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Sub Damage

http://www.navy.mil/view_single.asp?id=21183

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  • gerry gill
    gerry gill Member Posts: 3,078
    there is a now a captain

    sailing a desk in kansas!!ouch..
    gwgillplumbingandheating.com
    Serving Cleveland's eastern suburbs from Cleveland Heights down to Cuyahoga Falls.

  • Constantin
    Constantin Member Posts: 3,796
    Ouch!

    But as bad as I feel for the poor sub, I feel worse for the seamen who got hurt or killed in the accident.

    Allegedly, the maps on board did not show the sea-mount that the sub hit...
  • S Ebels
    S Ebels Member Posts: 2,322
    Incredible

    I can't believe that the whole sub wasn't lost along with the entire crew.
  • Constantin
    Constantin Member Posts: 3,796
    A testament to the builders and designers, no doubt!

    Allegedly, the inner pressure hull was not even compromised. Hard to believe, considering all the crumpled steel up front.

    It's going to cost a lot to repair, I imagine... the outer hull has deflections going back a good ways, which signals to me that there is a lot of unseen damage as well.
  • Lew
    Lew Member Posts: 21


    That is a nuclear sub and the reactor is in the rear, Thank God.

    My co-workers son was on that sub, and had to remain on it until drydock. He performs calculations for ballast to keep it afloat.
  • Maine doug
    Maine doug Member Posts: 47
    Some additional info

    By ROBERT A. HAMILTON
    Day Staff Writer, Navy/Defense/Electric Boat
    Published on 1/15/2005

    New London -- The galley crew had started to serve lunch as the USS San
    Francisco checked its position against a global positioning system
    satellite,
    checked the water depth with its fathometer, and announced that the
    ship was
    going to dive, all routine operations aboard an attack submarine.

    Four minutes after it submerged, that routine was shattered one week
    ago today
    as the San Francisco crashed into an undersea mountain at more than 35
    mph,
    sending sailors crashing into equipment and bulkheads and destroying
    the bow
    dome and three of the main ballast tanks at the front of the sub.


    But engineers are impressed that despite the violence of the underwater
    encounter, the ship's reactor, steam turbine generators, electrical
    distribution network and even its navigation system were unharmed, and
    the
    ship was able to limp back to port on its own.


    Saturday morning, soon after breakfast ended at 6 a.m., the ship
    conducted a
    "field day," during which the entire ship is cleaned, top to bottom.
    All 137
    men on board would have been out of their bunks and taking part until
    just
    before lunch was served at 11 a.m. They would have removed deck plates
    to
    clean bilges and other hard-to-reach spaces.

    The chief petty officers on board warned everyone as they finished to
    "stow
    for sea" - make sure everything is bolted down or locked up. In the
    event of a
    collision, loose objects tend to become unguided missiles. As a result,
    the
    ship was probably more tightly stowed than usual, which helped prevent
    more
    serious injuries, submariners said.

    In late morning, the ship was at periscope depth, checking to make sure
    it was
    on course. Everything checked out; the ship was just over 400 miles
    southeast
    of Guam, near the Caroline Islands ridge, but the charts showed that
    there was
    no water less than about 6,000 feet deep for at least seven miles
    around the
    boat, more than enough of a safety margin for submariners, who are
    known to be
    cautious.

    Some time about 11:30, after running through a safety checklist to make
    sure
    the boat was ready to submerge, the officer of the deck gave the order
    to
    dive. The San Francisco used the dive to pick up speed, and was soon
    running
    at flank speed, something in excess of 30 knots.

    Although its destination was to the southwest, it was headed in an
    easterly
    direction, probably because it had "cleared its baffles," or changed
    direction
    to check to make sure there were no submarines trailing it in the spot
    directly behind the ship, where its normal sonar sensors cannot "hear."

    At 11:42 a.m. Guam time, about four minutes after diving, the San
    Francisco
    crashed head-on into a nearly vertical wall of stone, a seamount that
    was not
    on the charts. In an instant, the submarine's speed dropped from almost
    33
    knots horizontal to 4 knots almost straight up as the bow whipped up
    and the
    ship tried to go over the obstacle - without success.

    Crewmen told family and friends that the moment was surreal, so
    unexpected
    that it took a moment to realize what had happened: The sub had rammed
    into
    something and was out of control. One sailor told a friend it reminded
    him of
    the movie "The Matrix," in which everything slows down and a disaster
    unfolds
    in slow motion.

    The diving officer of the watch, normally strapped into a chair in the
    control
    room, had just unbuckled his belt to update a status board. He struck
    the
    control panel so hard that he broke some of the gauges. Some crewmen
    were
    tossed 20 feet into bulkheads, several narrowly missing being dropped
    down
    through stairways.

    A couple of men were smoking in the lower level of the engine room, and
    more
    were waiting their turn - it is the only area in the sub where smoking
    is
    allowed. The area includes much sharp-edged metal equipment that caused
    several of the lacerations and broken bones that had to be treated
    later.

    Machinist Mate 2nd Class Joseph Allen Ashley, 24, of Akron, Ohio, who
    had just
    re-enlisted for a second four-year term, was in the main seawater bay
    at the
    back of the sub. He was thrown forward 20 feet into the propulsion lube
    oil
    bay, striking his forehead against a large metal pump. He was knocked
    out and
    died the next day without regaining consciousness.

    Through the chaos, though, the crew followed the procedures they had
    drilled
    on day after day as submariners. Within seconds, one of the crewmen at
    the
    helm, his arm broken in the crash, pulled the "chicken switch," which
    forces
    high-pressure air into the main ballast tanks to force the submarine to
    the
    surface.

    The executive officer suffered a serious back injury when he was thrown
    onto
    an emergency air supply pipe, but he was quickly directing
    damage-control
    efforts. Injured men were carried to the crew's mess and the wardroom,
    where
    the tables were pressed into service as gurneys. The ship's "doc," an
    independent duty corpsman trained in emergency medicine, began
    assessing and
    treating the injuries.

    One of the ship's junior officers was a former enlisted man and was
    able to
    help out. Other crewmen were recruited to keep men with head injuries
    awake
    until they could be checked out, as the worst cuts were stitched and
    the worst
    breaks were set.

    When a medical team arrived from Guam via helicopter the next morning,
    a
    surgeon, an undersea medical officer and another independent duty
    corpsmen
    remarked that the care given to the injured crewmen was outstanding,
    particularly considering the circumstances.

    ***

    The submarine force has a policy of "water space management" that would
    have
    required Mooney, the skipper, to file a plan showing his expected track
    and
    speed through the area to make sure he would not be in the same water
    as
    another submarine at the same time. Navy sources said there was nothing
    on
    that plan that would have raised any alarm.

    In addition, given the charts that showed only deep water in the area,
    Mooney
    would not have been expected to do depth soundings more than every 30
    minutes,
    certainly no more than every 15 minutes, which would not have given him
    enough
    time to react to the steep seamount. In fact, he might not have been
    able to
    avoid grounding even with nearly continuous soundings.

    The undersea mountain was so steep that there was damage visible even
    on the
    top of the sonar dome, which indicates that the sub hit a virtual wall.

    The San Francisco would have picked up the mountain if it was using
    active
    sonar, but submariners use that sparingly because it gives the boat's
    location
    away. Instead, it would have been using passive sonar - listening for
    the
    noises made by other ships and submarines. But seamounts don't make any
    noise,
    and even if there were currents swirling around it, the noise would
    have been
    lost in the noise the San Francisco was making as it sped through the
    water
    near top speed.

    Jeff Schweitzer, a research professor in the Physics Department at the
    University of Connecticut, said the submarine's kinetic energy at 33
    knots and
    4 knots is easy to calculate - one-half its mass (6.3 million
    kilograms) times
    its velocity (16.98 meters per second before the accident, 2.06 meters
    per
    second afterward), or 902.4 megajoules before, and 13.3 megajoules
    afterward.
    So the accident released just over 889 megajoules of energy.

    The Millstone 2 reactor in Waterford is rated at 870 megawatts, so if
    the ship
    slowed over a second, it released roughly the same energy in that time
    as
    Millstone 2 could generate.

    "It would have lit quite a few light bulbs," Schweitzer said. "It is a
    lot of
    energy, which is why the collision cracked rock and dented such strong
    steel."

    He said it would take much more complex calculations to determine where
    all
    that energy went - how much went into bending the steel of the ballast
    tanks,
    or even heating the water in the area around the wreck - but the
    release was
    enormous.

    Physics also explains the injuries, a fundamental principal being that
    a body
    in motion tends to stay in motion until something slows it down,
    whether air
    friction or a steel bulkhead. If the submarine instantly decelerated
    from 33
    knots to 4 knots, in theory the men aboard would have kept moving
    forward at
    29 knots relative to the rest of the ship until they encountered
    something
    hard.

    Schweitzer noted, however, that even sitting in a chair or standing on
    the
    floor would bleed off part of that speed, and that the ship would have
    decelerated over a second or so, which would also yield a slight
    difference.

    "So it might not be the same thing as being thrown forward at 29
    knots,"
    Schweitzer said. "But it would have been a lot more comfortable to have
    been
    in a seat and belted in."

    At the time, however, no one on the San Francisco was doing the
    calculations.
    They were more worried about saving the ship. At almost 550 feet, the
    water
    pressure would have been almost 240 pounds per square inch, so even a
    small
    leak could have quickly put the ship in danger.

    In addition, it quickly became apparent that three of the four forward
    ballast
    tanks had uncontrollable leaks, which caused the ship to take on a
    serious
    bow-down aspect. That was dangerous for two reasons: any forward
    movement
    could quickly drive the ship deeper; and any angle would allow more air
    to
    seep out of the ballast tanks, making the ship heavier, increasing the
    angle
    even more.

    Through the quick use of variable ballast tanks located throughout the
    ship,
    the crew was able to get it to the surface, though the back end of the
    ship
    was riding about four feet higher than normal, and the bow was so deep
    the
    depth markings were out of sight.

    The reactor plant, propulsion system and electric distribution gear
    were all
    operating normally, however, which allowed the crew to focus on the
    ballast
    system.
  • Wethead7
    Wethead7 Member Posts: 170
    Desk driven

    I Do not think so. We[Kansas] does not have a naval base.
    We had the largest naval base in the country in the thirties and forties. We had a naval air base long since closed.

    From the only state with a ship named after it.

    Mike
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