If you missed Mr. Salecker's presentation, you missed a very engaging and informative one! We all learned a ton about the Sultana disaster and Mr. Salecker's slide deck was amazing! They say a picture is worth a thousand words and the photo of the Sultana loaded down with the passengers as Mr. Salecker pointed out all the tiny details was captivating. His descriptions were clearly presented, easy to understand, and certainly helped to explain the various factors that contributed to the disaster.
As promised here is the content from the chat log:
07:35 PM
@Gary Morgan - How will your new book on the
Sultana differ from
Disaster on the Mississippi?
07:42 PM
@lelliott19 - A couple of people have asked about what happened last week. A regional Zoom outage impacted 3900 meetings including ours. We have rescheduled LTC Knudsen for SATURDAY June 12 at
7:30pm EDT
Link to the new announcement with registration
07:49 PM
@Gary Morgan - Do you know how many Andersonville prisoners were on board/killed?
07:52 PM Kathleen S. - I just visited the
Sultana monument near Knoxville TN.
08:00 PM
@gentlemanrob - Great Presentation
08:02 PM
@NFB22 - Wasn't there also some confusion on the actual count of passengers being loaded because the officer keeping count left for some reason, or something along those lines?
08:14 PM
@Western Reserve Volunteer - Sultana had a total of four interconnected boilers, which allowed the water to slosh from one side of the boat to other, causing hot spots on the boilers which eventually led to the boiler explosion. Why were the boilers interconnected, as opposed to separate? There isn’t any reason I can think of to make the water feeding the boiler be interconnected in that way, since you can always have separate filler pumps for each boiler. So what was the reasoning to that design? Was it just misguided economy on the part of her designers?
08:17 PM Larry DeM. - Was the Sultana involved in a race with another steamboat during the accident?
08:21 PM
@RLowe - Great and interesting presentation, Gene! Well done.
08:22 PM Rip E. - Excellent presentation
08:25 PM
@Western Reserve Volunteer - Interesting thought: had the Sultana been sunk by a coal torpedo and not a boiler explosion as it actually was, would the tragedy have actually had a lower body count?
08:26 PM Richard S. - what a heart thumping story.
08:28 PM
@Ole Miss - What was the ambient and the water temperature at the time of the accident?
08:38 PM Bruno P. - Superb presentation!
08:38 PM
@ucvrelics - Another Great Presentation. Thanks Gene.
08:39 PM Richard W. - Great presentation!
08:39 PM Rip E. - Who will be publishing your new book?
08:39 PM Nick G. - Fantastic presentation. Thank you so much
08:39 PM Gordon M. - Very good presentation. Thanks!
08:39 PM
@Gary Morgan - Have you ever looked at the two other nautical disasters that happened that month, the General Lyon fire (29 survivors out of 500-600 on board) and the collision of the transport steamer Massachusetts with the picket boat Black Diamond?
08:39 PM James M. - Thank you.
08:40 PM
@bdtex - how many known Sultana fatalities are buried in Memphis National Cemetery?
08:42 PM
@NH Civil War Gal - Mr. Salecker's book,
Disaster on the Mississippi: The Sultana Explosion, April 27, 1865 is available on AMAZON.COM. Be on the lookout for his new book on the Sultana planned for publication in 2022.
08:46 PM
@NH Civil War Gal - Mr. Salecker would like to call your attention to the Sultana Disaster Museum and his vast collection of Sultana artifacts and memorablilia on exhibition there. Visit the website at sultanadisastermuseum.com
There is a Sultana Association of Descendants and Friends. Their mission is to preserve the memory of the Sultana Disaster, the largest maritime disaster in American history, and the memory of the nearly 1,200 men and women who lost their lives that fateful evening of April 27,k 1865. Membership is also available to non-descendants. Visit their website at the sultanaassociation.com
08:47 PM
@A. Roy - Did I understand correctly: Is the wreck of the Sultana all buried now? Has there been any thought of doing archaeological work there? Would that be practical or fruitful?
08:54 PM Jim C. - I believe your representation of the heeling effect is in error. The boilers were connected at their lowest point by the mud drums. This was the only passage for water among the boilers. In your heeling depiction you show a gross affect across all the boilers. This is inaccurate. Each of the boilers would have virtually the same area of exposure, not greater from the end boilers.
08:55 PM Keith S. - Awesome presentation!
08:58 PM Mike L. - Excellent presentation, thank you.
09:02 PM
@Western Reserve Volunteer - Yes for some reason they are omitted, I think I found that illustration for steamboats.org
09:05 PM
@NH Civil War Gal - Coming up next Wednesday, our guest will be Charles R Knight, on his brand new book "From Arlington to Appomattox: Robert E. Lee's Civil War, Day by Day, 1861-1865"
09:08 PM
@Western Reserve Volunteer - Generally, low water explosion tend to occur in fire tube boilers above the firebox\furnace. The low water lets the boilers get too hot in a particular spot, that then lets go explosively. Logically, that hot spot is usually above where the fire is. Generally the result is an explosion which blows out the arch above the firebox. That can be seen in the boiler failure at the Gettysburg RR in the 1990s.
In that particular case, there was actually a built in weakness in the boiler, so the boiler gave out in a rather more controlled way. That was because the loco in question was a Canadian design. Leave it to the Canuks to build a better boiler.
09:10 PM
@bdtex -
@Rick Featherston and I visited the museum in June 2017. Pretty neat.
09:10 PM
@Western Reserve Volunteer - Most of my boiler knowledge comes from the RR context, the steamboats used very similar but not exactly the same technology. Marine boilers are a bit of a mystery to me, but boiler explosions are not! All too common back in the day…
09:15 PM Keith S. - AWESOME!!!
09:17 PM Sue Anne B. - I enjoyed the talk just as much as the first time I heard it. It is true that the Sultana disaster is not well enough known. Great presentation.
09:30 PM
@Western Reserve Volunteer - I’m not so sure I’d want burning, melting sugar aboard in a fire!
09:42 PM
@Western Reserve Volunteer - The pilot may have been more concerned with navigation and not the weight distribution, which in a flood would have been pretty all consuming (so many opportunities to hit snags) so really it’d definitely be both the responsibility and fault of that 1st Mate.
It’s interesting though that other steamboat captains were more than willing to take on way more passengers than was strictly legal. The riverboat business back then was pretty cutthroat. Agreed I’d never heard of it before tonight