The first rescue ship arrived more than two hours after Titanic had gone down. The flaw with this assumption was that Titanic sank far more rapidly than anyone anticipated. All 742 passengers and crew were ferried to safety. When the smaller liner Republ ic was involved in a collision in 1909, she remained afloat for more than 24 hours. That would allow plenty of time for the lifeboats to go back and forth several times, ferrying passengers to nearby ships. Nearly everyone believed that even a heavily damaged vessel would remain afloat for many hours before sinking. The prevailing thinking at that time was that the ship itself would serve as a gigantic lifeboat. Nearly every other vessel of that era was similarly deficient in the quantity of lifeboats. Under those regulations, Titanic actually had four more lifeboats than she was obligated to carry. Revising the regulations was therefore unnecessary. Yet officials maintained that ships had become much safer. Titanic was more than four times that amount. The ship sailed under safety regulations that originated nearly 20 years earlier, when the largest passenger ships weighed 10,000 tons. The ship’s owners felt that too many lifeboats would clutter the deck and obscure the First Class passengers’ views. That number was later cut in half, then nearly halved again. Titanic ’s original design called for 64 lifeboats. Why didn’t Titanic carry enough lifeboats for everyone on board? Even if all had been filled to capacity, only half the people would have been saved. As they pulled away from the sinking ship, many were only half-full or even less. The main reason for the high death toll was that the ship had only 20 lifeboats. In the early morning of April 15, 1912, the ocean liner Titanic sank on her maiden voyage after hitting an iceberg.
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