A Titanic Tragedy

The lifeboat capacity of the Titanic was 64 vessels, meaning that the ship, had it filled all available space, could have saved over 4,000 passengers given that the average boat held 65 people. However, laws for lifeboat requirements for passenger ships had last been updated in 1896, sixteen years before the Titanic set sail. The twenty lifeboats actually on board at the time of the voyage could hold only 1,178 people out of 2,223 aboard. This was compliant with the law of the time in 1912. The given requirements that Titanic would have had to follow assigned the number of life boats based on the weight of the ship, not the number of passengers. The law specified that any passenger ship up to 10,000 gross registered tons was required to carry 16 lifeboats. As the law was outdated, ships were much larger than when it was first written. Titanic weighed 46,329 gross registered tons, over four times what the law stipulated. Yet, it still only had to have 16 lifeboats. The ship designer even went beyond the law and added 20 lifeboats rather than 16.