According to engineers from the Imperial College London, the streak in the photograph may have been caused by a fire in one of the Titanic’s coal bunkers—a three-story-tall room that stored much of the coal that fueled the ship’s engines. Molony believes that the fire had started as early as three weeks before the Titanic set out for its maiden voyage, but was ignored for fear of bad press and the desire to keep the ship on schedule.“Britannia rules the waves,” Molony says. “They’d been facing massive competition from the Germans and others for the valuable immigrant trade. You don’t want don’t want a loss of public confidence in the whole of the British maritime marine.”Just after survivors made landfall, several people who worked on the ship’s engines cited a coal fire as the cause of the shipwreck. An official inquiry by British officials in 1912 mentioned it, too, but Molony says the narrative was downplayed by the judge who oversaw it.“He was a shipping interest judge, and, in fact, he presided at a toast at the Shipwrights' Guild four years earlier saying ‘may nothing ever adversely affect the great carrying power of this wonderful country,’” Molony says. “So he closes down efforts to pursue the fire and he makes this finding that the iceberg acted alone.”
However, some people are still not convinced. Matthew Anderson of Shipwreck World offers this explanation:
Further contradictions were made to Dr. Rein and Moloney’s findings come from Titanic historians Mark Chirnside, Bruce Beveridge, Ioannis Georgiou, Steve Hall, J. Kent Layton and Bill Wormstedt. All of whom are authors of the digital book Titanic: Fire and Ice (Or What You Will), published as a direct contradiction to Moloney’s documentary and findings. The book points out the bulkhead and coal bunker in question were located directly underneath the First Class Swimming Bath. The book’s text argues, “If temperatures in the coal bunker directly below it had reached as high as 500-1,000°C (or 932-1,832°F), then the water in the pool would likely have been nearly boiling hot as water boils at only 100°C (212°F). Certainly, the deck at the forward edge of the pool would have been searing hot, paint would have been bubbling off, and the hull plates outside the pool would likely also have been deforming from the incredible heat” (Beveridge et. al.). The text further states that a survivor testimony from first class passenger Archibald Gracie and surviving photographs of the Titanic’s pool show the pool area was undamaged and the water’s temperature was mildly heated to a comfortable warm rather than a scalding hot. As the pool was in normal and operable condition, the fire couldn’t have been as hot as Dr. Rein and Moloney suggest it was. To further illustrate this point, the authors argue that if the fire was as hot as Dr. Rein suggests, it would have taken men with protective gear to approach the bulkhead and fight the fire as the temperature would be too hot for the exposed human body to handle, something which was never described by survivors.
Right now, all I could do is just listen to both sides of the story!