[conservatism_IS_compassion]

2000 people times the 2 hours it took to sink equals 4000 man hours of labor.

I think part of it is the fact that it took a significant amount of time for the engineer to tumble to the fact that the ship would in fact go down . . . which explains why some of the adventurous passengers boarded rafts - and were later faulted for cowardice for not having stayed with the ship and gone down with her, giving place in the lifeboats to women/children.

So that slashes the number of man-hours. What slashes it even more is that well over half of the people would have been women and children not able to do much physical work. And lastly, there was no plan and no tools in place to make use of the manpower that was available.

And as to making a refuge on the iceberg, the ship had no facility for deboarding onto the berg and no way to approach it safely without probably colliding and doing further damage, accelerating the sinking of the ship.

There are plenty of things that coulda, woulda, shoulda after the fact - but the bottom line is that if the ship you're boarding is gonna sink, don't board her. They should have had lifboats enough for the entire population on board, but they didn't. And even the ones they did have were, predictably, not all available due to the listing of the ship. Well, duh! - if you're gonna have to abandon ship it probably will be listing!

The fundamental problem was hubris. The ship "couldn't" sink, so why bother with lifeboats, and why worry about icebergs. It was all downhill from there.

[Boiling point]

My thought was that groups of men could use the life boats to approach the icebergs, use tools from the engine room to chop access ways or anchor rope ladders to allow people and supplies to be loaded onto the icebergs and shuttle people over with the lifeboats. I understand that many people were unable or unwilling to work, but you'd be surprised how much say, 100 men could do if faced with the alternative. The anchors and anchor chains on the Titanic weighed many hundreds of tons. If aloud to drop from the ship, this would raise the damaged areas, reducing the speed/pressure, of water infiltration, increasing the effectiveness of the pumps. That would at least buy time which (unknown to them at the time) could have allowed the Carpathia to arrive before going under. Anyway, Just some fantasy engineering on my part, I have several other ideas that would have slowed or stopped the ship from sinking.