This took an interesting turn. A sprinkler system might have helped but it's not mentioned as part of the changes in maritime regulations following the incident.
I think OP makes a good case that the cause of the fire was probably the shortsighted poisoner, child rapist, human/dog murderer, embezzler, thief, and bomber who apparently had grudges against the captain who mysteriously died shortly before the fire mysteriously started at the worst time & place possible.
At least from Wikipedia's description - of the ship as a disastrously ill-designed firetrap, with lackluster officers and crew - there were an extremely large number of "worst times & places" for a fire to start.
(BTW, you forgot to implicate the story's villain in the ship's poor design, weak cadre of officers, and the departed captain's slipshod safety training:)
That is the type of thinking I was criticizing. Your standard swiss-cheese complex-failure model doesn't apply when you are in an adversarial security setting.
When you do a post-mortem on a complex failure, the outcome proves the accusation: "obviously the fire suppression was inadequate, because it didn't suppress the fire; QED". This sort of hindsight is fine for a regular failure, because the steps in the failure happening at all show that they had large probability of happening - if the fire suppression system let the whole ship burn down from a minor accidental fire in the writing room, it was obviously inadequate. (And so on for the other flaws.) But it doesn't apply if you have an adversary, like a psychopath like Rogers. In security, you can have a failure which will happen once in the lifetime of the universe with random events - and which happens 100% of the time when there is an attack.
Perhaps in reality the fire suppression method was well-designed and adequate to the task... except that the attacker used an incendiary with its own oxidizer (the acid+powder) which couldn't be put out. Perhaps the 'poor design' wasn't so poor, and the attacker simply found the weak point. Perhaps the departed captain wasn't so bad, and it was the careful choice of poisoning him at the end of the shift to replace him with an officer near-delirious from sleep, so conked out he's asking if he's dreaming, and who couldn't even order an SOS until well after he should've. Perhaps the lack of fire alarm coverage in that one room wasn't a damning fault, because the attacker would've simply cut the wire before starting the fire if it had had coverage. (A random accidental fire cannot choose to ensure it goes undetected by cutting the alarm wire first. An intelligent attacker can.) And so on.
When you are dealing with a technically sophisticated, patient, psychopathic attacker with zero remorse or concern for human life, who is an insider, and who has been casing the joint for months or years, and who will carefully wait for and arrange the worst possible circumstances, it may simply not be possible to harden the system against such an APT at acceptable cost and performance, particularly when the attacker is willing to put himself at mortal risk for hardly any apparent gain. (Notice that you aren't going on about all of the failures which let Rogers go through his whole life of crime - only about the ship. Why is the ship poorly designed but not society?) Most of society is like this: we cannot ensure zero crime or error or fault. There is no way to stop someone from, say, taking a kitchen knife and going out and stabbing people until the police shoot him, or from renting a truck and driving through a crowd of pedestrians before killing himself.
So, the existence and likely culpability of Rogers completely changes the meaning of the post-mortem claims, and renders them a lot less credible given their naive view of all events as accidental and due to incompetence or bad design, rather than this extreme level of irrational, spiteful, self-destructive evil.
> At least from Wikipedia's description
The description which mentions barely anything about Rogers?
This took an interesting turn. A sprinkler system might have helped but it's not mentioned as part of the changes in maritime regulations following the incident.
From Wikipedia's account - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Morro_Castle_(1930)#Causes - the cause of the fire could be (in effect) an overheated storage locker full of oily rags.
I think OP makes a good case that the cause of the fire was probably the shortsighted poisoner, child rapist, human/dog murderer, embezzler, thief, and bomber who apparently had grudges against the captain who mysteriously died shortly before the fire mysteriously started at the worst time & place possible.
At least from Wikipedia's description - of the ship as a disastrously ill-designed firetrap, with lackluster officers and crew - there were an extremely large number of "worst times & places" for a fire to start.
(BTW, you forgot to implicate the story's villain in the ship's poor design, weak cadre of officers, and the departed captain's slipshod safety training:)
That is the type of thinking I was criticizing. Your standard swiss-cheese complex-failure model doesn't apply when you are in an adversarial security setting.
When you do a post-mortem on a complex failure, the outcome proves the accusation: "obviously the fire suppression was inadequate, because it didn't suppress the fire; QED". This sort of hindsight is fine for a regular failure, because the steps in the failure happening at all show that they had large probability of happening - if the fire suppression system let the whole ship burn down from a minor accidental fire in the writing room, it was obviously inadequate. (And so on for the other flaws.) But it doesn't apply if you have an adversary, like a psychopath like Rogers. In security, you can have a failure which will happen once in the lifetime of the universe with random events - and which happens 100% of the time when there is an attack.
Perhaps in reality the fire suppression method was well-designed and adequate to the task... except that the attacker used an incendiary with its own oxidizer (the acid+powder) which couldn't be put out. Perhaps the 'poor design' wasn't so poor, and the attacker simply found the weak point. Perhaps the departed captain wasn't so bad, and it was the careful choice of poisoning him at the end of the shift to replace him with an officer near-delirious from sleep, so conked out he's asking if he's dreaming, and who couldn't even order an SOS until well after he should've. Perhaps the lack of fire alarm coverage in that one room wasn't a damning fault, because the attacker would've simply cut the wire before starting the fire if it had had coverage. (A random accidental fire cannot choose to ensure it goes undetected by cutting the alarm wire first. An intelligent attacker can.) And so on.
When you are dealing with a technically sophisticated, patient, psychopathic attacker with zero remorse or concern for human life, who is an insider, and who has been casing the joint for months or years, and who will carefully wait for and arrange the worst possible circumstances, it may simply not be possible to harden the system against such an APT at acceptable cost and performance, particularly when the attacker is willing to put himself at mortal risk for hardly any apparent gain. (Notice that you aren't going on about all of the failures which let Rogers go through his whole life of crime - only about the ship. Why is the ship poorly designed but not society?) Most of society is like this: we cannot ensure zero crime or error or fault. There is no way to stop someone from, say, taking a kitchen knife and going out and stabbing people until the police shoot him, or from renting a truck and driving through a crowd of pedestrians before killing himself.
So, the existence and likely culpability of Rogers completely changes the meaning of the post-mortem claims, and renders them a lot less credible given their naive view of all events as accidental and due to incompetence or bad design, rather than this extreme level of irrational, spiteful, self-destructive evil.
> At least from Wikipedia's description
The description which mentions barely anything about Rogers?