and created irreparable damage that made the ship susceptible to the iceberg.
When the ship did eventually strike the iceberg, it didn’t have the structural integrity to survive the crash.
According to Molony, people knew about the fire but chose to do nothing about it.
In a new documentary titled Titanic: The New Evidence, Molony says: “It’s a perfect storm of extraordinary factors coming together: fire, ice, and criminal negligence. The fire was known about, but it was played down. She should never have been put to sea.”
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[H/T: The New York Times]
