
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: FRIDAY, September 17, 1993                   TAG: 9309170092
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-2   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: NEW YORK                                LENGTH: Medium

SCIENTISTS BLAME BAD STEEL FOR TITANIC'S FAST SINKING

Many more passengers might have survived the Titanic's collision with an iceberg 81 years ago if the liner had been made of sterner stuff, said a study of this century's greatest peacetime sea disaster.

In a report made public Thursday, maritime experts said the ship's steel plating suffered "brittle fracture" in the icy waters of the North Atlantic.

A better grade of steel might have held up longer after the collision in 31-degree water and more lives might have been saved, they said.

Whether the Titanic could actually have stayed afloat after the collision is "problematical," said William Garzke, a New York naval architect. He was co-author of the report, presented at the centennial meeting of the Society of Naval Architects and Marine Engineers.

Garzke said that question will remain unanswered without first-hand study of the liner's hull, partly buried in the seabed 12,000 feet down.

The Titanic report was part of an extensive review of research by manned and robot submersibles.

Pronounced "unsinkable" by its owners, the British firm Cunard White Star, the Titanic was on its first voyage, from Southampton, England, to New York, when it hit an iceberg off Newfoundland on April 14, 1912.

Of the more than 2,340 people aboard, about 700 were able to get off in the two hours and 40 minutes before the Titanic sank.

The report is the latest revision of history concerning the fabled ship. The hull was located in 1985 by Robert D. Ballard of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

Four later expeditions by research minisubs and robots revealed that the ship broke into two main pieces, and that the iceberg did not rip a 300-foot gash in the hull allowing multiple compartments to flood - a long-held belief nurtured by news accounts, books and movies.

Garzke and Dana Yoeger, of Woods Hole, another of the study's five authors, said videotapes and two separate laboratory analyses of metal plates brought to the surface show "brittle fracture" damage concentrated near the bow. They said that indicates that as the ship tried to turn away from the iceberg, several "glancing impacts" popped rivets, broke seams and allowed water to rush in.

"The real tragedy in this is that without that brittle-fracture tendency, the ship might have lasted longer, maybe a couple of hours, until the Carpathia [another ship] got there and rescued some of the passengers who were actually lost," Garzke said.

by CNB