The British had one depth charge design which used water filling an internal chamber to trigger the charge. The water entered at a known rate, which increased with depth, allowing the detonation depth to be set. A disadvantage of this design was that, even if the depth was set at, say, 350 feet, if one happened to fall overboard with the ship tied up the dock in 30 feet of water, the detonator chamber would still slowly fill up and if the safety failed the results could be embarrassing, to say the least. Most other depth charges used water pressure as the trigger, which was somewhat safer. In all cases, there was always someone (usually more than one) crew member whose job was to insure all depth charges were set to "safe" if the destroyer was sinking. Otherwise they would explode when they reached their set depth and if that happened there was little chance anyone in the water would survive.

J.T. McDaniel