72 STABILITY OF VESSELS AS AFFECTED 



Empress of Ireland up to the shelter deck, letting water in on to the lower and main decks, 

 and subsequently on to the upper and shelter decks. That hole pierced the after stoke- 

 holds. In that stokehold there was a bunker wall. That, of course, trapped the water, and 

 from the moment of the impact the Empress began to heel. The stability of the Empress 

 is undisputed — it was more than the average. I understand that the metacentric height was 

 about 42 inches in its loaded condition at that time. There was no question of the stability 

 or the structural strength of the vessel. There were no bulkheads destroyed, and therefore, 

 as the Empress was designed and built to float with two compartments bilged, there should 

 have been no doubt of her ability to stand up under the blow. What happened was that 

 in the divisional bulkhead between the stokeholds there were watertight doors, which were 

 not shut. We have heard of the lack of permeability of spaces filled with coal and other 

 cargo. It was very extraordinary, the rapidity with which the water came in through the 

 break and permeated the bunkers filled more or less with coal. As the water came over the 

 lower deck it went through the bulkhead doors, from one stokehold into the other, down 

 through the deck escape hatches into the lower bunker, and out through the bunker door 

 on the stokehold floor in five seconds. A man in the forward stokehold found water com- 

 ing out on the platform almost immediately after the impact. To make a long story short, 

 this longitudinal bunker wall prevented the water from going across the ship and the Em- 

 press heeled from the moment of impact, and went over in twelve minutes — absolutely 

 capsized. 



Mr. Linnard stated that very few ships capsize after being bilged, but the case of the 

 Empress of Ireland was an exceptional one. There would have been no loss of life had 

 not the Empress heeled over the moment the impact took place and gone down in such a 

 way that the boats could not be launched, and undoubtedly the horror of the catastrophe was 

 entirely due to the failure of the stability of the ship under these conditions. 



Now when we are discussing papers of this kind we are all anxious to assist in any little 

 way we can in improving the safety of ships at sea, and you cannot find in the design of 

 the Empress of Ireland any faults in the structural arrangements or in the calculations; but 

 if you have a series of -bulkheads pierced by doors, and these doors are not shut, and cannot 

 be shut — no time to shut them — then, of course, a catastrophe might result from a very 

 small, comparatively small damage. The only way to obviate that is to have the very latest 

 system of bulkhead subdivision and bulkhead doors, and means for closing the doors. 



I am positive nothing is to be gained by having anything automatic. We have heard 

 in this meeting today about automatic sprinklers. Lots of people have tried to use auto- 

 matic stokers and automatic governors and all kinds of automatic things on board ship. They 

 are all right in their way on land, but when you put them into ships, in which the conditions 

 vary from minute to minute, hour to hour, and day to day, nothing will enable you to do 

 away with the importance of eternal vigilance, supervision day by day by the engineers and 

 officers; this is true of all classes of boats, no matter whether it is a motorboat, a catboat, a 

 merchantman, or a belligerent battleship or cruiser in which, whenever anything automatic 

 is installed, when the time comes to use it you find you cannot use it. This question of 

 stability is one to which we should pay more attention in the future at these meetings than 

 we have in the past. I hope this is only a beginning in the matter. 



The Chairman : — Do you know how low the waterlines were on the doors on the 

 Empress ? 



