Intentions

After the Titanic disaster in 1912 in which more than 1500 people lost their lives – many because there were too few lifeboats – the U. S. government instituted a requirement for ships to carry an adequate number of lifeboats for the number of passengers on board. It seemed to be a reasonable requirement.

Three years later, in 1915, the S. S. Eastland, a steamship retrofitted with the requisite extra lifeboats and carrying 2,572 passengers, was beginning a tour on the Chicago River when it rolled over and capsized. An eyewitness account by writer Jack Woodford is recounted in Wikipedia:

And then movement caught my eye. I looked across the river. As I watched in disoriented stupefaction a steamer large as an ocean liner slowly turned over on its side as though it were a whale going to take a nap. I didn't believe a huge steamer had done this before my eyes, lashed to a dock, in perfectly calm water, in excellent weather, with no explosion, no fire, nothing. I thought I had gone crazy.

The resulting death toll was 844 including 22 entire families. The calamity was called the Eastland Disaster. An investigation determined the disaster was caused in part by a design flaw that made the ship top-heavy. But the coup de grâce, the last link in the causation of the disaster, was the weight of the additional lifeboats. Without the additional lifeboats, it is likely that no one would have died that day.