The Washington times., 1922-12-24

diagram showing now 0UU-r 00t
OCEAN Liner Rests ON the Greats
Of Two 300-Feot Waves.
IRON time to time the great ocean
liners come into New York with
- Mbroken windows, smashed stateroom
doom and sometimes an injured passenger
or tgo-but smaller ocean-goins vessels,
which have passed through the same ocean
disturbance come in undamaged.
Last September the great Aquitania,
one of the newest and biggest Of the
ocean greyhounds, was struck with
mountainous wave which reached up and
smashed things on the top deck, seventy
feet in the air. Windows and doors were
crushed and more than forty passengers
were. virtually washed out df their rooms,
which were flooded by the onrushihs
waters.
Msre recently the Presideuts Wilson
tooKson big sea, which reached up to
the Up deck and the pilot house. smashing
things and throwing the passengers and
crew off their feet. And yet smaller ves-
sells encountered the same seas and went
through them without scratch.
And early in December that enormous
ocean greyhound, the great Berengaria,
came to her wharf in New York Harbor
with forty feet of her port bow rail gone.
her steel bulwarks battered and bent and
a steel ladder twisted like corkscrew.
The great Aquitania Is over 900 feet
long, and its superstructure reaches 80
feet above the waterline, while the small
est :---thoroughly seaworthy, ocean-going
typa- of ship, the steam trawler, is $50
feet or less. Every day these little steam
vessels, some little less and some a little
more than $50 feet, leave Fulton Market,
in New York, or the Bay State Company's
wharf in Boston, or the East Coast
Fisheries dock in Rockland, Me-, and
push out to the ocean fishing grounds on
the Newfoundland banks.
!Fhese little trawlers are low in the
water, without any high superstructure,
and they continue along day after day in
alf kinds of weather without a mishap.
They are able to keep the seas in any sort
f.storm, and they always come home as
do other small freighters and liners.
The reason that the big ocean liner
comes in damaged. while the little trawler
comes in without mishap is because the
big. vessel is heavy and slow in seaway,
while the little trawler is quick" The
big ship does not rise to the onrushing
sesse Sometimes great rollers Of green
water. come up and over the deck and
stfike against the superstructure of the
vessel, rise still higher and rush along
the. top-most deck, breaking windows,
crashing in doors and sometimes sweeping
away the lifeboats high in the air.
But when the little steam trawler meets
this same wave it rises to the crest of the
wave and goes over the top of the rolling
sea. Being smaller and lighter, it keeps
ontop Of the water, and the heavy mass
of thousands of tons of sea water rolls
under the vessel instead of on top of it.
Scientists have studied the phenomenon
of ocean waves carefully, and IL is gen.
orally agreed that in the heaviest storms
waves seldom reach height of
more than fifty feet. When
fifty-foot wave does damage
seventy feet up on the upper
deck of an ocean liner, it Is be-
cause the onrushing wave has
been stopped,by the superstruct-
ure of the vessel and rises an Z
other twenty or thirty feet into .as.sf iaS8 f
the, air, thus reaching the pilot
house and boat deck. 1t is be-
ieved that the height of waves
cam usually be calculated in
feet. at about half the number
of miles per hour that the
wind is blowing.
Thus sixty-mile breeze will pL...
raise 'thirty-foot wave, while ~
a. ,hundred-mile hurricane will W."
raise fifty-foot wave. There oi
have, however, been instances
Of waves running one hundred
feet high, but these were probably tidal
waves caused by earthquake shocks under
tie ocean bottom. The famous old Lusi-
tania encountered hundred-foot wave on
ope, trip, which nearly reached to the top
OF. her smoke stack.
Science explains the action Of ocean