Ice alert row sank the Titanic: Documentary

LONDON: The Titanic disaster, that claimed over 1,500 lives 96 years back, could have been averted if its radio operator had not been rude, a new documentary claims.
 
According to the documentary, the 25-year-old radio operator, Jack Phillips, had a row with his counterpart on the nearest ship who tried to warn him of ice in the area on April 14, 1912.
 
In fact, Phillips, who had a backlog of greetings messages to send for the luxury liner's passengers, told Cyril Evans of the SS Californian: "Shut up", 'The Sun' reported.
 
An angry Evans reacted by switching off his radio equipment just ten minutes before the Titanic hit an iceberg on her maiden voyage to New York.
 
So SS Californian, just 20 miles away, didn't get the doomed ship's SOS and 1,523 people, including Phillips, died in the disaster early on 15 April 1912, the documentary to be aired on Channel 4 has claimed.
 
"The Titanic would sink in two hours. The Californian was 20 miles away and near enough to save everybody," the narrator of programme 'The Unsinkable Titanic' was quoted as saying by the British tabloid.
 
The Titanic hit an iceberg during her maiden voyage on the night of 14 April 1912, and sank two hours and 40 minutes later, early on 15 April 1912. At the time of her launching in 1912, she was the largest passenger steamship in the world.
 
The sinking of the Titanic, which used some of the most advanced technology available at the time, resulted in the deaths of 1,517 people, ranking it as the deadliest peacetime maritime disaster in history.