On May 4, 7:45*pm, Nightjar wrote:
On 04/05/2012 17:59, harry wrote:





On May 4, 10:53 am, "Dave Liquorice"
*wrote:
On Thu, 3 May 2012 22:44:09 -0700 (PDT), harry wrote:
I'd assume that they would vent the steam and douse the fires
before
that stage. Certainly Jack Phillips, the Titanics radio operator,
was
sending messages that he couldn't read other stations due to steam
and air noise.

How exactly does one do that?
It's on a par with "opening the seacocks"

The boilers would have safety valves which no doubt vent somewhere
safely. Manually open them? Or far more likely have another valve
that opens to a safe vent. Dousing the fires might be slightly more
tricky due to thermal shock on the cast iron parts and not wanting to
produce too much steam that the flues/funnels couldn't cope with.

.
* There are safety valves. They would lift if the engines stopped. They
do not vent to the funnels.

They vented up the side of the funnel and would have had easing gear,
which allowed them to be opened manually.

But there's no way you would want to remove tons of water at steam
temperature. It is the ultimate catastrophy for a steamboiler. The
furnace tubes would overheat and collapse in minutes.

I doubt that any of the engineers would have expected the boilers ever
to be needed again, once they saw the extent of the damage to the ship.
Boiler rooms 5 and 6 were at risk from the flooding and cold sea water
hitting a boiler under pressure would cause an explosion, to add to
their problems. It was vital to reduce pressure in those boilers as
quickly as possible, hence the venting. In fact, all boilers not needed
to run pumps or dynamos would probably have have had an emergency shut down.

And how would you "douse the fires"? You would close the dampers but
the fires would take hours to burn the tons of coal in there.

The fires would have been raked out onto the boiler room floor.



You got to be mental.
How are you going to rake out almost a hundred tons of white hot coal
onto the boilerhouse floor without burning your self to a cinder,
setting fire to the bunkers and gassing your self?

Exactly how would you do it?

What would be the point in any case?

Have you ever even seen a coal fired steam boiler in operation?