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Sub Damage
Maine doug_9
Member Posts: 12
http://www.navy.mil/view_single.asp?id=21183
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Comments
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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.0 -
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...0 -
Incredible
I can't believe that the whole sub wasn't lost along with the entire crew.0 -
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.0 -
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.0 -
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.0 -
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.
Mike0
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