Princess Alice disaster: The Thames' 650 forgotten dead

> During 1915, the new federal Seamen's Act had been passed because of the RMS Titanic disaster three years earlier. The law required retrofitting of a complete set of lifeboats on Eastland, as on many other passenger vessels.[7] This additional weight may have made Eastland more dangerous by making it even more top-heavy. Some argued that other Great Lakes ships would suffer from the same problem.[7] Nonetheless, it was signed into law by President Woodrow Wilson.

An interesting aside related to the Princess Alice disaster is that the main northern sewer was only finally fully working months before the disaster and its outflow was very close to the crash site. Work began in the next decade to purify the sewage rather than just dumping it into the Thames there.

But I'd argue (and this is just a hunch) that sewage was "deadly" then in the sense that if the water then were as clean as now, the death toll would have been far lower, especially as the crash happened so close to (admittedly rather muddy) land.