Seven Dead Sailors 'Were Trapped ALIVE inside Flooding USS Fitzgerald after their Comrades [Trunc]

Daily Mail (U.K.) ^ | June 20, 2017 | James Wilkinson & Michael Fitzpatrick

[Cecily]

The Navy is investigating the horrifying possibility that some of those who died on the USS Fitzgerald when it sank may have been trapped alive in rapidly flooding compartments as emergency hatches were closed, it has emerged.

Cargo ship the ACX Crystal slammed into the side of the US destroyer off the Japanese coast while much of the rest of the crew were asleep on Saturday.

The cargo ship's bow, which protrudes underneath the water, punctured the steel armor of the ship, opening a hole into the quarters where more than 100 sailors slept.

Emergency hatches were closed on the compromised berthing compartments to stop the ship from sinking.

Now it's suspected that some of the seven men who died aboard the ship were locked in those rooms as they were flooded, Good Morning America reported.

[meadsjn]

I know about the Belknap and the Kennedy. A couple of guys came to my ship from the Belknap, and told their experiences. I followed the news of the investigations for the next few years.

That happened during maneuvering drills, at night, wherein one ship takes tactical command, and orders all the ships of the formation to maneuver from spot to spot, using coded commands from the Tactical Signal Manual. "Somone" on at least one ship misinterpreted one command, and the Kennedy and Belknap locked up side by side, with the JP5 from the JFK spilling down on the superstructure of the Belknap, feeding the flames. Ammo was cooking off and exploding in some of the magazines, and people in the berthing compartments were crawling beneath the smoke trying to find the exits.

Yes, people do make mistakes, and the investigations go on for years. But while the crazy stuff is happening, a whole lot of people are wide awake, doing their jobs, and doing their best to prevent the train wreck.

This investigation will also probably take a while.

[rlmorel]

I know...when you look at this as an isolated incident, it seems utterly and completely impossible.

Impossible.

How does this state of the art, billion something dollar vessel, with a highly trained crew, sensors that can spot a ballistic warhead the size of a medicine ball, streaking thorough the stratosphere at ten times the speed of sound, with state of the art SPY-1D radar that can detect surface and air contacts for hundreds of miles, bristling with sensors...how does it run into a ship in the middle of the night.

I am here to tell you it not only happens, but every single time it happens, it is for depressingly the same reasons nearly every, single time.

Procedures not followed. Procedures ignored. Lack of awareness. Fatigue. Simple mental errors. And that is when you get a ship, with all these wonderful, amazing, and capable things, manned by smart people, steaming at speed at 0200, compounding each minor contributing factor, ending up having a collision.

Nobody ever walks out the front door of their house in the morning to go to work and says “Well, today I am going to get T-Boned by a tractor trailer, and this is the last time I am ever going to go out this door.

No Lieutenant in the Navy ever climbs up a ladder to the bridge at 2330 to assume the deck, and thinks “Well, tonight, people are going to be dead because of me, and my career will be over and my life changed...”

Nobody ever thinks these things. It is all routine.

Course...setting...hey...no big deal. We have been doing this for months now, our deployment is over in two months, nothing ever really changes. Same routine...red lights for night vision...hatches open and close...people walk in and out...someone shoves a clipboard in your hand for a signature...your JOOD tells you there is a contact on a parallel course 5000 yards away heading in the same direction...we are overtaking her. What’s her course? Ah...okay. Shouldn’t be a problem, keep an eye on her....the phone rings. It is the engine room. What? What kind of electrical issue? Smoke? Ah. Okay, is the system still functioning? Well...power it down, we don’t need it tonight and we can look at it tomorrow morning. The Captain said what about it? Why would he say that? Do you think we need to wake him up and tell him? I know, I know we got dinged on it during the last engineering inspection...

And so on.

Then someone says something that catches your attention, and you look over. Someone has a puzzled look and their voice is a question. You walk over and agree. Check that for me. A few seconds later, someone says “Sir!” and all the little things, little contributing factors, mishearing a course correction, or thinking the contact is moving at NINE knots, not NINETEEN knots, or thinking her course is FOUR degrees, not FORTY degrees, not picking up on something innocuous while you were engaged in a minor problem, and you now have a 30,000 ton ship close aboard bearing down on you.

Believe me. This happens over, and over, and over again with depressing and predictable regularity.

That is how these things happen. Not just in ships. In aviation...industry...nuclear power plants...when you read them, there is a sameness to them. It is like a seasoned homicide detective who is called to the scene of a murder, and as they walk in, see the blood, the bodies, the first thought they often have is “Yeah. This is typical. I have seen this before, over and over and over again.” And some junior detective says “What do you think?” And they just spit out the narrative, because...they have seen it all before.

In the case of the collision, it could be terrorism, hostile intent. It could have been a major engineering casualty. It could even have been a meteor that hit the ship’s radar putting it out of commission. But we are going to find out, in all likelihood it is none of those things. It is going to be human failing.

Because of all the things that we depend on to be constant, turbines spinning, radars providing information, and computers functioning, the one thing above all others that is ALWAYS constant, and we can ALWAYS depend on, is that people get bored, tired, lazy, distracted, and make mistakes.

Because it is in our nature.

[rlmorel]

I know. Don't get me wrong. I am in no way wishing for this to be caused by poor performance, lack of focus, or any of those things.

My point is...all it takes is a few people (even just two out of entire ship's company of hundreds of people who are doing their job correctly) to make small mistakes, at the wrong time, in the wrong place.

I admit to being somewhat obsessed with this subject, since it hits home for me, and really resonates not just because I was on a ship, or saw accidents while there...my job requires me nearly every day to evaluate things that did not work correctly, find out why, analyze workflow, systems, etc. because they can result in harm to people if they fail to work as they should. We do have failures, and the overwhelmingly vast majority of the time, nobody is harmed. But I live in a constant state of watchfulness and concern, antennae twitching, looking for signs to alert that there is something going on out of sight and mind that might manifest itself at the worst possible place and the worse possible time and cause harm. Those things you just don't foresee or predict.

When you see accidents after the fact, in retrospect, it all seems like a permanently paved road that could not be deviated from, that it was nearly pre-ordained. But it isn't like that. Things can almost always be avoided...if they are noticed and seen. I don't want to be these guys:

I post it with apologies to Gary Larson, as I told him in my head I would post no more of his cartoons because of his nice letter he wrote to the Internet community, but...this is just too on target. It is probably one of the most common human antecedents to catastrophe.

[NewJerseyJoe]

There is a chapter in Sebastian Junger's The Perfect Storm called "The Zero Point Moment." Here is Junger's description of what it is like to drown. (Some typos; this is not my transcription.)

---

The amount of air in their lungs is about a minutes worth. The instinct not to breath under water is so strong that it overcomes the agony of running out of air. No matter how desperate the drowning person is he doesn’t inhale until he’s on the verge of losing consciousness. At that point theres so much carbon dioxid in the blood, and so little oxygen that chemical sensors in the brain trigger an involuntary breath whether he’s underwater or not. That is called the “Breakpoint”; laboratory experiments have shown that the break point to come after 87 seconds. It’s sort of neurological optimism, as if the body were saying “Holding our breath is killing us and breathing in might not kill us, so we might as well breathe in. If the person hyperventilates first — as free divers do, and as a frantic person might — the break point comes as late as 140 seconds. Hyperventilation initially flushes carbon dioxide out of the system, so it takes that much longer to climb back up to critical levels.

Until the break point, a drowning person is said to be undergoing “voluntary apnea” choosing not to breathe. Lack of oxygen to the brain causes a sensation of darkness closing in from all sides as in a camera aperture stopping down. The panic of a drowning person is mixed with odd incredulity that is actually happening. Having never done it before, the body — and the mind– do not know how to die gracefully. The process is filled with desperation and awkwardness. So this is drowning a drowning person might think.. So this is how my life finally ends.

Along with the disbelief is an overwhelming sense of being wrenched from life at the most banal, inopportune moment imaginable… “I can’t die, I have tickets to next week’s gam” is not an impossible thought for someone who is drowning. These types of thoughts shriek through the mind during the minute or so that it takes a panicked person to run out of air. When the first involuntary breath occurs most people are still conscious, which is unfortunate, because the only thing more unpleasant than running out of air is breathing in water. At that point the person goes from voluntary to involuntary apnea and the drowning begins in earnest. A spasmodic breath drags water into he mouth and windpipe and then one of two things happen. In about 10 percent of people anything, anything, touching the vocal cords triggers an immediate contraction in the muscles around the larynx. In effect, the central nervous system judges something in the voicebox to be more of a threat than low oxygen levels in the blood and acts accordingly. This is called a laryngospasm. It’s so powerful that it overcomes the breathing reflex and eventually suffocates the person. A person with laryngospasm drowns without any water in his lungs.

In the other 90% of people, water floods the lungs and ends any waning transfer of oxygen to the blood. The clock is running down now. Half-conscious and enfeebled by oxygen depletion, the person is in no position to fight his way back up to the surface. THe very process of drowning makes it harder and harder not to drown, an exponential disaster curve similar to that of a sinking boat.

Occasionally someone makes it back from this dark world, though, and it’s from these people that we know what drowning feels like.

[Lou L]

I was on a frigate for 4 years and we practiced abandoning ship ad nauseum.

I was on a cruiser for about the same length of time, and I'm sure I could count on one hand--with fingers to spare, the number of times we practiced to abandon ship. Our focus was on damage control and saving the ship, not fleeing from it.

And just so I understand you, you think that after a very traumatic collision that caused significant damage to the command and control of the ship--as well as breached its watertight integrity, it would just gracefully slip below the water, allowing boats and life rafts to be deployed without any issues? At night?

After such an incident, there was already significant confusion and damage throughout the ship. The captain, and likely many other members of the crew were injured. Egresses from the berthing areas and other working spaces were likely blocked. Abandoning ship is not the textbook exercise that everyone may have learned about in boot camp, or practiced at GITMO.

I think your assessment and first instincts to abandon ship because you don't perceive danger is cavalier. Abandoning ship is a last resort, and only after all other efforts to save the ship have failed. I disagree with your take on the situation.

[TXnMA]

Thanks for clarifying the issue! There is still too much sensationalist speculation going on here on FR, IMO... :-(

FWIW, your dropbox link didn't work. I believe this was the image of mine you were trying to display:

IMO, there is no longer any credible reason to go on speculating and spreading FUD about a "deliberate attack". etc. I guess some knotheads here on FR just have to have their "cheap kicks"... :-(

It is now abundantly clear that the collision occurred BEFORE the ACX Crystal began her bizarre maneuvering. And, it is also obvious that she did u-turn, return to the scene of the incident and putter around there at dead slow speed, presumably offering what aid she could supply.

And, it was while the Crystal was at the incident scene that she (almost an hour late) reported the event -- in confusing "local time", rather in the "Zulu" or Universal Coordinated Time" (UTC) -- in which AIS data are recorded. (See table, above...)

Confusion about the time makes early reports of the collision position at point "A" excusable. "Garbage" media reports as in #39 on this thread are simply inexcusable reporting in any nation's media...

And, IMO, continuing to try to make an attack out of an accident here on FR (six days after the event) smears FReepers as imbeciles -- or worse, as wacko conspiracy theorists -- or liberal "Fake News Junkies"...

</RANTMODE>

[ilovesarah2012]

When Muslims are involved, conspiracy theories make perfect sense.

[rlmorel]

I agree completely TXnMA.

Several things that (to me) buttress your analysis:

1.) The 90 degree turn at 1630 UTC (0130 local time) with the accompanying dramatic dropoff in speed. That alone appears to support a collision.

2.) The data indicates that with almost no delay, literally three minutes, the ship began picking up speed and resuming its course. To me, that is also evidence the ACX Crystal was on autopilot. If not, any normal mariner would have stopped the ship dead in the water and stayed that way.
Looking at the times, it took about eight minutes for the ACX Crystal to resume its course and pick up speed again, something I just don’t think any mariner would have done on a civilian ship in peacetime.

During that eight minute time frame, while the CRX Crystal was on autopilot, I don’t doubt that the 20 man crew was running around in total pandemonium and confusion (Including the Captain) while the lone guy on the bridge who was probably surfing the Internet or watching a DVD was standing in the middle of the bridge with alarms going off, the ship thudding and heeling as it began to pick up speed and steer back to the original course, phones going off, people arriving on the bridge, and him having no idea what happened.

We are sensitized to see nearly anything as terrorism, myself included. This just doesn’t fit that, to me.

[rlmorel]

"...When Muslims are involved, conspiracy theories make perfect sense..."

I know what you mean. But two things to keep in mind:

1.) We don't know how many of the crew, or even if any of them are muslim. The Philippines is 90% or greater Christian, not mulslim.

2.) In things like this, while it is okay to NOT rule anything out, jumping directly to terrorism is not only unwise, it is likely exactly what terrorists want. They want us to get crazy about everything that happens and attribute it to them. It gives them power and validity. Sometimes...a cigar is just a cigar. In a post 9/11 world...anything is possible. But when we begin attributing everything to terrorism, we run the risk of sounding like liberals who attribute everything to global warming.

[rlmorel]

FWIW, here is the angle I see the impact occurring at...don't know their relative speeds yet. I think if it happens like this, a lot of force of the collision is transferred in the motion of the ship forward. I think the Fitzgerald saw her at the last second and tried to turn to port to avoid the collision:

[ilovesarah2012]

What a 64 year old retired grandmother thinks about world events has absolutely no bearing on anything. Trust me.

[rlmorel]

I beg to differ, ilovesarah2012.

But I know what you mean. It reminds me of that old saying about the relative power of a husband and wife:

Our wives decide how much money we can spend, how many children we have, what kind of cars we own, where we go, what we eat, where we sleep, how much work is done on the house, where we retire, how much money we retire with, what nursing homes we will go into, where and how we will be buried.

We men get to decide the importance of world events, what they mean, how they affect us, who we should be allied with overseas, etc. etc. etc.

Yeah! We men have all the power!

[TXnMA]

Thanks for clarifying the issue! There is still too much sensationalist speculation going on here on FR, IMO... :-(

FWIW, your dropbox link didn't work. I believe this was the image of mine you were trying to display:

IMO, there is no longer any credible reason to go on speculating and spreading FUD about a "deliberate attack". etc. I guess some knotheads here on FR just have to have their "cheap kicks"... :-(

It is now abundantly clear that the collision occurred BEFORE the ACX Crystal began her bizarre maneuvering. And, it is also obvious that she did U-turn, return to the scene of the incident and putter around there at dead slow speed, presumably offering what aid she could supply.

And, it was while the Crystal was at the incident scene that she (almost an hour late) reported the event -- in confusing "local time", rather in the "Zulu" or Universal Coordinated Time" (UTC) -- in which AIS data are recorded. (See table, above...)

Confusion about the time makes early reports of the collision position at point "A" excusable. However, "garbage" media reports as in #39 on this thread are simply inexcusable reporting in any nation's media...

And, IMO, continuing to try to make an attack out of an accident here on FR (six days after the event) smears FReepers as imbeciles -- or worse, as wacko conspiracy theorists -- or liberal "Fake News Junkies"...

</RANTMODE>

[rlmorel]

Can you see this image, TXnMA? Or are you getting the little red box icon?

[TXnMA]

I get a little blue box with a “?” inside...

[rlmorel]

Dang. I was hoping not...thx though

[TXnMA]

FReepMail for you...

[Bigg Red]

C’mon! You actually expect them to proofread? You meanie!

[mad_as_he$$]

;-)