John McKenzie: When the torpedoes struck, I was aft in the main engine room, with Dan Wesker. Somehow, we made our way forward to the temporary safety of the air pocket. The people had panicked, were trying to reach the top deck unaware that it was now completely underwater. Out of a total of almost 1900 passengers & crew, only 240 managed to survive. The captain and most of the ship's officers were gone, and the rest of us were faced with certain death as our oxygen supply ran out. But then I remembered the auxilliary engine room forward. If anything was to be done, it would have to be there. We made our way down to G Deck. The lights were on, which indicated that the generators were still operating. But the key was the Scotch boilers. They had to be kept fueled, and although Goliath had almost a million barrels of oil in her bunkers when she went down, we had to determine how much was left, and whether the pipes that carried it were still intact. The original venting system had been destroyed, so it was necessary to put on gas masks to protect us against carbon monoxide until we could find a way later to vent it overboard. Luckily, most of the bunkers were still undamaged as were the conduit pipes, and those that went, we later repaired. By my calculation, we had less than 48 hours to replenish our oxygen supply. Water being composed of two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen, the problem was solved for the time being by electrolysis, which separates the two. But by doing so, we were also releasing hydrogen, which was extremely volatile and could blow the ship apart. It became necessary to vent it outwards through the hull. By now, the pressure inside Goliath had equalized with the pressure outside, so the water was held back. After many hours, the job was finished, which meant we had some air to breathe. We had a shipment of barrel lime aboard, which we spread around to soak up the carbon dioxide we were breathing out, and until we could later construct a more permanent air scrubbing system. There was plenty of food & water aboard, and the forward staterooms were intact. Now that the crucial problems had been temporarily solved, the people settled down... to wait.
