Sub Sunk- Plus 55 Years

55 years ago today, the USS Thresher (SSN-593) was lost. She was the lead ship of her class, which was renamed the Permit class.

The loss of the Thresher uncovered a number of problems with quality control and submarine construction methods. They weren't so much of an issue during the war, but the then-new nuclear submarines could dive about a thousand feet deeper than the American submarines built during the war.

The procedures for constructing and QCing submarines was radically changed with the development and implementation of the SUBSAFE program. No SUBSAFE-certified submarine has been lost, as of today. (USS Scorpion was built before the loss of the Thresher )

Sub Sunk + 50

USS Thresher (SSN-593) sank fifty years ago.

To say that there were significant changes to the construction, maintenance and operation of nuclear-powered submarines in the years following the accident would be like calling a plasma torch "warm".

All well before my time and it wasn't my community. But it was one of the reasons why the supply priorities were what they were.

A Career-Limiting Move

Running your ship aground.

USS Guardian (MCM 5) ran aground on Tubbataha Reef at 2:25 a.m. local time, Jan. 17, while transiting the Sulu Sea. The Avenger-Class ship had just completed a port call in Subic Bay, Olongapo City and was en route to her next port of call when the grounding occurred.

Never a good move. If the chart was accurate, then good excuses for running aground are rarer than honest congressmen. That'll kill the career of the CO and it almost always has. The XO and the OOD also should be planning on transitioning to civilian life sooner rather than later.

Uniform Disasters: Burn, Baby, Burn

Now it seems that Aquaflage is not fire resistant.

My full rant is here, because that blog has more readers and this shit needs to get out.

Fo'c'sle, Bridge, Breaker, Breaker, One Nine

In an earlier post on anchoring, I alluded to a sound-powered phone circuit between the Bridge and the Forecastle. Sound-powered phones are telephones designed to take their power from the energy of the incoming sound waves. While the handsets and headsets had receivers and transmitters, they were really bidirectional in that you could, if you wanted to, listen and talk over the same unit.

The advantage of sound-powered phones was that they were dirt-simple and they didn't require power. All you had to do was string two wires and hook a handset up at each end. For example, as part of the rigging lines between ships during underway replenishment, two sound-powered phone lines were sent across to the two ships could talk Bridge-to-Bridge and Unrep Station to Unrep Station.

All installed circuits were designated with at least two letters[1] and then maybe numbers. For this post, I am focusing on the maneuvering circuit, the 1JV. In open-ocean steaming, the 1JV connected the Bridge, Main Control and the After Lookout. On the Bridge, the Lee Helmsman served as the phone talker; in Main Control, the Throttleman did.

Coming in and out of port, there would be more stations on the 1JV. For mooring alongside a pier or another ship, the Forecastle would be on the line, while the After Lookout served as the phone talker for the Fantail line handlers. If boats were to be operated, the boat davit stations had phone talkers.

Communications could be slow. The Conning Officer would give an order, such as "Foc's'le, Bridge, slack Line One." The sailor on the Lee Helm would repeat the order, verbatim, and the phone talker on the Forecastle would shout it out. The officer/chief/petty officer in charge would yell back: "Slack Line One, Foc's'le, Aye!" and that would be repeated back up the phone circuit. And if you had a couple of sailors as phone-talkers who were not exactly the sharpest knives in the drawer, it could be a real clusterfuck with lots of "say again" responses.

Back in the `70s, during the CB radio craze, a number of CB walkie-talkies began to hit the consumer market. Ships bought them, figuring that the Conning Officer (or the Captain) could then talk directly to the person in charge of the Forecastle and/or the Fantail. All it took was to find an unused channel[2] and use that. It was believed that as long nobody said their ship's name, that using the CB radios didn't compromise operational security.

This is no shit: A destroyer was steaming into the naval station at Roosevelt Roads, Puerto Rico. The ship was heading for an anchorage, and, like a lot of ships, they were using walkie-talkies. When the ship was at the right spot to drop the anchor, the Conning Officer keyed his walkie-talkie and radioed: "Foc's'le, Bridge, let go the anchor!"

That command was heard on two ships. The other ship was an oiler that was heading down the channel at Roosevelt Roads at ten knots. The Bo'sun's Mate on the Forecastle of that ship keyed his radio and yelled: "Let go the anchor, Foc's'le, Aye!" At that command, the sailor holding the sledgehammer at the pelican hook swung the hammer, knocked it free and all hell broke loose.

Fortunately, there were no injuries and nothing serious was broken. But an order went out from the type commanders, in very short order, outlawing the use of CB radios aboard ships.
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[1] All included the letter "J", designating the circuit to be sound-powered.
[2] Not 9, the emergency channel or 19, most commonly used by truckers

Oops!

One of the target drills practiced with the 5" naval rifles found on most of the tin-can Navy was an anti-surface target shoot. Basically, an ocean-going tug would tow a target sled; the warship participating would lock its fire-control radar onto the target sled and shoot it with BL&P[1] rounds.[2]. A spotter on the tug would watch for the splashes and impacts of the rounds on the sled and grade the ship on its accuracy of fire.

The target sled was tracked by radar in Gun Plot, where a fire controlman (FC) would designate the radar blip of the target to the gunfire control computer. The gunfire control computer took in the ship's course and speed, the target's course and speed, as well as the wind and other factors to generate a firing solution. It was normally an easy exercise, it was a full-up test of the gunfire system. A failure usually meant that something was broken or out of calibration. A failed exercise was usually followed by a CASREP.

The Spruance class introduced a more-computerized fire-control system, the Mk-86, that was designed to have a faster reaction time against small, fast-moving patrol boats. So in the late `70s, one of the then-new Spruance-class destroyers was taking part in an anti-surface gunfire exercise. The target sled was deployed and the range was clear.

The ship opened fire on the target. The Mk-86 tracked the target, tracked up the tow line, and fired on the tug. Accounts differ on the number of times that the tug was hit before the ship was able to cease fire, but it was apparently more than once. The word was that one 5" round went into the Goat Locker.[3] Nobody was injured by the shelling.

The immediate fix was to double the length of the towline anytime that a Mk-86 equipped ship was to shoot at a towed target. The other fix was to require that the ships also optically track targets in gunfire exercises.[4] Depending on who you talked to, the story I heard was that the coaxial TV camera for the gunfire radar was either out of commission or not installed at the time of the incident.[5]

Lore has it that the tug was unofficially awarded a Purple Heart by the destroyer's captain.
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[1]BL&P stood for "blind, loaded and plugged". BL&P projectiles had no fuzing and they were loaded with an inert material to make them weigh as much as war rounds. The projectiles were painted blue and they weighed over fifty pounds.
[2] 5" guns used "semi-fixed" ammunition. "Semi-fixed" meant that what appeared to be the cartridge case was the powder casing, the projectile was loaded separately. The powder case also weighed over fifty pounds. The other types of ammunition were "fixed" (like small arms ammunition) and "bag" (the powder was in silk bags), used in battleships and pre-war cruisers.
[3] A/k/a the Chief Petty Officers' Quarters.
[4] This was SOP in the earlier Mk68 GFCS, as the gunfire director itself was manned.
[5] I'll go with "not installed."

The Convincer

Ships were supposed to have safety-themed events from time to time. The Damage Control Assistant on one ship, who had the collateral job of Assistant Safety Officer*, arranged for a program of traffic safety. One of his ideas was a hot-dog cookout on the pier, offering free hot dogs and soda.

The catch was that anyone who wanted the free food had to first take a ride in the Convincer. If you didn't click the link. the Convincer is a gizmo that you ride in; the seat slides down some guides and then slams into some bumpers to give you an idea what a low-speed crash feels like (and why you should wear your seat belt).

The Chief Engineer thought it was a good idea if he rode it first. After being slammed to a stop, the CHENG had a revelation and an idea. The revelation is that the shoulder strap for a seat belt naturally goes over the collar points of a uniform shirt. If you were wearing a shirt that had what the Navy calls "collar devices" (rank insignia), the impact drove the collar device into your collar bone and it hurt.

The idea was to combine the Convincer with a demonstration of why it was a good idea to get a car seat for kids. He told the DCA to have someone get two 5-lb bags of flour or sugar from the cooks, to put them into a plastic bag and to wrap them up with duct tape to make a simulated baby. You'd ride the Convincer, hold onto the "baby" and see the "baby" go flying out of your arms when you jolted to a stop.

That turned out to be a great idea, for it developed into an informal competition to see who could hold onto the "baby". Hardly anyone could.

So the XO came down to make an appearance and ride the Convincer. He got in and strapped in. The CHENG and the DCA were watching. The DCA asked the CHENG if maybe he should tell the XO to put his collar over the shoulder belt. The CHENG smiled and said: "Nah."

The XO rode the Convincer, it slammed to a stop. He said: "Kee-rist, that hurt." afterwards and rubbed his collarbone. But he didn't drop the "baby"; it spun out of his arms and he was able to catch it.

Oh, and when the Captain rode the Convincer, the XO didn't tell him about the shoulder belt.
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*That was true for all ships. The DCA had the collateral duty of serving as the Assistant Safety Officer, the Chief Engineer was the Safety Officer. They did those jobs in their copious spare time.

Lockout and Tagout

One of the jobs I had before I went into the Navy was cleaning machinery in a factory. Each one of us on the cleaning crew was issued a padlock and a lockout hasp.

The first person on the job turned off the power to the machine, inserted the lockout hasp on the power switch and then locked the hasp with a padlock. Every additional person on that job added their lock to the hasp. Only the individual worker had the key to his or her own lock. The machine could not be cleared to run without everyone removing their locks. It was a suspendable offense to leave the site without clearing one's lock. Working on a machine without locking it out was a termination offense.

That didn't work that way in the Navy. There were redundant sources of power to a lot of machinery. There could be several inputs of things that might hurt someone working on a piece of equipment.

What there was, instead, was a tagout system. Yellow was used for caution, red for danger. Most of the tags that one would see were red tags. Sometimes there were a shitload of red tags. Tagging out a boiler required tagging out everything that fed into the boiler, was operated to service the boiler or fed from that boiler. Tagging out a boiler required over sixty red tags.

To do a tagout right, a sailor had to bring all of the proposed tags and the piping/wiring diagrams to the EOOW or the Duty Engineer, as well as a tagout sheet, which listed each tag (now they are serialized) and its location. The Duty Engineer (since most tagouts were done in port) was supposed to go over the tagout sheet and the diagrams with the worker, then they would sign all of the tags and the tagout sheet. After the equipment (valves, switches) were all tagged, the tagout sheet was logged into the Tagout Log in DC Central.

Tags were supposed to be inspected daily by the workcenter supervisor, the LPO in charge of the relevant work center. A missing tag meant that the work had to stop until both the thing tagged out was checked and a new tag procured and hung.

To remove the tags, the worker brought the tagout sheet to the Duty Engineer, who signed to authorize removal. The worker then removed all of the tags and brought the tags and the sheet back to the Duty Engineer, who would inventory the tags. Both the worker and the Duty Engineer signed each tag for removal and signed the tagout sheet. Once that was done, the sheet and the removed tags were entered into the tagout log. Then, and only then, was whatever was tagged out cleared for operation.

Violating tagout was a big Bozo No-No. It was a damn near certain guarantee of getting maxed out at Captain's Mast (demotion, restriction to the ship and extra duty for 45 days and loss of half-pay for two months). The tagout system was at the heart of plant safety; I know of no Chief Engineer or Captain who had any sense of humor about tagout violations.

Career-Limiting Move

Running your submarine aground:



(Um, you couldn't figure out a way to try and steady your camera??)

But, But, I Might Get in Trouble!!!

This is no shit (and all times are approximate):

I was on shore duty for a spell; I was stationed in the DC area. For some reason, the Powers That Be where I worked sent me and a bunch of civilian engineers to a four-hour presentation/lunch at the Little Creek Naval Base in Virginia Beach, VA. We had to all be at work at 0530 to ride a large passenger van down (the conference started at 1000) and the van would take us back to our offices at the end of the presentation.

Most of us snoozed on the way down.

I wish I could tell you what the presentation was all about, not because it was classified, but because I just don't remember. For some reason, we had to ride out in the harbor in a LARC-LX to watch some ship do something worth seeing. It was a nice day, the water was calm, a LARC-LX is one big mother on huge wheels (like a really big DUKW) and we got to eat a buffet lunch after the boat ride. But none of that is important to this tale.

It was an hour or so after we started back to DC that it became clear to me (and others) that the driver of the van was seriously tired. He was having trouble staying in the lane on I-64. I called out to him (I was two rows back) and asked that he make a pit stop as soon as possible, with the excuse that I really had to pee, "and I mean right now."

He pulled into a truck stop and everybody got out. I made a quick run to the head and got back to the van before the driver. I climbed into the driver's seat, buckled up and waited. When the driver came back, he didn't even put up an argument. He got into the right front seat and he was out like a light just after we got back on the highway. He slept until we pulled off the highway towards the facility where we worked.

The van had three lights to monitor mileage, the idea being that you were supposed to drive in such a way as to keep the green light on. I had the yellow or red lights on the whole way back. When we got to the facility, around 1900 or so, the gate guard did a double-take when he saw that I was driving, but he saluted and I drove in to the office building, where we all got out and the driver took the van back to the motor pool.

The next day, one of the engineers buttonholed me and said: "I was really happy that you took over from that driver. I could see that he was falling asleep at the wheel. We could have all been killed."

"If you knew that, then why didn't you volunteer to drive," I asked.

"But I don't have a government driver's license," he protested. He actually seemed scandalized at the idea that he might drive a government vehicle without one.

I looked at him and smiled. "I don't have one, either. But I'm not about to let the lack of a piece of paper get me killed."

The driver, though, must have told what had happened to his boss. For three days later, without my saying a word to anyone, I received a government driver's license through the interoffice mail. The effective date on the license was back-dated to a week before the trip.

The file had been papered.

Ship's Boats

Destroyers and cruisers traditionally had two boats[1]. Both were powered by small diesel engines.

They were the Captain's Gig:

And the 26' Motor Whaleboat (this one was sold as surplus):

Boats were used primarily when the ship was anchored somewhere, though in far rarer occasions, they were used for "blue water" transfers between ships in the open sea. They were hoisted onto the ship and lowered by davits. The davits were double armed affairs that held the boats on cradles when they were not used. When in use, the davit would lift the boat up, tilt down so that the boat was over the water, and then lower the boat on pulleys (called "falls").

When the boats were being raised and lowered, only the bare crew was on the boat and they were required to hold onto the monkey lines (ropes with knotted hand-holds). For one end of the boat could slip off a fall and yes, they occasionally did.

The davits were powered by large electric motors which had limit switches to prevent the motors from breaking things. The motors wound and unwound the wire rope winches on the davits. The limit switches, though, were sitting right out there open to the salt air and they sometimes failed. When they did, the winch motors could wind things a little too tight and bend the living shit out of the davit arms.

During good weather, these boats had a three-man crew: A coxswain, a seaman and an engineman. The seaman and engineman handled lines fore and aft. In bad weather or at night, a boat officer was added, usually the junior-most ensigns in the duty section.

The motor whaleboat was pretty straight forward. The coxswain drove the boat from the steering station next to the motor. The motor had a straight shaft that ran right to the prop.

The gig was, comparatively, a maintenance nightmare. The engine was at the rearmost part of the boat. The driveshaft went forward into a "v-drive", which in turn drove the prop shaft. The housing of the v-drive was made of aluminum. There was no way to get to the bottom of the v-drive other than pulling it out. Aluminum corrodes nicely in seawater, which tends to get into the bilges of boats. So what would happen is that the bottom of the v-drive would swiss-cheese itself from corrosion, the oil would leak out of the v-drive and, if that was not caught, the goddammed thing would seize up.

The gig was the captain's boat and it was at his beck-and-call. A considerate captain would let his gig be used as a liberty launch for at least the chiefs and the officers, if not for the entire crew. It was incumbent upon those who were returning to the ship and who were really drunk to pass up on riding in the gig, as captains took a dim view of squids puking their guts out in the gig's cabin.

When boats were in use, a beach party with a radio was sent ashore for controlling the sailors at the landing point. The petty officer or officer there reported to the OOD. Anyone who was really drunk might have to wait for hours there until they sort of sobered up. The beach party also functioned as a security checkpoint, welcoming and screening visitors to the ship. The boats took their orders from either the beach party or the OOD.

When boats were in use, the senior line officer in the boat was in charge, even if an officer was assigned to the boat and even if that senior line officer was drunk on his ass. More than a few drunk lieutenants got into serious trouble after an incident when someone else on the boat was injured. ("Line officer", in this regard, meant that one was in a warfare specialty eligible for command at sea.)

 It was common to hire water taxis when visiting foreign ports.



This served several functions. First off, it freed the ships from having to crew and operate their own boats. Second, it provided some work for the local charter boats, which meant there was some more interest in having naval ships visit. Third, because they were foreign vessels, the ship's officers were not responsible for safety of the water taxi.

Anchoring out was done in ports that either had limited pier/dock/wharf space (or the port wanted to reserve the space for freighters and cruise ships) or were too shallow for the ships to pull in. Most everyone hated anchoring out and using the boats. It was a strain on the duty sections. Boat crews were required to wear the uniform of the day, which meant trashing a set of whites in the summer.[2] Boating operations could be hazardous, especially if the weather was up. Boating might be secured,[3] which meant that you could find yourself stuck on shore for awhile.

A wise sailor on liberty made sure that he or she had enough money set aside to rent a cheap hotel room in case the weather soured. Worse case was when the weather really soured and the ship had to get under way to the relative safety of the open sea. It was not unheard-of for half of the crew to be stranded ashore for a few days, an event that would involve the local consulate/embassy to help out in caring for the strandees.

[1]Carriers and other large ships had personnel boats that were much larger. The admiral commanding a task group would also have his own boat, known as "the admiral's barge."
[2]Working uniform might be authorized if the weather was getting lousy, but that was not to be counted upon.
[3] "To secure" in the Navy meant "to end an evolution and tidy up." In the Navy, "to secure a building" meant to sweep down the halls, empty the trash, turn out the lights and lock the doors. To the Army, "secure the building" meant to post a guard at the front door. To the Marines, "secure the building" meant to attack the building, blow a hole in the side, go in and kill or capture everyone inside. To the Air Force, "secure a building" meant to negotiate and sign a lease for the building.

The Story of the Green Flare

This is no shit:

The Navy conducts exercises at sea from time to time, operations that civilians refer to as "war games." The goal is to train the ships' crews to deal with the operational tempo, lack of sleep and some of the stresses of being in fluid and uncertain situations at sea.

I was one of the OODs of one of the ships in the exercise. My ship had a modest AAW defensive capability. That was simulated by the firing of a green flare from a Very pistol. For the duration of the exercise, the OODs wore a holster with the Very pistol and several flares.

There was a recognition procedure to identify friendly and hostile aircraft. If I remember correctly, friendlies were to approach ships by flying a certain true course. No radio calls were to be made.

When the EWs detected a contact, the information was passed up to the Bridge over the JA phone circuit. The lookouts were also on the JA circuit, so they would look for something. Because of this, the bearings to any possible threats were sent up as relative bearings (0 degrees being "dead ahead").

So there I was, on watch. The call came up: "Hostile aircraft, bearing 080." The lookouts almost immediately reported "air contact, 3 o'clock". I looked, sure enough, a helicopter was flying directly at the ship.

I loaded the Very pistol, raised it, and fired the flare.

The problem, of course, was that when one added the ship's course to the relative bearing of the air contact, the helicopter was on the "safe course".

The pilots, understandably, were not amused. They broke radio silence and rained some abuse down upon the R/T operator in CIC.

The Captain, though, was more sanguine about it. He came up to the Bridge and asked me what happened. I told him and apologized for fucking up. He shrugged and asked me if I had ever heard the Simon & Garfunkel song "the Boxer". I said I had and I guess my puzzlement showed.

He told me that there is a line in the song that "a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest". He told me that I expected to see an enemy aircraft and that I saw what I thought I would see and that, in a hot war, people were always going to get killed that way. He told me the real trick was to be able to make fast decisions and yet be alert enough to question myself to make reasonably certain that I really knew what was going on.

I kept the shell casing from the Very flare for many years, eventually losing it in a move somewhere along the way.

Of course, what sparked this remembrance was the recent story about the crew of an Apache attack helicopter shooting at a Reuters news crew.

Stupid Engineering Tricks

Engineers had a series of checklists and diagrams that made up the two parts of the book on running a steam plant. The procedures for normal operation made up the Engineering Operational Sequencing System, or EOSS. The emergency procedures made up the Engineering Casualty Control System, or ECCS, and they were practiced by a set of exercises known as the Basic Engineering Casualty Control Exercises, or BECCEs.

BECCEs often involved wrapping up the engineering plant, which was no big deal in a twin-screw ship, as you practiced on one plant and steamed the other. On single-screw ships, it was a big deal, as doing boiler drills meant the ship went "hot, dark and quiet" at different times during the drills. For that reason, the XOs wanted BECCEs to be done on the midwatch, so that the flickering of power "wouldn't upset the ship's routine."

Engineers hated midwatch BECCEs. The engineering training team, which ran the BECCEs, had to be off-watch in order to run them. Both the officers and the sailors on the training team could count on maybe getting three hours of sleep on a BECCE night. Worse, to my mind, was the message that midwatch BECCEs sent to the engineers, which was "your drills are not as important as anyone else's". Operations and Weapons drills were run during the day; the only routinely run engineering drill that was run during the day was a main-space fire drill, as that drill took the ship to GQ.

I did see one time when a ship I was on ran BECCEs after lunch. The engineers were awed, even flattered, that their drills were being run during the working day. It was a simple thing, but it made a huge impact on their morale. The XO, though, was ripshit about the disruption to the work day of having the power go on and off as generators were taken offline and brought online.

The dumbest thing that the surface navy did to the engineers, though, was the "outchop OPPE", the "Operational Power Plant Examination" that was held as the ships steamed back from the Mediterranean for home. OPPE (the West Coast pukes called them OPRES, with the R for "readiness") were the major engineering inspection. Everything was examined, from training records and administrative records to normal steaming and casualty control drills. That meant that the engineers had to be be at their best as everyone else was mentally gearing up for coming home. Worse, the frigates who had towed array sonars almost always had their arrays out underway; they were reluctant to do full BECCEs because of the risk of damage from stopping while having an array out and the captains did not want to take the time to recover the array before the BECCEs and then deploy it afterwards.

To cut to the chase: On that series of outchop OPPEs, every twin-screw ship passed their OPPE. Every single-screw ship failed. From what I heard, life on those ships that failed was not much fun for the next few months.

No other major inspection was done in the Navy that way. Only the engineers had to spend their deployed time training and preparing for a major inspection. This sent a message to the engineers that their time, their work, was not as valued as the other departments, that their training and readiness was less important to the Navy, so let's just work the engineers harder on deployment so as to not take any time when the ships were home.

The message was received loud and clear.

Lack of Sleep

I generally try to stay away from current affairs in this blog and stick to the old days of the steam Navy, but not for this post.

There is an article in Navy Times concerning the lean manning of ships and the effect of lack of sleep on the crews. And it's not just ships that are feeling the pinch.

This may be a concern because of fewer sailors, but as a matter of fact, in the ranks of watchstanders, this has always been a serious problem for officers. It was routine to stand 3-section underway watches, which means that you are on watch for roughly eight hours a day and then, in the off-time, you have to do your job. One day out of three you get the luxury of coming off watch at midnight and then being able to sleep until 0600, when you then have to get up, grab a quick shower, and go on watch at 0700. When you stand a forenoon watch (on deck at 0345), you were previously on watch until 2000 the evening before. The midshitter is the cruelest watch; you go on at 2345 and you're there until roughly 0400. You are damned fortunate if you can get two hours of sleep on either side.

All that is if there is nothing else going on. You might have a night refueling, which calls you to a refueling station. I know of one OOD who damn near ran a ship around on Sardinia because of exhaustion; that particular OOD was on refueling station from 2100 to 0130 (the ship was in waiting station for hours because the ship ahead of her had a fouled rig or something and could not disconnect) and then stood the rev watch from 0345 to 0700. The OOD was dog tired and could not think at a much higher level than "fire bad, tree pretty". That was, by far, not the only example I can think of. I've seen some hairy-ass shit happen because sailors and officers were overtired.

I knew of one refueling ship over 20 years ago (an AOR, I think) whose captain refused to obey an order to take her to sea because the ship was so undermanned in boiler techs. It was the talk of the waterfront for awhile, the captain probably killed his career, but everyone knew that he had made the right call.

The problem is only going to be exacerbated on the new littoral combat ships, which are supposed to be operated with a very small crew. That means that it will be operated with a very tired crew that will make mistakes. That also means that the ships will wind up looking as rusty as a Russian Navy destroyer; First Division on a 1052 had about 20+ sailors to do topside maintenance and that would be half the crew of a LCS. Computerization is nice, but computers can't chip paint, swab decks or paint shit. And unless the ships have halon fire-suppression everywhere ("evacuate the compartment, shut the doors/hatches and pump in halon"), I do not see how a ship with 40 people will be able to fight a serious fire.

I suspect that the Navy is asking for some serious problems beyond the grounding of the USS Port Royal.

Man Overboard! Man Overboard!

Falling over the side is the nightmare of every sailor. There are procedures to recover a man overboard. (I’m using the word “man” in the generic sense. If you don’t like that, sue me.)

As I mentioned in an earlier post, the primary job of the After Lookout is to watch for a man overboard. If the After Lookout sees the man go over the side, the After Lookout immediately throws a lifering at the man. If the After Lookout hears a cry of “man overboard,” he throws a lifering over the side to mark the spot. Either way, the After Lookout calls the Bridge in the 1JV phone circuit and reports: “Man Overboard, Port/Starboard Side!”

The Bosun’s Mate of the Watch announces on the 1MC (the public address circuit): “Man Overboard, Man Overboard. Man the motor whaleboat. All hands not on watch to Quarters for muster.” Anyone who can see the man in the water points at him and continues to point at him as long as they have visual contact, to aid in conning the ship back to the man in the water.

In CIC, the OSs mark the ship’s position on the Dead Reckoning Tracer. Every thirty seconds, they pass the range and bearing to the position where Seaman Schmuckatellli fell over the side and the time he has been in the water up on the 1JA sound-powered phone circuit to the Bridge Status Board Talker.

All over the ship, all hell breaks loose. Sailors are running to their divisional muster station so they can be accounted for. Senior petty officers from every division are going to all of their watch stations to lay eyes on every sailor on watch. The goal is to get all of the muster reports to the XO within six minutes so it can be determined who is missing. On the Boat Deck, a Coxswain (a BM rated to drive small boats), an EN, and a junior BM are manning the motor whaleboat. Other BMs are on the forecastle, readying the Man Overboard Davit (a simple crane to lower a line to the man in the water).

While an aircraft carrier will probably just send up a helicopter with a rescue swimmer to find the man, most other ships still have to get back to the man in the water. Large ships will circle back. Smaller ships will perform a Williamson Turn. A Williamson Turn is performed by throwing the rudder over full in the same direction as the side of the ship the man fell from, this serves to help kick the stern of the ship away from the man in the water, at the same time ringing up a full bell to increase speed. When the bow of the ship is 45 to 60 degrees off its initial course, the rudder is thrown back in the other direction. If done properly, the ship will steady up on the reciprocal course to the one she was on when the man fell in the water. The Conning Officer will attempt to maneuver the ship so that when she comes to a stop, the ship is upwind of the man in the water and the man is opposite the forecastle. The wind will blow the ship down to the man; the BMs on the forecastle will lower a horse collar from the Man Overboard Davit. The man will put his head and arms through the horsecollar and the BMs will hoist his soggy ass on board.

If the man is injured or as desired, the motor whaleboat is lowered into the water. The whaleboat just goes over, hauls the man into the boat, and returns to the ship, where the boat is hoisted back on board.

In winter weather, there will be only a handful of minutes to get a man back on board before he dies of hypothermia. In heavy seas, if the man wasn’t lucky enough to grab the life ring thrown to him, spotting a man in the water is very difficult. On a dark night, it is almost impossible to find a man in the water who is not conscious enough to yell at the top of his lungs when the ship gets close (if he didn’t grab the ring, which has a strobe light in it).

In very heavy weather, due to the risk to the ship and those sailors who would have to go topside to rescue anyone, the Captain may issue an order that anyone who falls over the side will not be recovered. Then the mustering drill only serves to identify the man who will be written off as being lost at sea.

Mooring Lines

If you've ever been around small boats much, you may have used mooring lines. "Mooring lines" are, to landlubbers "the ropes what you use to tie the boat up." When you go into a marine supply store, you may see single-braided nylon lines and double-braided nylon line, up to maybe 5/8" or so in diameter.

The mooring lines on ships are 5" lines or larger and are usually double-braided. Those lines are phenomenally strong. Six lines, doubled up, will hold a 8,000 ton ship to the pier against the winds and tidal current (unless the winds are howling). But exert enough force on them and they will part.

Usually what happens is that the bow-most line is passed over to the pier, the linehandler on the pier drops the loop at the end of the line over a bollard and the linehanders on the ship make the line fast to the bits on the forecastle. Then either the wind catches the ship wrong or the tugs pull the ship or the Conning Officer rings up an astern bell; all the thousands of horsepower that the tugs or the main engines can exert pull on that line. It stretches waay out and then it snaps.

If you have ever had a small rope snap on you, you may have noted that it tends to whip back along the line of force exerted on the rope. If you were to break a 5" mooring line, it comes back with unbelievable speed and force. Generally, but not always, the line comes back low to the deck and if you are in the way, you can forget about walking on your own legs, as the line will smash both of your legs to the point that if the line didn't amputate them, the doctors will have to.

This happened on one ship almost 30 years ago; the XO of the ship was up by the bullnose of the ship, yelling at someone on the pier, when the mooring line running through the bullnose (#1 line) parted. Both of his legs were shattered and his blood was spattered all over the forecastle.

He survived and later appeared in a training film on snapback. That film had a scene were a number of mannekins were placed by a mooring line that was deliberately parted; the dummies went flying every which way.

Mooring lines were just another item on ships that people worked with and around all the time, but if you didn't respect them, they could kill you.

Storm Story

This a story from my other blog, Just an Earth-Bound Misfit. I posted this story there several months ago, well before I opened the doors on this blog.

So, for your reading pleasure (and so I don't have to write a new post), here it is:

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At the risk of poaching on Scully’s turf [reference to a deleted blog removed-edited 12/14/07], I want to write about a storm at sea. This took place a long time ago. A group of navy ships from several NATO nations was conducting an exercise in the North Atlantic, off the coast of North Carolina, during the winter. They still called them “task groups” back then, not “battle groups”.

That is not a good place to be at that time of year.

A storm blew up. It was not a light storm. This storm was a very intense low and the meteorologists later said it was an anomaly, a cyclonic low in the winter. The winds during the peak of the storm were measured on some of the ships at over 65 knots. The wave heights were in excess of fifty feet.

What fifty foot waves mean is that if you are on a navy ship smaller than an aircraft carrier, when you are standing in the pilot house and the ship goes down the back side of the wave and it is at the bottom of the trough, you cannot see over the top of the next wave. Then the wave crashes down on your ship and green water charges over the forecastle and up the front of the pilot house, covering the windows. The ship rides up the front of the wave and tilts over it. The bow comes completely out of the water and then slams back into the sea.

Ships with large sonar domes do not ride very well, for the sonar dome does not knife back into the sea. It slams down and the entire ship, all several thousand tons of it, shudders from the impact. Do that enough times and the sonar dome can be damaged.

Then there is the fun of being on a ship that is constantly rolling 40 degrees from side to side. Cooking is impossible, so you had better like cheese and bologna (“cheese and horse cock”)sandwiches, for that is all that there is to eat. And that will be your menu selection for three days, for on the fourth day, they’ve run out of bread.

“Cheese and horse cock, hold the bread.”

After the storm, the sailors have to clean the bulkheads along all of the passageways. Not because people have puked on them, but because they have walked on them. The lower portions of the passageways have footprints. The XO just loves seeing footprints on white bulkheads.

Sleeping is difficult at best. For the sailors on the bottom two racks, they sleep on “coffin racks”; the bunk is a mattress on top of a horizontal locker. The top rack is a mattress on a wire bed frame with springs around the edges. If you’re on a coffin rack, you hopefully have a bungee cord or three to secure yourself in. If you’re in a rack with a wire/spring frame, you sleep face down, for you then slip your arms under the mattress from either side and grab hold of the wire netting under the rack. And yes, you can sleep that way and you can learn to hold yourself in against the rolling of the ship without being thrown out or waking up.

There are things you try not to think about.

One is fuel oil.

Back in the day of oil-fired steam ships, which is to say, almost every navy ship that was not nuclear powered before the mid-1970s, fuel was kept in fuel oil storage tanks. Those tanks almost always had some water in them, because if the tanks were empty in heavy seas, they were ballasted down with seawater. The fuel was pumped to settling tanks, to allow the water to settle out. The water was stripped off, the clean fuel was pumped from the settling tanks to the service tanks, one pair for each boiler, and those service tanks fed the boilers’ burners. It was critical to keep water out of the fuel oil for, as you might suspect, water does not burn very well. At normal steaming rates, a service tank would last twelve hours or more before you had to switch them and refill the empty tank from the settling tanks.

In heavy seas, the settling tanks could not do their job properly, for the fuel would keep being stirred up and the water would not settle out. In really heavy seas, there almost was no point in using the settling tanks at all. You just hoped and prayed that the fuel going to the boilers was not so contaminated that the fires would be lost in the boilers.

For if fires were lost, the ship would go dead in the water, steerageway would be lost and in 50-foot seas, the ship would wind up not heading into the seas, but having them come from her beam. A warship the size of a destroyer or cruiser will not survive heavy beam seas for long, the sea will roll her over. And she, along with her crew, will die.

"Oh Lord, the sea is so vast. and my boat is so small."

Even a warship is a small boat in a Force 12 storm and fifty foot seas.

And you learn, as people in their twenties should, that sometimes your fate, whether you survive and thrive or die, is not up to you.

And you learn, as people should, that what is important to most landsmen really is not all that important. Whether or not your shoes go with your belt. The model of your car. Office politics. Who said what to whom. You learn that sometimes, all you can do is hang on, endure, and hope to survive. For if you do, you may come to know that what a lot of people on shore think is important is really just small stuff.

Respect the Steam Plant

If you have never read the poem by Robert Kipling "The Secret of the Machines," you should. Steam is essentially a 19th Century technology. About the only items on a last-generation naval warship's steam plant that would astonish an engineer from a century earlier would be the turbine-powered equipment, the wide use of electrical motors and the automatic combustion control system. He would be amazed at the very high operating temperatures and pressures, but the principles would be familiar and it would take him not a lot of time to become wholly familiar with the plant.

Steam is a powerful force and it is fearsome. You probably know that if you were in Denver, water boils at a lower temperature and it takes longer to cook things by boiling. It works the other way; if you have a boiler under pressure, the boiling point of water is higher. In a 1,200psi steam plant, the boiling point of water is 575degF or so. The steam in the main line has been superheated to 975degF for 400degF of superheat.

If you have an older steam heating system in your home, it is a saturated steam system running at about 1/2-1psi. Home systems do not run higher because a steam leak at a higher temperature becomes not serious,but deadly. On a warship, the steam line for heating hot water, to the galleys and to the HVAC system was a 50# saturated steam system; as you can see here, the temperature of the steam was almost 300degF (that web page is in absolute pressure,not atmospheric, so add 14.7psi). If you put your body in front of a steam leak at that temperature, you will be seriously hurt.

Unlike saturated or "wet" steam, where a leak is visible, a leak of superheated or "dry" steam is invisible. All you can do is hear the shriek of the leak itself, you cannot see it. If you were foolish enough to use your hand to try to feel a superheated steam leak, you will lose your fingers or your entire hand, for the steam jet will cut it right off. The only safe method was to take a broomstick and use that to find the leak; watching for then the broomstick became scorched or was sliced through.

Steam is a powerful force and those who do not respect its power, those who are not in awe of it, will pay the price.

But remember, please, the Law by which we live,
We are not built to comprehend a lie,
We can neither love nor pity nor forgive.
If you make a slip in handling us you die!

Safety Rules are Written in Blood

In the post previous to this, I wrote that when the fires were lit in a naval boiler, only the two sailors actually lighting off the boiler are permitted in the firing alley.

There is a reason for that. Under the right circumstances, when the burner ignites, a rush of flame can come out of the light-off port (known as a "flareback"). It was a rare occurrence, but it did happen from time to time.

One day, back about 30 or so years ago, a young officer from the engineering staff of a destroyer squadron was observing a light-off on one of the ships in port. In order to get a really good look at the procedure, he stood right behind the Burnerman. The staffie was wearing the uniform of the day, Summer Khaki, which were made of gabardine, or what the Navy called "certified navy twill."


Those are fancy terms for "polyester."

A flareback occurred and the young officer was bathed in flame. If he had been wearing the standard shipboard working uniform for officers, known as "wash khakis", he'd have gotten away with some nasty burns, no doubt. But he wasn't and, as a result, the uniform pretty much melted onto his skin, or, as it was more crudely put, he was shrink-wrapped. He lived less than two weeks.

As a result, only cotton or fire-retardant uniforms were permitted in engineering spaces. And nobody, other than the two sailors performing the light-off, were permitted in the firing alley when lighting fires in a boiler.

Safety rules are written in blood.