The sinking of the passenger liner, Lusitania has been shrouded in mystery for over 80 years. Few argue the incident lead to the US involvement in the first World War. But aside from the politics of the day, the "Queen of the Seas" as she and her close relative, Titanic were known, embodied designs portrayed as virtually unsinkable.

The Discovery Channel hired JMS to use their salvage engineering and naval architecture expertise to shed new light on how the 800 ft vessel sank in only 18 minutes. The ship was carrying 1,959 passengers and 700 crewmembers when a single German U-Boat torpedo struck her on May 7th 1915.

Most investigations to date have concerned themselves with the possibility that more than one torpedo struck the ship. Some say munitions, or even coal dust explosions were likely causes. Any serious engineering analysis performed previously dealt with brittle failure of the ship's hull or boiler explosions as possible explanations of severe damage and rapid sinking.

JMS created an engineering computer model of the vessel and 3D computer animation to analyze the effects of torpedo damage and determine if this matched survivor accounts of how the damaged vessel behaved.

The exact location and extent of the torpedo damage is unknown because the sunken ship is lying on her damaged starboard side. Survivors place the impact roughly below the bridge in her forward wing coal bunkers - of which the ship had many. These ran outboard of the boiler rooms along the length of the ship. Bunker doors and adjacent boiler room doors would have been open to facilitate fueling the 29 huge boilers that consumed nearly 1,000 tons of coal a day. If flooding began in one of these bunkers, progressive flooding from one compartment to the next was a legitimate explanation. Also, open portholes contributed to down flooding as the vessel took on an immediate 15° list which aggravated her situation still further.

Although the vessel was designed to sustain more severe damage, advanced safety systems such as automatic doors between compartments could not be activated because the vessel's steam pressure was lost when the torpedo struck and damaged the steam piping.

The engineering computer model revealed that if the bunker doors where open, enough seawater could pass into the vessel and cause her to sink as rapidly as reported. The computer model's list and trim continually matched the witness accounts of each stage of the 18 minute sinking.

The Discovery Channel's documentary on the Lusitania aired nationally April 12, 1997.

Contact Us