The Titanic was a state-of-the-art, ultra-luxury passenger liner that suffered a tragic sinking due to a lack of lifeboats and the limitations of its watertight bulkheads. The tragedy led to the introduction of formal safety assessment (FSA) techniques and the strengthening of maritime safety regulations, which have helped to increase safety by assessing the probability and significance of various accident risks.
Do you know the story of the Titanic, the world’s most beautiful luxury cruise ship, where thousands of people on a dream trip lost their lives in a split second? The tragedy was made famous by the movie Titanic, which was based on the event. The Titanic was an ultra-luxury ocean liner built in 1912 with the best technology and materials of the day, and was known as the “ship of dreams” by people of the time. For Europe’s wealthy and adventurous, America was a new land of opportunity, and the Titanic was more than just a means of transportation for them, it was a symbol of status and wealth. The thousands of passengers aboard the Titanic expected to travel in comfort, enjoying the finest services and facilities while crossing the Atlantic, but their dreams were quickly shattered.
As the movie shows, of the 3,327 people aboard the Titanic, only 710 survived. The reason for such a high number of casualties was the ship’s lack of lifeboats, which allowed only one-third of the passengers to escape, and the ship’s weak watertight bulkhead system, which prevented water from entering the ship itself, which caused the ship to sink so quickly. If there had been more lifeboats on the Titanic, or if the ship had held on a little longer instead of sinking, many more people would have survived, and the beautiful love story of the tragedy would have been preserved.
So why did the Titanic, an ultra-luxury liner that utilized the most advanced technology of its time, collapse in such a futile manner? There are two main reasons: first, lax regulations at the time allowed the Titanic to sail with too few lifeboats; and second, the flooding in the actual event was more severe than the watertight bulkhead system was designed to handle. Early 20th century maritime safety regulations did not strictly regulate the number of lifeboats for the number of people on board a passenger ship, so the crew and passengers, who believed in the safety of the ship, were unprepared for the lack of lifeboats.
However, the sinking of the Titanic led to a major change in maritime safety standards: the law was changed to require that the number of lifeboats must match the number of passengers on board in order for a ship to function as a passenger vessel. The design of watertight bulkhead systems and drainage systems has also become more robust. However, no matter how robust a watertight bulkhead system is designed, it cannot completely eliminate the risk of sinking, because humans cannot predict nature: no matter how robustly a ship is designed, no one knows what strong natural forces it will encounter.
That’s why engineers have developed a branch of engineering that attempts to prepare for it by making quantitative predictions of risk to the best of human ability. This risk prediction technique is called a Formal Safety Assessment (FSA). FSA is a technique that quantitatively calculates the risk of an event using probabilities. Let’s take the Titanic as an example. The probability of the Titanic hitting an iceberg and damaging a part of the ship is P1. Then, the probability of the water bulkhead system failing to hold back the rushing water when the ship is damaged is P2. In the same way, the probability of the rushing water damaging the ship’s electrical, power, and engine systems can be determined. However, not all of these probabilities have the same impact. For example, the probability of the ship hitting an iceberg and damaging the ship is very low, but the impact of the damage caused by the iceberg on the ship’s sinking is very high.
FSA helps you proactively analyze potential risks and set realistic priorities for addressing them. We call each event S and assign it a degree of risk. For example, if we rate the risk of an event with a probability of P1 as S1, we can calculate the risk of the total event, which is called “risk” in FSA techniques and is expressed as
Risk = Pn x Sn
(where n is the number of cases, n=1,2,3…)
With FSA, we can quantitatively calculate the number of risky events that could have occurred before the Titanic hit an iceberg, damaged the ship, and sank, claiming countless victims. By sorting these risks in order of magnitude, we can prioritize which systems to design to be robust. For example, on a ship like the Titanic, the probability of hitting an iceberg and damaging the ship is low, but even though the probability of damaging the watertight bulkhead system is low, the risk of damaging it is very high, so the risk will have a higher value, and you can conclude that the watertight bulkhead system should be strengthened just in case.
If FSA had been used in the design of the Titanic, the ship would have been stronger, and many people would have survived if the watertight bulkhead system had been stronger, slowing the ship’s sinking. However, FSA is inherently a probabilistic technique, and it is impossible to make 100% accurate predictions. This is because probability is basically the number of uncertainties in a coin that makes it impossible to predict whether it will come up heads or tails when flipped. Therefore, safety engineers around the world are still developing ways to reduce the error that probability inevitably introduces into each risk calculation in order to improve the accuracy of FSA.
