Posted on 07/23/2008 1:00:22 PM PDT by nickcarraway
American entrepreneur Gregg Bemis finally gets courts go-ahead to explore the wreck off Ireland
It is the best known shipwreck lying on the Irish seabed, but it is only today that the owner of the Lusitania will finally begin the first extensive visual documentation of the luxury liner that sank 93 years ago.
Gregg Bemis, who bought the remains of the vessel for £1,000 from former partners in a diving business in 1968, has been granted an imaging licence by the Department of the Environment. This allows him to photograph and film the entire structure, and should allow him to produce the first high-resolution pictures of the historic vessel.
The RMS Lusitania sank off the coast of Cork in May 1915 when a German U-boat torpedoed it. An undetermined second explosion is believed to have speeded its sinking, with 1,198 passengers and crew losing their lives.
Bemis is hoping that the week-long filming project, which begins today, will prove his theory that the Lusitania was carrying explosives, and that these were the cause of the mysterious second blast.
“I want to find out where the second explosion took place and why,” he said. “I believe there were explosives on board. I can tell the whole world that, but they’re not going to believe me until we get down there and get proof.”
JWM Productions will film the project for a television series to be shown on the Discovery Channel next year.
The 80-year-old entrepreneur only won the right to explore the wreckage,
(Excerpt) Read more at timesonline.co.uk ...
This is going by memory so I could be wrong but I thought I saw a TV doc about the Lusitania sinking and it claimed the liner had an escort part of the journey across the Atlantic then when the liner was near the Irish coast the escorts went away eventhough the coast off Ireland was a favorite U-Boat hunting ground. This was part of the theory the Brits wanted the Lusitania torpodeod to bring the US into the war.
His theory is based on the fact that, to keep a very large ship like Lusitania in trim, the engine crew (aka Black Gang) had to be constantly moving the coal from one bunker to another; hence keeping the boilers fired involved what amounted to continuous coal mining, a process that produced huge amounts of highly explosive (when mixed with the oxygen in the air) coal dust. Then, when the torpedo entered this explosive environment it functioned as a super detonator, igniting the clouds of coal dust the same way an electric spark can operate in a grain elevator filed with grain dust.
The Mexicans declined the offer, after deciding it was not feasible in the slightest.
http://www.usmm.org/ww1merchant.html
I concede that the majority were targeted after our entrance to war. Of course these do not include Americans on British ships.
Someone please explain how you buy a shipwreck, and then have to get a license from the government to take pictures of what you purchased???
You are pro-German! Therefore you are pro-Hitler!
“scavengers”
I read somewhere that in 1982 a salvage diver succeeded in detaching three of the Lusitania’s four propellers.
Later saw on TV one of those turning up in a salvage yard.
The hull of the wreck has mostly collapsed. Since it lies starboard side down, I wonder how the explorer-owner will locate the torpedo impact point.
Kind of like will some Titanic wrecksite expedition bore into the ocean bottom and reveal the exact nature of the rip in Titanic’s starboard side.
Too bad it was pacified by muslims...
My point was subtler than you are giving me credit for.
And I know which war was which.
Maybe the Lusitania was carrying contraband munitions. That would account for the secondary explosions and for its targeting by the German navy.
But are they diplomats we LIKE?
It will be fascinating to see if they actually can photograph the area in question or if there is enough left to draw any conclusions. If the sea bed were littered with artillery projectiles that'd be pretty conclusive but that's an awful lot to expect after nearly 100 years in shallow water.
I understood that it was “always” known that a “some” munitions were aboard (cases of weapons ?) but only a small amount, and that the amount (or kind) of listed weapons should not have either caused that big of an explosion, or that the second explosion was in the wrong place for what was listed.
??
Coal dust exploding is usually associated with the USS Maine explosion in Havana, not the Lusitania. (Rickover's analysis ?)
History is written by the victors and before you say anything, my late Maternal Grandfather, son of German immigrants, was a Corporal in the Infantry, 42nd Infantry Division, AEF in the trenches in France. He came home with Krupp steel in his hip along with his own bone splinters. Grandpa believed in what he did and the rightness of it. I respect his memory, but I am also trying to be objective about history.
Did the Lusitania burn coal or anthracite?
Anthracite is comparatively dustless and burns hotter.
Name two.
Fortunately, the Blarney Stone is not located in New York City.
She would have been torpedoed anyway - for the simple reason that the German U-boat commander, Kapitanleutnant Walter Shwieger on the U-20, did not know it was the Lusitania he had hit until she started to sink. (The U-boat war 1914 - 1918, Edwyn A. Gray).
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