Someone ought to give the procrastinator a medal.
You’d think there would be a way to hydrotest these systems before you put them on line.
In The Terrible Hours, Maas reconstructs the harrowing 39 hours between the disappearance of the submarine Squalus during a test dive off the New England coast and the eventual rescue of 33 crew members trapped in the vessel 250 feet beneath the sea.
It's my understanding that, on nuclear boats, even when all ballast tanks are blown they still need engine power to get to the surface. I think that what killed the Thresher - lost power and went below crush depth. In the old fleet boats (WWII) I was on, if you blew the tanks, even with a flooded compartment, you went UP.
Time to watch Das Boot again.
What? are they making the decks out of adobe blocks?
ping
“Flooding in the motor room.”
heh. I believe we would say it was flooding in the engine room.
Wow... very scary. Fire and flooding... both very bad. Mere seconds always make the difference between a scary sea story and total disaster.
I had the singularly unique experience once of making the pipe over the 1MC: “Now Fire Fire Fire! Class bravo fire is reported in the engine room! This is not a drill!” and it scared the crap out of all of us. This was only a 210ft ship. Any fire is pretty big, and the engine room was pretty close to everything.
A fuel line had broken and sprayed No.2 diesel liberally around the space and a hot engine touched it off. Kafloomph. A quick-thinking (or non-thinking, really) machinist’s mate (coincidentally my roommate in off-base housing) instantly grabbed the twin-agent hoses and waded into the fire without even taking time to suit up. His quick action pretty much saved not only the ship, but the other engine as well. As it was the damage was only such that they could fairly quickly get the good engine back online, and the other one after some new hoses... and we could continue the patrol.
But even another minute or so would’ve changed the damage by a whole order of magnitude, at least. Seconds count. The very few first seconds made the difference between something to talk about at chow that night, or a night in liferafts. He got a nice commendation for it. I’m pretty sure I bought him a beer. :-)
Good work.
Wow!
I knew a guy who was a cook on the USS Chopper. It was a diesel boat with a test depth of 400 feet.
They had a stern planes jam and that took it to over 1,000 feet down. They emergency blew and made it back tot he surface at an 80 degree up angle. They broached the surface and then resubmerged down to about 250 feet and then syurfaced again.
In GTMO there is a bar on a pier and above the bar inside there is a wooden plaque with all their signatureson it under the logo “The 1,000 Foot Club”
These safety reforms sounds just like they’re adopting the Navy’s “SUBSAFE” program which came about after the loss of the USS Thresher in 1963.
From 1915 to 1963 the U.S. Navy lost 16 submarines to non-combat accidents.
From the beginning of SUBSAFE to present day, not one SUBSAFE certified submarine has been lost.
As the father of a glow-worm bubblehead, all I can do is read it and shudder at the thought.