I think the deal with the Titanic are the lives lost due to poor planning
After the fact.
Unless everyone knew they were going to die due to poor planning in advance.
About the closest you can get to an assurance that something bad will happen and kill a lot of people is to state that it is impossible for the bad thing to happen, and then put a bunch of people in the target for potential bad things before putting it into a dangerous location.
Also, not enough lifeboats. And if I recall correctly, most of the compartments that were breached didn't actually have bulkheads fail. What happened was that the riveting was sub-par, and the force of the impact snapped a lot of them. But yes, the lifeboats alone is forewarning that if something bad happens a lot of people will die. The North Atlantic is not a friendly place in the best of times. It's sort of like building a city intended to house millions of people entirely from wood and tar, building a single fire station and no hydrants, and then declaring that it couldn't possibly catch fire, and that if it did the highly trained firefighters would quickly extinguish it. 
In the Titanic's day, lifeboats weren't intended to keep passengers alive long enough for rescue. The poor communications technology of the era meant that such a rescue was considered extremely unlikely to happen before cold and exposure took out the survivors. Lifeboats were more for ferrying passengers to a rescue ship or bit of land. For this purpose, the Titanic had plenty. Not the best assumption to make, but it's less of an idiot ball moment than pop history has rendered it.
True enough, but the fact still remains that even if there
had been another vessel nearby (and in this context that could easily mean not even within visual range if it had been daytime), a lot of people would still likely have died. She sank in roughly 2 hours and 40 minutes. The 20 lifeboats aboard could (IIRC), under ideal conditions, carry roughly half of the ~3,100 passengers and crew on boat. A rapidly sinking ship on the North Atlantic in the middle of the night is not what anyone would term ideal conditions. Even without panic and random accidents it would have been remarkable if the death toll stayed in the double digits, unless the rescuing ship was literally alongside the
Titanic at the moment it struck the iceberg.
For the record, the
Carpathia was only 93 km away when she received the distress call, and at top speed arrived four hours later. A large part of the problem was that the
Titanic sank incredibly fast for such a large vessel and what should have been a relatively trivial amount of damage. Incidentally, it took two hours for the USS
Maine to sink.
Let's put that in context: 5.1 tons of powder charges detonate aboard the USS
Maine, completely destroying its forward third. It takes two hours to sink. The
Titanic hits an iceberg. It takes two hours and forty minutes to sink.
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Topic: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O (Read 14471053 times)