Orange R

Titantic’s Misfortune Revisited

Courtnie Wilson, Staff Writer
May 17, 2012
Filed under Top Stories

One hundred years ago, at 11:40 p.m., on the evening of April 14, 1912, a voyage to New York costing an average of $4,350 a ticket, turned out to be a major tragedy in history. This tragedy was the sinking of the Titanic caused by the ship hitting into an iceberg. Over 1,500 lives were taken on that horrible evening; over half of the passengers. The ship began to sink within three hours of the collision, becoming a major catastrophe.

The ship was a whopping 882 feet and took over $7.5 million to build. With 2,223 passengers aboard, it had to be big. The ship was a way for the people to get to New York rather fast, so they could move on in their journey. For many people, their journey was soon coming to a halt.

Supposedly, Titanic was “sunk” from the beginning. Titanic was not fully equipped for all the hundreds of passengers, crew, and had some overlooked flaws from the beginning. People say that the Titanic could have saved many more that night, but it was lacking the amount of safety boats to save all the ship’s passengers. The Titanic had 16 boats, and four collapsible carriers, which could carry 1,178 people total, which seemed fine at the time, until they were in danger. The Titanic was carrying a lot more passengers than the capacity of the boats could hold. Meaning, if they would have had more boats on board, they would have been able to save many more lives that night.

Another factor was that there were six signals that went off to warn the crew that there was an iceberg in the way, If only they would have stopped the boat in time, and the crew would have stayed alarm, this problem could have been avoided.

Hundreds of people died on this very sad night in history, and all the survivors have passed away through the years, except for one, who died last April. Millivina Dean was a baby at the time. She was put in a sack and placed in a life boat by her father, just in time. This last survivor lived to be a remarkable 97 years old, and lived to know that her father died saving her, her brother, and her mother Georgette. “That’s partly what saved us-because he was so quick. Some people thought the boat was unsinkable,” she told the British Broadcasting Corporation in 1998.

A remarkable story that has haunted the survivors, and still today, makes everybody wonder, if only, if only…