The sinking of the Titanic may have been due to a huge fire inside the ship — not just because slamming into an iceberg in the North Atlantic, latest documentary, Titanic: The New Evidence claims.
On April 14, 1912, the sinking of the largest cruise liner claimed the lives of more than 1,500 passengers.
The 54-year-old journalist and Titanic expert, Senan Molony, claims that it wasn’t merely an impact into an iceberg that caused the liner to sink. While the cause of the famous accident has long been associated with the iceberg, new evidence has emerged of a fire in Titanic’s fuselage. Moley says it burned unnoticed for nearly 3 weeks leading up to the crash.
He points as evidence to specific photos showing black marks with a total length of 30 feet on the right side of the ship where the fire happened and claims weakened the hull close to where the iceberg hit. The photos were taken by John Westbeech Kempster at the Harland and Wolff shipyard located in Belfast, Northern Ireland in April 1912. It was just a week prior to the Titanic setting sail for New York City.
Twelve men tried to put out the fire, but it was too enormous to control, rising temperatures of around 1,000 degrees Celsius. Officers on board were reportedly ordered not to breathe a word of the fire to the 2,224 passengers.
Watch the whole documentary below:
Molony is not the first to argue that more attention should be paid to the association of the fire in the hull to the ship’s sinking. In 2004, Engineer Robert Essenhigh of Ohio State University also speculated that there was a smoking fire in Titanic’s coal bunker Number 6. It weakened the liner particularly in that area which ultimately slammed the iceberg.
