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The next day, a little more than 400 miles southeast of Guam, as sailors were sitting down to lunch, it slammed into the sea mount in an area where official Navy charts list 6,000 feet of water.
This is inexcuseable, on an administrative level. If charts are not maintained and updated constantly electronically, there is criminal contributory negligence higher up the chain of command. A corrected electronic version of the chart could have been and should have been transmitted and distributed world-wide to anyone who needed it in seconds...
On a ship or boat, the buck stops with the captain --- but only if the captain has ultimate control of where he is and when he gets there. I have the uneasy feeling that he was facing conflicting orders, one explicit the other implicit by reference, and his choice came back and bit him on the butt.

That notice is 58 pages long and covers hundreds of changes worldwide, including four — the sea mount, an obstruction and two depth changes — on the specific chart, number 81023, the San Francisco was using when it ran aground. And it is one of 15 notices issued so far this year.
It is so easy, after the fact to assume that the captain and his crew had the time and the resources to wade through 58 pages of data to find four changes that affected their immediate task, given his orders and the time frame they were given in which to execute those orders.

There's plenty of blame to go around, and procedural errors to be corrected.

It is so easy, after the fact to assume that the captain and his crew had the time and the resources to wade through 58 pages of data to find four changes that affected their immediate task...

The author makes it sound much harder than it is. The 58 pages of corrections covers the entire world and the charts affected by corrections are listed in numerical order. They are also available online. I found the corrections in my post #14 in about 30 seconds by doing a search for chart 81023 at the link I provided.

"It is so easy, after the fact to assume that the captain and his crew had the time and the resources to wade through 58 pages of data to find four changes that affected their immediate task, given his orders and the time frame they were given in which to execute those orders."

Because of the enormous responsibility and the possible consequences for not doing this, it should be SOP.

That should be the fix implemented from this disaster. The Army needs paper maps - kinda hard to lug a laptop around in your rucksack, and plus, they don't work too good in the rain. For the Navy not to have all this on computer is not only inexcusable, but unbelievable. For pete's sake, haven't they heard of Mapquest?