OTOH, the big-kahuna of grounding incidents was when, in 1950, the battleship Missouri ran into a sandbar, and was stuck for TWO WEEKS
“Nimitz ran a destroyer aground. He was then an ensign.”
People who never make mistakes never take chances. And, they never learn from their mistake. When McNamara was president Ford a subordinate made a $150k mistake. A reporter asked if he was going to fire the man and McNamara replied, “What, and give somebody else the benefit of a $150k education?”
—OTOH, the big-kahuna of grounding incidents was when, in 1950, the battleship Missouri ran into a sandbar, and was stuck for TWO WEEKS—
For the ultra big kahuna of grounding, check out Honda Point.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honda_Point_Disaster
Keep in mind that the only thing that saved Nimitz was that, with the black mark of the grounding very much a part of his permanent personnel record, he had the opportunity and initiative to jump full bore into the emerging field of marine diesel use.
IOW his career was “saved” by a one in a million fluke of timing where he was in the right place at the right time to take advantage of a once in a generation opportunity. Without that, his career would have gone nowhere.
Don’t forget the grounding of the Enterprise in San Francisco Bay in the 1980s.
Missouri’s Thimball Shoals grounding was, at least, spectacular. 58,000 ton battleship hits a sandbar at around 30 knots. With predictable results.
Apparantly the big difficulty in pulling Mo off (took most of the East Coast’s salvage assets) was that the force of the impact compacted the sand the ship plowed into into ... concrete.