About 160 feet away from the open shell door, under the front of the well deck, the foremost open D-deck porthole was located on the port side of the third-class men’s open recreation area and smoking room. Sometime before 1:20 a.m., and perhaps within only fifteen or twenty minutes of the boiler room number 5 flood, this porthole would have become the first open one above E deck to slide beneath the ocean surface (not very far behind the probable E-deck porthole observed from Brown’s and the Yasbecks’ lifeboat as gushing water).
Fourteen inches in diameter, this single recreation-room porthole was able to add approximately 10 percent to the total surface area of openings made by the iceberg. All by itself, the rapid flooding of the third-class open space on the port side would further increase the ship’s list to port. The tilt was bound to keep Harper’s large first-class porthole on the starboard side (in room D-33) above water for a while longer, but his stateroom and his belongings were by then enjoying only a brief respite. Even under a design plan by which the deck spaces curved from the center of the ship upward toward the bow, in a manner that had made the floor beneath Fifth Officer Lowe’s feet feel peculiarly level in spite of the fact that the Titanic was settling by the bow, by the time Lowe awoke, the line of portholes along the front of D deck was already shifting from parallel with the sea surface to a slight downward slant.
Probably within ten minutes of the recreation-room flood, the open porthole near stateroom D-20 was pulled below the surface, quickening the rate of the water’s climb toward Elizabeth Lines’s stateroom, a little farther back on the port side (at D-28); at this point, the lower boundary of the gangway door, forty-five feet behind Lines’s cabin, was poised to become the biggest opening of all.
By the time the sea began flowing one foot deep across the threshold, the door, which was four and a half feet wide and six feet high, became an open wound equivalent to one-third of the iceberg’s accumulated stabs. Only minutes later, once the water streaming through the door had reached a height of three feet, the total iceberg damage would have been effectively doubled by this single door, even if no other openings (including the front portholes) had existed. A few minutes after that, the damage was tripled. This single opening was capable of pulling the entire Titanic down by the port side. This final fatal hemorrhage probably began about 1:30 a.m.
Shortly afterward, the bow section’s well deck was drawn down by the port side and began to flood—exposing many square feet more to the sea through its hatches and doors. Along D deck, water entering through the gangway door found quick passage down to E deck through stairwells and began moving along Scotland Road, as far back as the second smokestack.
Scotland Road ran nearly the whole length of first and second class, along E deck’s port side. The pressure thus building against the front bulkhead of boiler room number 4 (behind the already flooded boiler room number 5) was immense. This was not a static head of water building against an interior dam; rather, it was water inside an increasingly unstable ship prone to powerful shifts and sways. As the Titanic shifted, water in already flooded compartments was driven by the same law of inertia that forces passengers in a car slightly forward or backward whenever the driver applies the brakes or the accelerator. Even a small inertial push was potentially fatal to a wall of steel already being pressed to its breaking point.
The boiler room number 5 bulkhead had ruptured under scarcely fifty feet of water. By 2 a.m., the water pressing against the base of the boiler room number 4 dam was sure to reach eighty feet, with a significantly lesser but nonetheless major head of water pressing down on the thin metal of the boiler room roof and its closed hatches. The chamber was doomed to a slow squeeze toward its bursting point, from both forward and above—and even from below, from which came another source of flooding, as early as the 11:40 crash.
Before the first distress rocket left the deck at about 12:45 a.m., before engineers Shepherd and Harvey were drowned by the boiler room number 5 breach, and before Celiney Yasbeck was held by force from leaving a lifeboat to rejoin her husband on the deck, Thomas Patrick Dillon, the coal trimmer who had been assigned to clean the gear under the giant reciprocating engines when the impact occurred—and who (being located far aft) was among the last to feel the jolt from crumbling ice—saw how another line in the epitaph of the ship was going to be written.
Immediately after the crunching sounds passed, Dillon saw engineers running to their stations, readying the pumps and valves. Chief engineer Joseph Bell then ordered Dillon forward with several other men to open the watertight doors—which had been closed from the bridge by William Murdoch. Dillon’s team was instructed to run pump hoses forward, because the most powerful pumps on the Titanic were located aft of boiler room number 4. Dillon would live to tell British investigators that his orders were to crank up and secure the watertight doors as far forward as he could go. His team was also asked to make sure that the men in boiler room number 2 kept the steam pressure up for the electric generators. The doors were opened all the way forward to boiler room number 4. They were still open when the chief engineer ordered Dillon and most of the younger men up to the top deck with life jackets, about fifteen minutes after Shepherd and Harvey had died on the other side of boiler room number 4’s bulkhead.
“If Dillon’s evidence is correct,” examiner Edwards said to naval architect Wilding, “could he account for the watertight doors being kept open up to a point when it seemed water was about to start entering boiler room [number] four?”
Wilding explained that he could see no reason the watertight doors should not have been kept open—“provided there was no need to close them.”
Seemingly perplexed by Wilding’s answer, Edwards phrased his question another way: “What point in the filling of the fore compartments do you suggest would represent a need for closing the watertight doors between [boiler room numbers] four and three?”
“Whenever water began to come into number four in a serious volume,” Wilding replied.
“Not until then?”
“Not until then,” Wilding insisted. “It would be of no value until then; and the reason for [not closing the doors until] water begins to come in—and in a serious volume—[is that before the water actually does reach that point, it’s] necessary to take steps to check its flow.”
“It would not be necessary to close those watertight doors until such time as it might represent the ship being in a state where the whole thing was hopeless?”
“Quite,” Wilding said, not entirely grasping, even after the fact, how hopelessly time-critical the situation had become.
Shortly after Dillon had been sent away to the upper decks, the sea was climbing up to, and then into, the open gangway door on D deck’s port side, ultimately putting more than 230 tons of pressure against the lower foot of boiler room number 4’s dam. If the bow dipped or tilted perceptibly, the motion of water in and above the flooded boiler room number 5 could easily increase the force against the bulkhead by a multiple of two or three. Although the boiler room number 4 dam was not embrittled by fire and side-kicked by ice and could surely stand longer than the bulkhead that had preceded it in boiler room number 5, the fall was nonetheless inevitable.
Not very long after 1:15 a.m., the port side’s open gangway door was bound to start angling the bow down like the minute hand of a large clock that had broken and was picking up speed—and which was connected to a time bomb. When finally the surge came through boiler room number 4’s front wall—or through the rooftop casing or both—there would be no time to close the boiler room number 3 bulkhead (especially if it had been propped up by a wooden brace to allow a pump hose to be run through).