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It simply wasn’t practical to expect passengers to go up a staircase to get over a bulkhead, so doors were put into the bulkheads to allow access, immediately removing the ability for a flooded compartment to be kept isolated from the next.
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Passengers and crew alike needed to access all parts of the ship without hindrance, and large public rooms also used up a lot of the space within the hull. However, on passenger liners in particular, this was of course generally found to be totally unacceptable. Additionally, bulkheads ‘A’, ‘B’, ‘K’, ‘L’, ‘M’, ‘N’, ‘O’ & ‘P’ extended to ‘D’ deck, all of them easily exceeding the Board of Trade’s requirements.įor a watertight compartment to be truly watertight, it must be enclosed on all six sides to form a box or cube within the hull. The compartments were labeled from ‘A’ in the bow to ‘P’ in the stern, and all of them came at least as far as ‘E’ deck. However, these compartments were actually far from being truly ‘watertight’ in the way that the name suggests, and this was cruelly proven on the night of April 14th, 1912. However, steps had been taken by the ship’s builders, Harland And Wolff, during the design of the Olympic-class liners to ensure that these vessels would be the safest ships to ever take to the seas at that time, and the key to this improvement in safety was the way the hull was sub-divided, or split-up, into watertight compartments.įifteen transverse bulkheads created sixteen compartments or cells, each of which could be isolated from the adjoining compartment using special doors which could be closed in the event of an emergency. Titanic, according to the many legends, was ‘practically unsinkable’, but in reality, no ship can ever be made trulyunsinkable, even almost a century after Titanic’s conception.