Titanic had the legal amount of lifeboats it was required to have. But Titanic (and her sister Olympic) was the biggest ship the world had ever seen at that point, and the law hadn’t been written with something that vast in mind. Harland and Wolff decided to stick to the letter of the law and not one safety net more.
The crew hadn’t run their lifeboat loading process before departure. It had been cancelled. So the professional response team wasn’t prepared to handle the disaster and load the boats in an efficient manner, since the president captain cancelled the drill.
There were also no binoculars available to the crew in the crow’s nest, and though they were warned about ice and it was common knowledge there would be ice that time of year, they didn’t heed it.
Finally, when it was clear that the ship would sink, the order was given not to cause a panic. Of course a panic wouldn’t have helped. But the steward crew was so pointed on the idea that there was nothing to worry about that people believed them and didn’t want to get into the boats until they started to really see the danger. To the passengers, it seemed as if it were much safer to stay on the large ship than to get into a tiny boat in the middle of the ocean. They hadn’t been properly informed that there was a very real and present danger.
As for the people in third class, they weren’t locked down there to keep them from flooding the decks due to the sinking. The doors were locked in a lot of places to keep them in third class in general. As the sinking began, the stewards were too busy trying to get everyone in life vests and up to the deck to remember to go unlock all the gates. The dedication to keeping the third class people in their place was ultimately their doom.
Furthermore, a lot of third class passengers didn’t speak English. They were in huge, cavernous belly of a ship where everything was painted white. It all looked largely the same, and they couldn’t read the posted signs. There wasn’t dedicated staff to help the third class passengers navigate up to A deck, so many of them were trapped.
They were so sure that they had built the best ship in the world and that the failsafes wouldn’t fail that they didn’t prepare for the eventuality of a disaster.
Oh also, this didn’t cause the sinking, but the ship was on fire almost the entire journey which is an apt metaphor all by itself isn’t it.
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