During the minutes leading up to the burst, engineer Herbert Harvey had asked Barrett to help him lift a manhole cover that gave access to the pump valves inside one of the double-hulled bottom’s forty-four watertight compartments. Shortly before the preflood knocking sound drew Barrett’s attention, another engineer, Jonathan Shepherd, was hurrying across the deck to a piece of equipment that he never did reach. Not knowing that a manhole cover had been lifted, he tripped into the hole and fractured his leg. Barrett, Harvey, and Kemish lifted Shepherd from the hole and laid him down near boiler room number 5’s pump valves.
When Jim Cameron finally succeeded in guiding one of his bots past the fallen steam pipes and other debris along a hallway called Scotland Road (the long E-deck corridor), marine engineer and historian Parks Stephenson noticed that one of the rooftop escape trunks from either boiler room number 5 or number 6 was open, with the escape ladder below the lid still visible. Of the two possible boiler rooms lying beneath the opening, more likely this was an escape hatch from number 5. The abandonment of the next chamber forward, number 6, had been a relatively orderly event. Although steel doors were closing off the floor level between the compartments very shortly after impact, water entered boiler room number 6 as a wide and fairly steady spray rather than as a boiler-submerging gush that developed quickly into sustained, riverlike rapids. The last men out of number 6 would most likely have sealed the hatches, in accordance with the regulations. Barrett and Kemish had left number 5 in a hurry, knowing that two of their companions, Shepherd and Harvey, were still below and had at least some chance, no matter how small, of reaching the ladder and pulling themselves up through the escape trunk, as long as no one added the extra handicap of closing the lid on them.
Since the men were running and then climbing for their lives, the release of the equalizing head of water in the coal bunker must have been followed in quick succession by a rupture at the bottom of the fire-damaged wall—a rupture that the flooding bunker had been helping to prevent. A breach in boiler room number 5’s dam no broader than a sidewalk square and no higher than a man’s knee, with a fifty- to fifty-five-foot head of water pressing back and downward from boiler room number 6, became all that was necessary to produce a horrifying, continuous gush.
With all of the coal having been removed from the starboard front bunker of boiler room number 5—and with the rapid loss of buoyancy in number 5 pulling the bow down deeper—a natural tendency for the rising flood in number 5 would be to shift toward the coal-heavy port side, causing the entire ship to begin shifting in the same direction.
Barrett and Kemish managed to escape the broken dam by a margin of seconds, before the flood developed into deep and deadly rapids and began shifting the Titanic’s list from starboard to port. When they looked down from the ceiling hatch, there was no sign of engineers Harvey or Shepherd.
6
Of Nature, Not above It
AUGUST 20, 2001
RUSSIAN RESEARCH VESSEL KELDYSH
EXPEDITION TITANIC XIII
The lessons of what happened that night cannot be forgotten here.
From the beginning, Anatoly Sagalevich (our director of submersible operations) and Jim Cameron were ever vigilant for anything that could possibly go wrong with our new array of great machines. In addition to our two bots, there was a one-ton photo-recon robot named Medusa, designed to follow and film the submersibles while providing floodlighting so intense that the Titanic would stand out in the darkness like a Ken Marschall painting come to life.
During a briefing on the procedures to be followed if something should go wrong with Medusa and the Mirs at the same time, Bill Paxton, the actor who was to become the narrator for Cameron’s IMAX/Disney documentary, was looking increasingly worried about actually climbing into one of the Mirs. Paxton began spending more and more time on the top deck, nervously and almost obsessively sketching everything he saw. In only a few weeks, he would begin evolving, with fascinating rapidity, into a good artist.
A conference about the survivability of a rapid ascent in the Mir, in which the submersible might actually tumble the crew compartment like a clothes dryer all the way up, had left the actor a little pale.
“Oh, stop worrying,” Big Lew Abernathy said. “If a man’s gotta die, what better way to die than advancing our knowledge of science and history?”
The comment left me grinning and nodding in agreement. Paxton looked at us both as though we had lost our minds. He began rattling off some other choices of how to die, some of which even sounded somewhat pleasant; but Abernathy had not really been asking a multiple-choice question.
AUGUST 21, 2001
Artist-historian Ken Marschall and I unintentionally managed to put a heightened sense of trepidation into poor Bill Paxton with a simple discussion of perspective. I had always referred to the depth of water from the surface to the submerged Titanic as being ten World Trade Center twin tower lengths. Marschall pointed out what this meant in terms of artistic perspective. If the waters of the North Atlantic could somehow be made as transparent as air, then at our “ten Twin Towers” altitude, if we looked over the side of the Keldysh, the 450-foot-long bow section of the Titanic would appear as tiny as one’s own fingernail viewed at arm’s length.
Paxton did not believe it possible that anything could give him a sense of acrophobia, or fear of heights, over open water. “Impossible,” he said—but there it was. Fortunately, his sense of wonder remained intact (helped along by a nightly rereading of his favorite childhood novel, the illustrated edition of Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues under the Sea). There were plenty of discoveries being made to keep his love of mystery alive. Lori Johnston displayed her film footage from the previous month’s reconnaissance of the World War II ship Bismarck.
Compared with what could be seen in photos taken during Robert Ballard’s expedition to the German warship a decade earlier, there had been a surge in the growth of rusticles—mostly bacterial-based organisms whose interior structures were so specialized that if they had been built from nucleated cells (instead of being built from archaea, a score of different bacterial species, and at least two species of deep-ocean fungi), we would have said that, like sponges, they belonged to the field of zoology.
Johnston had come up with a fascinating new puzzle: Why this explosive growth on the Bismarck—which had previously been almost rusticle-free? In a very short time, it had become almost as densely draped in rusticles as the Titanic, when it was discovered in 1985. Was it possible that the Titanic had been lying on the bottom in almost pristine condition for decades until the rusticles reached a sort of biological flash point? Or was something on the bed of the Atlantic changing, causing recent accelerated rusticle growth at two wreck sites hundreds of miles apart?