In the heat of the forwardmost boiler room, No. 6, Leading Stoker Frederick Barrett was talking with Second Engineer James Hesketh when a red warning light and the "Stop" indicator came on. "Shut all dampers," Barrett called out. Suddenly a rush of water began pouring in from along the side of the ship, two feet above the floor and only a short distance from where the two men stood. Barrett was nearly swept off his feet before he and Hesketh jumped through the quickly closing watertight door leading to boiler room No. 5. There they saw a gash extending from a point two feet aft of the forward bulkhead into the coal bunker that had been emptied because of an earlier fire. A geyser of water shot through the opening. When Barrett climbed to a higher deck where he could see down into No. 6, he found it already eight feet deep in sea water.

Apart from the men on the bridge and those close to the point of the iceberg's impact, few crew members realized that anything was amiss.