Just another one of your typical alternate timeline stories....Would they had simply ruptured from the ice cold water or all out exploded ..... could any explosion be powerful enough to blow a hole in the hull?No wild guessing please, I've already done that!Include your experience with boilers exploding (or not) from cold water
Yes. The boilers were made of cast iron. The thermal shock of flooding them could easily fracture them and cause ruptures and explosion. Yes the boilers exploding could easily take out the side of the Titanic because the metal it was made of was very brittle. Paddle wheel steamers on the missippi were many times reduced to kindling wood from a boiler explosion. This is how Mark Twains brother died when the Natches blew up. A boiler explosion is a life changing event. The first one I saw was a mile away. If I had been closer I would not be here.
Boilers not required to supply steam for the pumps and dynamos had to be shut down, keeping them under pressure was dangerous. Engineers could not afford the time to check that feed water was being supplied to all boilers and if the water level in a boiler fell too low the furnace could collapse resulting in an explosion. Cold sea water coming into a hot boiler under pressure could also cause an explosion due to the thermal stress induced and so the boilers in No 6 and No 5 boiler rooms had to be shut down with great urgency. Any boiler explosion would have killed people but would also have damaged watertight bulkheads and possibly the hull. This would have resulted in the ship foundering much more quickly. To prevent such explosion fires had to be raked out of the furnaces and steam pressure had to be reduced rapidly; this was done by manually lifting the safety valves using the easing gear fitted to valves for that purpose and it is the operation of this easing gear which resulted in the roar of steam from the vent pipes together with the natural release from boilers generating steam no longer required by the engines.
