FACULTY & STAFF
CITY TECH PROFESSOR SEEKS TO VINDICATE SURVIVORS’ ACCOUNTS OF ‘TITANIC’ DISASTER
A century after the sinking of the Titanic – a disaster retold and reconstructed in films, books, art and science – Richard Woytowich has presented a new theory about how the doomed luxury liner broke apart, giving credence to the accounts of survivors that were dismissed at the time.
Richard Woytowich
In Maryland in early April 2012, just a few days before the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the RMS Titanic, City Tech Professor of Computer Engineering Technology Richard Woytowich, a marine forensics expert, presented a paper on the disaster at the First
International Marine Forensics Symposium. The paper looked at statements made by survivors at the official British and American inquiries, and re-examined key portions of their testimony in light of what engineers and other technologists now know about how the ill-fated passenger liner broke apart. Professor Woytowich has been studying how the ship sank since 1998. In 2007, working with technical historian Roy Mengot, he developed a computer model showing that the breakup of the ship could
have started in the ship’s bottom rather than at the uppermost decks, as is popularly assumed. That work, which grew into a technical paper presented locally in 2009 and published in a journal in 2010, was prompted by the release of photographs taken in 2005 by an expedition to the wreck in which the fractured edges of two pieces of the ship’s bottom were shown. When Woytowich first saw the edges of the actual bottom pieces of the wreckage, he immediately felt that he was looking at the parts that failed first, not those that failed last. This issue could not be resolved completely by building a computer model. Some aspects could be investigated by looking at the wreckage, but others could only be resolved by re-examining the testimony of survivors. The vast majority of survivors who testified at one or both of the inquiries did not voluntarily state or know, if asked, whether the ship broke apart or not. However, more than a dozen survivors testified that they saw Titanic break in two while still afloat and only four stated that the ship sank intact. Those who said the ship broke apart were not believed by the official inquiries, and their testimony was only vindicated when the wreck was discovered lying in two pieces separated by 2,000 feet of smaller debris on the bottom of the Atlantic. Woytowich believed that there would be a dual benefit to re-evaluating the testimony of the Titanic survivors who participated in the two inquiries. Re-reading their testimony in light of the reconstruction that he and Mengot developed might improve our understanding of the testimony, and it might lead to improvements in the reconstruction of the breakup. If, as Professor Woytowich believes, the breakup started in the bottom as opposed to the top of the ship, then much of the process would have occurred near or below the surface of the water, and the extent to which each survivor could see what happened would have depended on his or her location in the near pitch-black of a moonless continued on page 12 http://www.citytech.cuny.edu/alumni
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