I'm a bit of a Titanic buff, and I recently picked up a new book at the Titanic Museum in Branson titled Story Of The Wreck Of Titanic: The Ocean's Greatest Disaster. It was originally published in 1912, although my edition was published in 1998.Anyway, it has many accounts of survivors' views of the sinking, and numerous mention boiler explosions. I have been reading about the Titanic for six or seven years, and have never read anything about boiler explosions, or indeed, explosions of any kind. Can someone verify this one way or the other?
Well, I never heard of boiler explosions.......I guess they did not happen because the extremely cold water when the ship sank enveloped the boilers into such cold temperatures so they went way below the flashpoint of possible explosion. The only explosions were, as I had seen in the Titanic movie of 1996, I guess, the pyrotechnic explosions from the signal rockets that passengers mistakened for party rockets.
I could not say for sure; but in the movie, the boiler safety valves have been released. That is the loud steam noise coming from the stacks after the ship was stopped. If the safety valves had released the pressure and there were no additional fuel added (the stokers had abandoned the fire rooms), it is doubtful that any of the boilers exploded. Oil-fired boilers may explode not due to steam overpressure, but excessive combustion of fuel. Coal fired boilers boilers tended to explode due to overheating. For HMS Titanic's boilers to explode, they would have had to overheat. It is plausible that they did (by overheating). The fire rooms would have been amidships (many decks below the stacks) and may have overheated on the coal already in their fireboxes.
The vessel did not split because of an explosion. Rather, the accumulated seawater in the bow area had forced the front end into the water. Subsequently, the ship rose vertically just shy of being upright on her nose. The Titanic was not designed for such stress, and it snapped just behind its midpoint. Witnesses claimed that the stern quarters stood up and floated for a few moments like a cork before sinking itself. The stern had a much more perilous journey to the sea bed because of this, and suffered greater damage as a result. A boiler explosion would have been unlikely once the relevant areas were flooded. Boiler explosions commonly occur when the boilers are starved of water, and this was usually restricted to steam engines used on land: Hence why locomotives had water tanks placed in convenient areas alongside (or in some cases, under) the track and why many factories had to be alongside some body of water. There are, however, a few modern research vessels that can intentionally flood their forward compartments to float vertical to the ocean's surface. Redundant sewage and water systems are also needed to facilitate the switch, since any toilets would shift to the wall and urinals moved to the *ceilings*.
