Titanic: The Final Word with James Cameron Page #9

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the escalation of forces

that caused this massive failure

in a structure

that's designed to be unbreakable.

STEPHENSON:
Basically, buoyancy

is what determines if the ship floats or not.

In Titanic's case, the stern maintained

its positive buoyancy for a while

and stayed on the surface,

then the bow became nothing

but a dead weight

that's got to go to the bottom of the ocean.

CAMERON". Once the bow had gone under

and lifted the stern right out of the water,

stresses not anticipated

by the ship's designers wreaked havoc.

If this bow was hanging down like you say,

it's totally negative buoyancy.

Or very close to it. Probably has

still some airspace at the top.

Which speaks to the buoyancy in the stern

because that thing is holding up...

- CAMERON:
That's what's holding it.

- All of that.

Thought of as a complete system,

it's still positively buoyant.

But there's this huge negative mass,

pendulous mass,

which breaks off at some point,

maybe at this angle, maybe at this angle,

maybe it hangs on for a second.

Maybe as it is achieving that angle,

it's ripping away.

In order to test popularly held assumptions

based on eyewitness accounts,

I've commissioned

a team of naval architects

to apply a scientific method

to Titanic's breakup,

to really separate myth from reality.

Do you wanna tell us about

the modeling software that was used?

Sure. I think we need to shift...

- We'll switch to Stettler's computer, please.

- Yeah, we'll come back to this.

So, what I wanted to do...

I'll just stand up a little bit,

here, to illustrate.

These are called

hydrostatics and stability softwares,

and there's a number of them out there.

Basically the way they all work is,

-you use the lines drawing for the ship...

- CAMERON:
What did you use as a source?

-(STAMMERING)

- The Harland and Wolff drawings?

Right, the original drawings

from Harland and Wolff.

CAMERON:
In Titanic's time, shipbuilding

was at the cutting edge of all industries.

Harland and Wolff, based in Belfast, Ireland,

was a revolutionary shipyard

that designed iron ships

that didn't simply copy

the design of wooden ships.

This allowed them to build bigger, better,

and technologically superior vessels

ahead of any of their competitors.

Unfortunately, their crowning

achievement, Titanic,

flooded, split in half,

and sank to the bottom of the ocean.

Now, using today's most advanced

shipbuilding computer tools,

Commander Stettler

will attempt to figure out

why Harland and Wolff's design failed.

So this is just a representative section,

as we call them.

All the compartments had to be defined

by the balance of the decks.

So you can see the coal bunkers,

and the salt water tanks are green,

and the blue are the fresh water tanks.

So we model the hull

as a bunch of these sections,

basically, these slices,

and for each slice, that slice has

an area of property associated with it.

And we can actually calculate, basically,

the resistance to bending,

or flexure, of that section of the hull.

And then we can use that to find the stress.

So let me just shift the view a little bit.

Now let's look at the stress, say,

in this panel here,

and plot the bending moment.

So, now you see what's on the bottom

is actually negative.

Compressive stresses in the bottom.

- Compressive stress in the bottom.

- CAMERON:
Tension...

STETTLER:
And you see the yellow

and a little bit of red up there,

that's tensional or positive stresses. Okay?

So what's interesting is,

it's basically saying that

the bottom plating of the ship will buckle

-before the material reaches a yield stress.

- At a smaller stress.

Just to be clear,

based on your calculations,

we're thinking that

the bottom buckled first,

before the shell broke at the top.

Correct.

We know the steel was better in tension

than it was in compression.

Right, but that makes the keel

even stronger.

It was put into compression,

but was still strong enough to hold

-the two sections together momentarily.

- To hold together.

What Commander Stettler was able to do

was bring a rational, mathematical model.

No cinema tricks,

no mythology, just the facts.

"This is what the computer said."

I found that was a breath of fresh air,

because it lets you sever the chains

with those preconceptions you have

and say, "A-ha!

"This is what happened."

CAMERON". Commander Stettiefis analysis

gives us the scientific proof

to support our ideas of Titanic's last hours.

But what about the flooding itself,

and how the rushing water

brought the ship down?

Did her stern really rise out of the water?

It's a controversial shot in the movie,

a gut-wrenching, big-screen moment

based on survivor testimony.

Is this really how it happened?

(PEOPLE SCREAMING)

If the breakup was Titanic's last breath,

the iceberg strike was her death blow.

(METAL SCREECHING)

It damaged 90 meters of her hull,

allowing flooding in five

of her 16 major watertight compartments.

An injury that fatally crippled the ship.

No one has ever actually seen

the iceberg damage.

It lies buried in the sediment,

underneath the ocean floor.

But using the modern analytic tools

of the shipbuilding industry,

can we fill in some holes

in our understanding of the flooding?

So, Commander Stettler's gonna start off.

He's gonna show us the sinking studies.

- MAN:
Yep.

-(lNAUDIBLE)

CAMERON:
Let's turn to

the flooding analysis to look for facts.

We know some things about

the initiation of the flooding,

that it sideswiped an iceberg,

that it opened the first five compartments.

We have some outer boundaries

that were set up by the testimony.

We know it didn't take three days to sink,

we know it took about two-and-a-half,

two hours and 40 minutes.

So, there are certain things we know.

They were able to create

a model complex enough

and accurate enough to be able to tell us

certain things we didn't know before.

How did the floodwater

move through the ship?

How did the bow so rapidly go negative?

How did the stern rise?

Let's turn to the naval architects'

progressive flooding model

to look for facts.

THOMAS:
Part of the analysis that

I was working on is a hydrostatics study.

It involves tracking the floodwater

as it moves from the sea,

through the holes in the hull,

up and through all the compartments.

I have sliced the model up

in a bunch of places,

so you have Hold 1, Hold 2, Hold 3.

We haven't ever been able to track

the compartment-to-compartment

progression of floodwater before.

It allows us to determine

if the floodwater would've reached

one part of a compartment

or a different part of a compartment first.

It allows us to much more accurately see,

at any intermediate stage of flooding,

how the ship is loaded

and what the structural

consequences of that are.

All right, so here we go.

It's recalculating everything

on ten-second intervals.

As you can see, there's a long period in here

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