Claris Law Legal Blogging Community

Name:

E-mail:

Phone Number:

Zip Code:

Your Question:

Editor: Rod Sullivan
Profession: Maritime Attorney

Category: Cruise Ship Injuries and Accidents

You recall how it happened in the movie Titanic--Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet are in the cargo hold, having just made love in the back seat of an automobile. They exit the car just as the ship hits an iceberg. The jagged edge of the iceberg slits a gash in the steel shell plating on the starboard side of the vessel, buckling the frames and causing the water to come rushing in. Guess what? According to researchers at Johns Hopkins University, it didn't happen that way.

It turns out that in the year 1911, the shipbuilding industry was on the verge of a revolution in materials. Steel, a combination of iron, manganese and other metals, was on the way in and pure iron was on the way out, and the most important place to use the newer, stronger material, was in the rivets. Consequently, the Titanic was built with steel rivets throughout its middle, where a ship experiences the most stress. However, in the bow and the stern the plates were held together with iron rivets, and it turns out that many of those were substandard.

How did they discover this, you may ask? The 1996 expedition to the graveyard of the Titanic in the northern Atlantic Ocean showed that the iceberg had never penetrated the hull, there was no gash in the side, and the water which caused the world's largest ocean liner to sink in 1912, costing over 1500 lives, came in through the seams between nine sets of adjacent plates in the bow of the vessel. The expedition also recovered some of the rivets from the hull, and took them ashore for testing.

By comparing the chemical composition and grain structure of the rivets from the Titanic with the chemical composition and grain structure of rivets from the Brooklyn Bridge, which was completed in 1883, researchers were able to discover that the Titanic rivets has up to three times the amount of impurities and slag as the Brooklyn Bridge rivets did.

What does this mean for us today? It can be taken as an important lesson that lack of care in even small jobs can have catastrophic results. In the mid 1300's a children's nursery rhyme was written that went like this:

For want of a nail the [horse]shoe was lost.
For want of a [horse]shoe the horse was lost.
For want of a horse the rider was lost.
For want of a rider the battle was lost.
For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.
And all for the want of a nail.

Each of us may feel that our jobs are small and insignificant. However, what each of us does each day makes a difference. Because the powerful play of life goes on and each day, and each you and I have the opportunity to contribute a verse.