Small cruiser hulls and the time available for escape

Heavy crew losses raise a design concern about small cruisers such as the Arethusa and Leander classes. One proposed explanation is that they carried the machinery and other weight of a cruiser without the larger hull volume that helped distribute flooding and preserve buoyancy. A rapid sinking leaves less time to escape. That matters especially for people secured behind closed compartments at action stations. The concern is about survivability and escape time, with no claim that every loss followed the same sequence.