I Am Sure We Have All Heard Of The Tragedy Of The Titanic,

where in 1912,

832 passengers had died in the Titanic tragedy, or in the Lusitania which had been torpedoed and sunk, with a death toll of 788 passengers, but how many of us have heard about the sinking of the Eastland? where 844 passengers died on a sluggish urban river, 20 feet from the dock, even more amazingly some of the survivors of the 2,573 passengers and crew walked across the exposed hull to safety, never even getting their feet wet, the sinking of the Eastland was on July 24th. 1915,

safety issues made after one tragedy, the Titanic and the installation of more lifeboats on the Eastland led to another tragedy, the Eastland was one of five vessels chartered to carry Western Electric workers and their families on a day-long outing from downtown Chicago to a park 38 miles across Lake Michigan to the southeast, more than 7,000 tickets had been sold, the Eastland was licensed to carry 2,500 passengers plus crew, as the Eastland filled with passengers between 7:10 and 7:15 a.m, it began to list to port, away from the wharf, the movement didn't seem to alarm the partygoers, but it caught the attention of the harbormaster and some other observers on land, the 275-foot-long boat had then righted itself, if only briefly,

at 7:23, it listed even further to port, water poured through the open gangways into the engine room, the crew there, realising what was about to happen, scrambled up a ladder to the main deck, few, if any, of the passengers boarding that day noticed that the Eastland carried a full complement of lifeboats, life rafts and life preservers, it was in compliance with the law, and that created a serious hazard,

the 1912 sinking of the Titanic gave rise to a "lifeboats-for-all" movement among international marine safety officials, in the United States, Congress passed a bill requiring lifeboats to accommodate 75 percent of a vessel's passengers, and in March, 1915, President Woodrow Wilson signed what became known as the LaFollette Seaman's Act,

during the debate over the bill, the general manager of the Detroit & Cleveland Navigation Company had warned that some Great Lakes vessels, with their shallow drafts, "would turn 'turtle' if you attempted to navigate them with this additional weight on the upper decks." too few legislators listened, by July, 1915, the Eastland, which had been designed to carry six lifeboats, was now carrying 11 lifeboats, 37 life rafts (about 1,100 pounds each) and enough life jackets (about six pounds apiece) for all 2,570 passengers and crew, most were stowed on the upper decks, no tests were conducted to determine how the additional weight affected the boat's stability—even though it already had a troubled history,

the Eastland was built in 1902 to carry 500 people for lake excursions and to haul produce on the return trips to Chicago, the boat had no keel, was top-heavy and relied on poorly designed ballast tanks in the hold to keep it upright, repeated modifications increased the vessel's speed and passenger capacity—and made it less stable,  

for the technical, George W. Hilton, whose 1995 book, Eastland: Legacy of the Titanic, provides a meticulous investigation, critical to a boat's stability is what is known as its metacentric height, floating objects are like an upside-down pendulum, with a centre of gravity and the ability to roll, or heel, to either side before righting itself, the distance between fully upright and the maximum heel—the point beyond which it will capsize— is its metacentric height, referring to the Eastland, Hilton wrote: “For such a ship, where the distribution of passengers was highly variable, normal practise would have been to provide a metacentric height of two to four feet, fully loaded.”

changes made to the Eastland before July 24 had reduced its metacentric height to four inches,

within two minutes after it listed 45 degrees to port, it rolled over, as reporter Carl Sandburg wrote for the International Socialist Review, “like a dead jungle monster shot through the heart.” by 7:30 a.m., the Eastland was lying on its side in 20 feet of murky water, still tied to the dock, the vessel rolled so quickly, there was no time to launch the lifesaving equipment, affixing blame for the accident began immediately, Eastland Captain Harry Pedersen, chief engineer Joseph Erickson and other crew members were taken into custody on Saturday—in part to protect them from the angry crowd that had gathered at the scene, despite the haste, it would take 24 years to conclude litigation related to the Eastland disaster, sorry this has been a long post, but it is an interesting story, the largest shipping accident of a US vessel claiming more passenger lives that either the Titanic or the Lusitania, but why have so few people heard of it or remembered it? in the case of the Lusitania, it was an act of war, in the case of the Titanic as one writer allegedly wrote about the Eastland, 'there was nobody famous on board'.