April 15, 1912. The RMS Titanic has already filled
with water. Above the din of steam coming from the safety valves, an officer is shouting, “Women and
children first.” He’s acutely aware that there aren’t enough lifeboats for everyone. A woman
looking radiant in her dinner dress clings onto her weeping child as they are guided onto a boat.
Her husband stoically nods in their direction. When they are out of sight, he just stares into
the distance. He knows that’s where he’s heading, into the freezing cold waters of the
North Atlantic Ocean. Another passenger, a complete stranger, hands him a Camel filterless
cigarette. “Do you think we will make it?” he says. The husband doesn’t reply. He just keeps
looking forward, transfixed on the dark. With great violence, the ship suddenly tilts. A giant
wave sweeps many passengers into the ocean. Can this man survive, even though he won’t make it
onto a lifeboat? What were a person’s chances of survival in that frigid ocean? Today you’re going
to find out, and you might just be surprised. Ok, so the ship hit that iceberg at about 11.40
pm. As you already know because you’ve watched the movie 15 times, it didn’t just sink in the
blink of an eye. In fact, for the first hour, the majority of the 2,224 people on board
had no idea just over 1,500 of them were about to have a date with Davy Jones’ Locker.
The ship was letting in water from the beginning, but the flooding was incremental and slow
at first. It took about 40 minutes for the loading of the first lifeboats to happen, boats
that were filled with only women and children. This was somewhat problematic since some of
the boats hit the water only partially filled because not enough women and kids could be
put in them. When lifeboat number 7 rowed away from the sinking ship at about 12.45, only
28 passengers out of a possible 65 were on it. It wasn’t until about 1.20 am when the
flooding got much worse. That’s about the time the ship tilted more and those onboard
really understood the gravity of the situation. It’s when couples said their
tearful goodbyes and when the guy in our intro saw his beloved child
for the last time... Well, if he died, we’ll come back to him soon. We hope you
have your fingers crossed for this dude. And just in case you’re wondering, it wasn’t as
if all the women and children were spared that appointment with the freezing cold ocean.
Of the 412 adult women on board, 108 died. Of the 112 kids on board, 56 died. That’s a 75
percent and 50 percent survival rate respectively, which isn’t bad going at all. The men did
have it worse. Of the 1680 guys on the ship, 1357 ended up with an unwanted sea burial. That’s
only a 19 percent survival rate. Add that up and you get 1,521 deaths. Some sources say 1,503
died. Others say 1,517 died. Let’s just agree the number of deaths was in the early 1500s.
Titanic the movie wanted to encourage you to be angry because it portrayed a scenario in which
wealthier people had a greater chance of survival. This was a British-run ship. Still today that
country judges you by the strength of your accent and then puts you into a class bracket, and back
then people were a lot more obsessed with class. Titanic the movie got it right in some ways. The
wealthy did fair better than the poor, although that bit where the third-class plebs are locked
behind doors down below is totally fictional. Let’s break this down, something
we’ll call class mortality rates. If you were a rich woman, you almost had it made.
Of the 141 women who’d bought first-class tickets only four bit the dust. That was a 97 percent
survival rate. One posh kid died, so that sucked for him. Of the 171 men in first-class, 105 died.
Get this though. Of the 179 women in third-class, 91 died. 55 out of 80 kids who were staying
in the crappy part of the ship were killed. 391 out of 450 of the men in third-class died. In terms of betting, if you were a woman without
much cash you were an odds-on favorite to die. In all, only one-quarter of third-class folks
survived when 62 percent of first-class folks survived. It also turned out that Americans had
a better chance of survival percentage-wise than Brits, and it was those two nationalities
that made up the bulk of the passengers. We can conclude, being a working-class family from
Wolverhampton was not the ideal demographic for sailing around icebergs in those days. To give you
an example, let’s look at the Sage family who was emigrating from Britain to the land of the free.
Mr. Sage and Mrs. Sage bordered the Titanic in England with third-class tickets and nine kids
in tow. None of them made it to America. The Andersson family from Sweden also had third-class
tickets, and all seven of them perished. As did the English Goodwins, also a family of seven, and
another family looking for a new start in the USA. Ok, so let’s get back to our stoic man
who’s just bid farewell to his wife and kid. Not too long after he smoked that cigarette the
ship tilted 30 to 45 degrees. The cacophony was absolutely deafening because the ship was coming
apart in the water. The lights were still partly on, but then there was flickering followed by
darkness. The people in lifeboats looked on in shock at the shadow of the behemoth sinking into
the depths like a slain sea monster from a Greek myth. The crashing, the screaming, the surreal
image, it was almost unbearable to look at. Onboard some people were being thrown
down the now heavily tilted ship. Some of them were literally pulverized
after being smashed against fixed objects; others flew through the air like ants in
a hurricane. As the ship pointed skywards, those who’d managed to cling together in
groups fell en masse hundreds of feet. Some of those people ended up in the
icy water and believe it or not a few of them were still in one piece.
Others weren’t so lucky. They were cast into the sea only to be whacked by
all the debris that came from the ship, stuff like giant pieces of timber and bits of
beds. The theory is, some of the debris went down but being buoyant it came back up with
a vengeance and hit the ill-starred swimmers. Maybe that was better than dying
slowly in the freezing water. To say those survivors were cold
would be an understatement. One of them later said the feeling was like
being pierced by a thousand knives. The temperature was about 28 °F (−2 °C), which
didn’t give people much chance of surviving. People did survive, though. One of those people
later said all he could hear was a terrible moaning sound, a situation he described as
being “horrifying, mysterious, supernatural.” Some of the folks in the lifeboats, not so far
away, said they felt hopeless as they peered into the darkness and listened to the poor
souls whose moans were carried by the fog. The situation was dire, to say the least.
You see, water is very dense. In fact, it’s over 800 times more dense than air. That
might not mean much to you, but it will if you ever find yourself immersed in very cold water.
What it means is that in the water you cool down a lot faster than you do when outside in the open.
In fact, the chilling is about 25 times faster. Let’s say you weren’t one of the passengers
that swallowed a load of water on impact and so your lungs didn’t drown. You’d still be
breathing very heavily, and your teeth would be chattering as if they were powered by a generator.
You’d also have the most horrific headache. The reason is nerves. They send a message to
your good old brain and your brain thinks, hmm, this guy’s head is freezing, I better
send some warm blood up there. Your brain is now your enemy, because the warm blood causes
swelling, and you get that terrible headache. Ok, so why do people shiver
and why do their teeth chatter? The reason is shivering activates muscles
to get moving and this warms up tissue in your body. Shivering is good for you.
As for those mad chattering teeth, that’s because all the muscles moving causes
the jaw to spasm. If your teeth ever start chattering and you’re not cold at all, you best
go see your doctor asap, or a psychiatrist. Back to our man in the ocean. He’s now been
in the water a few minutes and is fortunate enough to find some flotsam to grab hold
of in the shape of a rather well-designed cabinet. He’s hyperventilating due to the
shock, and that’s not so good for him. Too much of that can release too much air from the
blood and that can lead to reduced blood acidity. The upshot of that can be fainting, which
is not great when you are in the water. But our guy, he’s one of those strong,
silent types and he aint gonna let a bit of hyperventilation bother him. Plus, he’s
got that cabinet to hold onto. The problem is, he’s now shivering so much he almost looks
like he’s about to have a seizure. As we said, shivering is your friend in times of
coldness, but it’s a different matter when you are in the ocean or perhaps stuck
on a mountain top. That’s because in those situations you really need your muscles to work
for you. Our guy is shaking around on his cabinet, and that’s really not ideal. He needs his
muscles working fine. He needs his strength, but because of all that moving around
at times he almost loses his grip. He’s strong, but he’s no Wim Hoff, aka, the
Iceman. Not the contract killer guy, but the Dutch guy that’s trained his body to withstand extremely
cold temperatures. Because our survivor is not trained like that, his brain is in a kind of fight
or flight mode. As you likely know, a bit of this is good for you, but too many stress hormones
firing up that amygdala in your brain is not good. All this stress has caused our gracious man to
have some internal problems. For one, his arteries have shrunk and so his heart isn’t getting the
blood it needs. That means his starved heart is pumping like crazy. Meanwhile, that selfish brain
of his is portioning out blood to only the most vital organs, including it. What that means is
all those less important parts of his body aren’t getting as much blood, and some parts are going
numb. When those parts get really cold, they no longer work so well, and when the bloodless parts
get super cold the extremities can get frostbite. Suffice to say, our survivor has cold toes. Now
he’s been in the water for about ten minutes and basically, he can’t feel his feet. His greatest
risk right now isn’t hypothermia although you’d think it would be. The biggest problem is the
fact that when his legs and arms get too numb, he won’t be able to either cling to that
cabinet or even swim. This is known as “cold incapacitation” and it is likely the reason most
of those water-bound Titanic passengers died. Most people in that water were slightly incapacitated
after only two minutes, but after 15 minutes they were virtually paralyzed. In terms of drowning,
this usually gets you before hypothermia does. That’s not happened yet, though. What’s
also a stroke of luck is even though his heart is working overtime he hasn’t had a
heart attack due to the narrowing of blood vessels. It’s just good fortune that the
star of today’s show is as fit as a fiddle. To survive in freezing cold water, strength,
conditioning, and a healthy ticker are required. Even so, his body temperature is
not what it used to be an hour ago. His regular 98.6°F (37°C) has been
reduced, and if it goes below 90, he can say goodbye to consciousness, which
again is not great when you are in the water. Still, people aren’t all the same, and
so while some of those moaners kicked the bucket after only 15 minutes, twenty
minutes have passed and our guy is still holding onto that cabinet – albeit he’s now
turned a shade of blue and is not sure if he has legs any longer. Lucky for him most of
his upper half is on that floating debris. At around the 25-minute mark, he’s moved
from stage one of hyperthermia to stage two. The first stage includes what we’ve already
talked about, but now things get worse. We should say here that some people are just
amazing. The record for surviving a body temperature drop in the water was someone who was
once pulled out and lived to tell the tale even though their body temperature went down to 13.0
°C (55.4 °F). That shouldn’t happen, but it did. He’s now feeling kind of tired
and he’s even stopped shivering, but that’s actually a really bad thing even
though he feels better. He’s losing his mind, and though he’s able to hold onto his raft,
he’s kind of drifting in and out of reality. Part of him is in the water and the other part
is having a picnic with his dear wife and kid on an atypical English summer’s
day when it actually didn’t rain. He’s tripping out because his brain cells
aren’t getting the oxygen they need. This can also work out in his favor since when
cold the brain doesn’t need as much oxygen. What that means is he could go into cardiac arrest
but his brain would still be functioning. That person we just mentioned who holds the
record for having the lowest body temperature and surviving actually went into cardiac
arrest and survived 40 minutes in an air pocket before being pulled out of the water. Since
her brain was in chill mode and working, she was revived and later ended
up telling her story on CNN. Ok, so he’s in stage two hypothermia
and things aren’t looking good at all, but then a lifeboat approaches and it brings
him out of his reverie about that picnic. He can hardly be excited given his body is so numb,
but he can hold on. He’s not out of the water yet, though, both literally and figuratively, because
there’s a chance he might die from Post Rescue Collapse. This happens to about 20 percent of
people who’ve suffered some serious hypothermia after being in cold water. A person can be
dragged out of the water and go into shock, or they might suffer a serious heart arrhythmia,
or their blood pressure might dangerously drop. That doesn’t happen, and our man became
one of 14 people pulled from the water. Those lifeboats could have
actually saved a lot more people, most of them in fact if they
had been on the scene earlier. He certainly was a resilient guy,
because the rescue took 30 minutes and by that time almost all the moaning in
the water had stopped. Believe it or not, after an hour when hundreds of dead
bodies were seen floating in the water, four other men were found. Three survived
and one died from Post Rescue Collapse. Our guy was fine. He went
on to write a book called, “Why I’m never going on vacation
again” and he even stopped smoking. Now you need to watch, “50 Insane Facts
About Titanic You Didn't Know.” Or, have a look at, “Why Is Titanic
Still at the Bottom of the Ocean?”
