Page 72 - British Inquiry into Loss of RMS Titanic Day 19 - 22

advantage or disadvantage in making the deck which is at the top of the watertight compartments watertight? - There are two points that your Lordship’s attention should be drawn to in that. First of all, it is necessary to have large holes cut in the way of the boiler room and engine room to let the exhaust gases come away from the boilers and also to provide ventilation. Those holes are big holes; you cannot make the deck completely watertight; and then you would have to considerably extend vertically the casings surrounding those and make those casings watertight. 21013. Make them like funnels? - Make them like watertight funnels. In addition to that there is the question which applied to the lower decks, that a hatch through which cargo has normally to be worked is not an easy matter to keep satisfactorily watertight; and there is a further consideration - a purely commercial one - that if this deck is made watertight and is at such a height above the waterline as to secure floatation with any two compartments flooded, it renders valueless either for passengers or crew a very large proportion of the total bulk of the ship on which her earning power depends. 21014. I suppose it is right to say that the moment a ship ceases to be commercially useful she ceases to be a sea-going vessel at all? - Her type ceases to be built altogether. 21015. If vessels are made by different devices so secure that they cease to be commercially valuable, they cease to go to sea at all? - They do. 21016. Can you tell me what would be the disadvantages, from the point of view of working the ship, of carrying up the transverse bulkheads to C deck? - The most serious disadvantage in carrying the bulkheads up to C deck would be the difficulty of providing the necessary exits required by the Board of Trade from the third class dining rooms and similar places, and also from the crew’s quarters, which are along “Scotland Road.” 21017. Those are the disadvantages? - Those are the disadvantages. That is a disadvantage in meeting Board of Trade requirements - not any structural impossibility. 21018. Supposing the Board of Trade requirements were altered, would you then see any disadvantage in taking the watertight bulkheads up to C deck? - The only disadvantage would be a certain increase of difficulty in obtaining certain spaces, but I think it would merely become a difficulty to be overcome in the designing office and not a difficulty of any other sort. 21019. Then the real difficulty at present is that you would violate, or would not comply with, the requirements of the Board of Trade? - We should find it impossible with the present design to comply with the requirements of the Board of Trade for ways out of the different spaces. Your Lordship asked for a list of the plans that we have submitted to the Board of Trade. Perhaps I may hand them in. (Handing plans to his Lordship.) 21020. This is a list of the plans submitted by you to the Board of Trade. Who was it that prepared the general arrangement plans of the ship? - The small general arrangement plans are prepared at the designing office by the staff employed there. 21021. Are they submitted to the Board of Trade? - They are not. 21022. Who prepared the structural plans to carry out the general arrangement? - They are again prepared in the designing office. 21023. Are they submitted to the Board of Trade? - At some stage or other, yes, they are supplied. You will find them as the sixth item on the list I have handed in, and they were submitted on the 3rd June, 1910. 21024. You have given me on this paper a list of the structural and other plans that were submitted to the Board of Trade? - I wired to Belfast to obtain the list, and your Lordship has there what they have sent me. 21025. Can you tell me what the action of the Board of Trade was after these plans were submitted? Did they criticise them or did they accept them? - We submitted the plans to them, and I think the situation is that they took no objection to them. 21026. I do not know what the procedure is. They would acknowledge the receipt of them? -