Everyone who testified about the Eastland agreed on one thing: that she stood up with water in her double bottom and leaned without it. The disagreement, which ran through the inquest, the federal board and twenty years of litigation, was about what that meant. To the owners, the inspectors and in the end the courts, it meant that she was a safe ship when the water was properly handled, and that on 24 July 1915 it was not. To the naval architects who were asked, it meant that her safety had been left to a valve. The testimony about the valve is the most exact thing in the record, and it is worth following the water through the system.
The system
The hull had a double bottom divided into tanks, five on each side, separated by bulkheads running fore and aft and across. Water came in from outside through one sea valve, a gate valve about ten inches across, on the port side, low on the bilge in the engine room, about six feet below the waterline by the mate’s estimate. From it a pipe led to a manifold, “a square box,” in William Nack’s words, with a valve on top for each tank, and from the manifold a pipe to each tank, none more than three or four feet long. To fill a tank you opened the sea valve, which let the river into the manifold, and then the tank valve. To empty one you closed the sea valve, opened the tank valve and set a reciprocating duplex pump to work on the manifold, discharging forward on the starboard side. There was no gauge. The customary way to know what was in the tanks, the second assistant engineer said in 1915, “was to pump the tanks all empty, and then you knew.”
Nack had been her chief engineer in 1904, and he told Redfield’s board how he had learned her. “We had a system on that boat that we studied out, and found that by filling a certain tank, which was No. 3 tank, right under the boilers, that would be sufficient water to ballast that boat up with any amount of people on her, and filled No. 3 tank full, so she was not in a condition for the water to slush around in there in case that she should roll; and now, after we got out, if she should have a little list one side or the other we would use No. 4 tank just to straighten her up, and she would run that way continually.” No. 3 held about 250 tons and took “close to half an hour” to fill; No. 4, the trimming tank, took ten or twelve minutes and carried fifteen or twenty tons. The pump could empty a tank about as fast as the sea could fill it. “We filled them every morning,” he said, “before we left any passengers on that boat at all.” Asked why he kept No. 3 full to the top, he explained free surface in an engineer’s words: “if you had a tank half full it would be as bad as if you didn’t have any water,” because “the water would go in the same direction as the boat would list,” and “it would hold her down on that side until you straightened her in some way to get her to go on the other side.”
That was the practice of 1904. On the day in July of that year when she listed off South Haven, the water had been let out to cross the bar and used from the largest tanks “for sanitary purposes, cooking, etc.” Nack said that after 17 July “we kept on our toes, paid particular attention to it,” and that in his view the ship had no ballast tanks at all except No. 3: “As long as No. 3 port and starboard was filled the other tanks were simply other compartments.” The inspectors’ letter of 18 July 1904 had suspected a leaking bulkhead between the two sides of No. 3; the owners reported it tight.
The men of 1915
Joseph Erickson became chief engineer in 1914, with a new company and a new master. In the winter of 1914 and 1915 the ship lay in the canal at Benton Harbor with her manholes open, and the sea valve, which had water standing in it, froze and cracked; when it thawed the river ran into the port tanks and she settled on the bottom with a list. A diver patched the plating outside so that the valve could be taken out and a new one of the same size and type put in. “Didn’t increase the capacity of the pipe?” the mate was asked. “No, sir.”
Fred Snow joined as second assistant on the Wednesday night before the disaster. He had ten years on the Lakes with the Pere Marquette car ferries, which used water ballast “but not this type of tanks.” He was told by the chief to use Nos. 2 and 3, “apparently they were the most effective and responded the quickest,” and paid no attention to 1, 4 and 5. He did not know whether any tank was full or empty when he came on watch at six on the Saturday morning. Peter Erickson, the oiler, nineteen, did: at about half past six Snow had him open the pump valves on 2 and 3 on each side, and they were emptied, “as we always did that every morning while in the harbor of Chicago.” Asked whether the port tanks were ever used “to tip the starboard gangway up nearer to a level with the docks,” he said, “Yes, often.”
So the Eastland loaded her 2,500 with her tanks pumped out in the river, which is the opposite of Nack’s rule, and the men who did it had been aboard, between them, for a year, two days and one season. Nobody had written the rule down. There was no plate on the manifold, nothing on the certificate, nothing in the regulations. The harbour master, who had watched her come and go for two summers, had told Pedersen the week before that “it would help the company along if he kept it on an even keel.” Pedersen’s answer, by Weckler’s account, was that “he fills in the lake and didn’t need any water ballast.”
Seventeen minutes
The engine room’s own account of the morning is short, because the chief declined to testify and the others knew little. When she listed to the dock during loading, water was let into the port tanks. When she went to port, “we admitted water in the starboard tanks and also was pumping out the port bilge aft,” Snow said. The oiler opened Nos. 2 and 3 on the starboard side at the manifold, “about 17 minutes—maybe more—before the boat went over,” while Snow went to the sea valve. “It listed a little more and finally went quite a little. Then the list stopped. The engineer said: ‘Well, I guess we’ve got her.’” Could they fill the starboard tanks and empty the port ones at the same time? “No.” Erickson’s own reported words were that he had been “flooding the right side of the boat” through two tanks a side and “thought two were enough.” He was pumping out the port bilge aft at the same time, which was the right instinct and could not have been fast.
Three things made the system slow on that side at that moment. The only inlet was on the port side, the low side, going deeper as she heeled, and the water for the high tanks had to come in there and up through the manifold. The tanks were being filled, not full, so that whatever was in them was free to run downhill. And the port tanks, which had been given water during loading to counter the first list, were now on the low side with their water in them. Wood, who examined the wreck for the coroner, added a fourth possibility: that the sea valve, “very low down on the bilge of the vessel,” was in the mud by the time they were trying to fill, “and possibly may have been in the mud and choked.”
Free water
The naval constructor James Ackerson, sent from the Navy Department to sit with Redfield’s board, explained in the plainest language in the record why a tank partly full is worse than one empty. “If you have a tank in the bottom of a ship filled with water, and it is absolutely filled, no air space, and the water can not move, it is exactly the same as if you put sand or iron in there equal to that weight of water.” But “if the compartment is not filled and the water is free to move the water acts as a pendulum and not only changes the center of gravity by the water shifting but it also changes what is commonly known as the ‘metacenter’ of the ship.” The distance between the two, he said, “is what determines the ability of a vessel to come to the upright once it is listed. If you push the center of gravity up or if you push the metacenter up the effect is the same.” Free water pushes the metacentre down. “So far as lowering the metacenter is concerned, it makes no difference whether the water is 3 inches or 3 feet deep provided it is free to move.”
Then the state’s attorney’s man put the Eastland’s case to him as a hypothesis. If she had no stability without her tanks, what did that mean? “It would mean that with no water in the tanks her metacentric height would be zero.” Take her light, with no passengers and no water, and her centre of gravity would stand a certain height above the keel; put 2,500 people on her decks “and the passengers would make the center of gravity higher than before.” If that brought the centre of gravity up to the metacentre, “there would be no initial stability, and, in theory, if you dropped a 5-pound weight on one side of the vessel it would start to heel.” And if, in that condition, you began to fill her tanks? “Then she would have a negative metacentric height, which would mean she would push over with the slightest touch.” Partly filled, “she has less than no stability; she has a negative stability.” Ackerson did not say the Eastland was in that condition; he said nobody knew, because nobody had the data: “if you have all the information and the lines of the vessel and the data from inclining experiments, you could tell.”
George McDermott of Cornell, who had been asked about her form before she was built, wrote the same thing from Ithaca two days after the disaster without having seen her. His recommended hull was for a metacentric height of “about 18 inches in fully laden condition,” laden meaning 1,000 passengers. From the newspaper pictures he judged her “at least the height of one deck greater in depth than that for which the form was selected; this together with the increase from 1,000 to 2,500 passengers, if I am correct, would affect the metacentric height materially.” Her gangports were “at least one deck too low, thereby reducing the ‘range of stability.’” And he had read that someone had run water into the double bottom to right her while the passengers were embarking: “this was an absolutely wrong thing to do, nothing being more prejudicial to stability than free water.”
Wood, from the wreck, judged her lines “that of a very unstable shape,” with “no midship bearings or flat body in her half length,” and said she had been kept upright when loaded “only … by the liberal use of water ballast in her double bottom, thereby increasing her draft and lowering the center of gravity.” He also said, when a juror pressed him, that whether she had any stability at all “could only be determined by an experiment,” and that he had never made one. Nobody had.
What the courts made of it
The commissioner’s finding in the limitation case, approved in 1933 and affirmed in 1935, was that the loss of life came “through the negligence of the engineer in charge of the operation of her water ballast tanks, in that they were improperly handled and the water therein not properly distributed so as to give her stability,” and that the ship was “seaworthy in every respect, properly equipped and manned and fit for the carriage of passengers if properly handled.” The claimants argued that those two findings could not both stand: a ship that was unstable until a man did something to her was not seaworthy when she began her voyage. The Seventh Circuit answered that the Limitation Act, unlike the Harter Act, did not require the owner to have used due diligence to make her seaworthy; it asked only whether the negligence was his own or his managing officers’, and the engineer was neither. The committee of supervising inspectors had reached the engineer’s conclusion two months after the disaster, in a sentence that the courts did not quote: “No passenger vessel should depend upon liquid ballast to insure the vessel’s stability. When ballast is required it should be permanent in character. Liquid ballast should be permitted for trimming purposes.”
Two hundred and fifty tons of lake water, in one tank, filled to the top before the first passenger came aboard, was the Eastland’s margin. It was never written anywhere but in the memory of the men who had sailed her, and in 1915 none of them was aboard.