Titanic: The Final Word with James Cameron Page #10

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between, say, 25 minutes

and 45 minutes or so,

before you get much flooding

in other places.

Can you stop for one second?

How is it getting to here?

Is that Scotland Road?

This is Scotland Road. Yeah.

CAMERON". Scotland Road is the long

passageway on the port side of E deck

that travels the length of the ship.

As Scotland Road flooded,

it completely undermined

the precaution of sealed compartments,

like an accelerant,

acting as a shortcut for the floodwater

over the top of the bulkheads.

Here we go.

Because the starboard side on E deck,

sort of starboard of Scotland Road,

is allowed to, in our model right now,

flood earlier, it floods first.

MARSGHALL:
To see it

dissected in such a way,

and to see how the flooding progressed

in a forensic way like that,

was almost like seeing Titanic sink

for the first time.

CAMERON:
Another accelerant

was an open door on D deck, just one.

Why would someone open a large door

on the lower level of a rapidly sinking ship?

Second Officer Lightoller at one point

sent a boatswain by the name of Nichols

to grab some men and go down

and open one of the doors.

And I think the idea was that,

since he wasn't loading the lifeboats full,

that they would come back

and take people off

through the doorway or something.

And he never saw the man again.

And when they found the ship in 1985,

there it is. The door is open.

The interesting thing about the D deck

shell door on the port side is that

it communicates down a quarter

all the way forward.

If you look at it here. Here's your door.

If your water could come in here,

it could come down and

flood the entire forward D deck.

We should stop it

at the peak of that stress curve,

because we know it didn't go past that,

so that's your upper bound.

Okay, the peak of the stress curve

is the moment we're after.

It's just before the ship broke.

When we reach this point,

we'll know the final angle of the stern.

THOMAS:
Yeah, it should be at 19 degrees

at trim.

CAMERON:
Ah. Interesting.

Okay, the model shows us

that the flooding caused

a 19-degree maximum angle of tilt.

There is no subsequent force

acting on the ship

that would tend to break it,

that exists greater than that moment

until it hits the bottom.

And we know it broke

before it hit the bottom.

That might be our maximum tilt.

STEPHENSON:
Yeah.

Not as much as we thought.

Ken, you're going to have to

repaint your paintings, buddy.

- I'm going to have to reshoot my movie.

- Which one's easier?

Painting. I'll help you paint the paintings.

(ALL CHUCKLING)

I think this is pretty amazing.

I mean, this is completely new to me,

that in the two-and-a-half hours

it took Titanic to sink,

she never capsized.

We never really thought about that.

It was staring us in the face.

Ships capsize.

We saw it recently

with the Costa Concorde

that sank off the coast of Italy.

And when you look back

at the history of

all the other famous shipwrecks,

they all roll over.

Bismarck rolled over,

Andrea Dofla rolled over.

But Titanic just went almost straight down.

Yeah, toward the end it had, maybe,

a variously reported six,

maybe eight-degree list.

That's not much.

That creates a whole new question.

Were they trimming the ship?

Were the engineers,

none of whom survived,

actually trimming the ship actively?

Were they fighting that?

Were they that good with their pumps

by filling the trim tanks and seeing the ship

was listing one direction,

controlling it and trying to keep it upright

so they could get those boats off?

Or did they just get lucky?

Was it the most amazing piece of luck

in maritime history

that they managed to

successfully evacuate

700-some people in the boats

while the ship just sat

perfectly upright in the water?

I've never thought of that before.

Well, there are some questions

we're just going to have to live with.

But before I send these guys home,

there's a game I like to play.

What would you have done

if you were captain of Titanic?

Could more lives have been saved?

Titanic set sail

with more than 2,200 souls on board,

but just over 700

would survive the disaster.

Some went down with the ship.

Most froze to death floating

in the frigid waters of the North Atlantic

waiting for a rescue ship.

SEAMAN:
Right ahead, sir.

Careful with your oars.

CAMERON:
Even with only enough lifeboats

for 50% of the passengers

and crew on board,

could the crisis have been managed

more effectively?

Can anyone hear me?

Let me pose a problem

based on everything you guys know.

Let's say I've got a time machine

and I can teleport you back to Titanic

one second after the ship

has already hit the iceberg.

You can do anything,

but you've already hit the iceberg.

So it's really an exercise in,

could the crisis have been

managed differently

if they knew what we knew?

How would you have saved everybody?

And it's not meant

as an indictment of the choices

that were made by the captain

and the officers.

I think they were managing the problem

about as well as humanly possible

under the circumstances.

But with what we know now,

could we have done any better?

Like, how would you

have saved everybody?

Save everybody, I think it was not possible.

You can save much more.

We can shift the number, that's for sure.

I think you could save everybody.

I think you could save everybody

and their dog.

Really?

I think there's a couple of ways to do it.

There's two ways to do it that I can think of.

There is a ship.

There is a ship six to eight miles away.

- One.

- Well observed by everybody.

All right? It's there. You can see it.

It's thought to have been

the British steam ship Californian,

within radio contact of the Titanic

right before the accident.

One of the officers told people

when they were getting in the boat

to go row to that ship.

Captain Smith.

Captain Smith, he was telling people

to row to the ship.

Why row to the ship?

Why not drive your ship to that ship?

Six miles with a boat like that?

No, no, no. Not that boat. That ship.

Drive your ship to the other ship.

And I would say even drive it backwards.

You don't want to go too fast,

'cause you're damaged.

You've only got to go six miles.

It's not very far.

No, but it could be an hour,

or something like that.

Drive it backwards,

it's going to tend to plane up slightly

and not add to the flooding.

You'd actually relieve the pressure

and slow the flooding.

You think it's just pure head pressure?

We respectfully disagree.

It's a big ship and

the holes are far underwater and it just...

I think Jeff and I made the point in there.

We disagree with that one.

You're going to evacuate some of them.

Some are going to go in the water

and some are going to have to

get picked up by the other ship.

So that's your biggest problem,

is the transfer.

Driving a ship backwards,

I was not in favor,

but I had no objective reasons.

It just seemed like

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