Posted on 02/13/2005 10:23:15 AM PST by NCSteve
The captain of a submarine that hit a seamount Jan. 8 in the western Pacific Ocean, killing one crewman and seriously injuring 23 others, has been found guilty of operating the submarine unsafely and has been issued a letter of reprimand, effectively ending his career.
Cmdr. Kevin Mooney, the captain of the USS San Francisco, was permanently relieved as skipper after an administrative proceeding known as an admiral's mast. The proceeding was convened by an order of the commander of the Seventh Fleet, Vice Adm. Jonathan Greenert.
Cmdr. Ike N. Skelton, a spokesman for the Seventh Fleet in Yokosuka, Japan, said late Friday night that Greenert determined during the investigation that Mooney failed to follow “several critical navigational and voyage planning” standards.
“By not ensuring those standards were followed, Mooney hazarded the vessel,” Skelton said, reading from a statement issued by Greenert.
The mast concluded that Mooney's crew had access to charts that showed there might have been an underwater obstruction in the area, and that a sounding taken just minutes before the accident did not correlate with the charts that were in use at the time, which should have prompted him to be more cautious.
The news stunned several Navy sources who have been following the accident investigation, particularly because Mooney's actions after the accident were characterized as heroic by everyone familiar with the situation. Despite extensive damage to the ship, he and his crew got it to the surface and kept it floating long enough to limp back to its homeport of Apra Harbor, Guam.
The San Francisco was heading to Australia when it came to periscope depth a little more than 400 miles southwest of Guam to fix its position accurately. Minutes after diving, and while traveling at a high rate of speed, the submarine slammed into a seamount in an area where official Navy charts list 6,000 feet of water.
Other charts of the area, however, show muddy water in the area, which normally indicates shallowness, and other government agency charts show evidence of the seamount less than 150 feet below the surface. The grounding destroyed three of the four ballast tanks in the submarine's bow, shattered the sonar dome and smashed the sonar sphere. In addition, a bulkhead at the front end of the ship was buckled.
Machinist Mate 3rd Class Joseph Ashley was killed when he was thrown more than 20 feet and struck his head on a large pump. Almost two-dozen others were injured so badly they could not perform their duties, though they have all since been treated and released from the hospital in Guam. Seventy-five others received less severe injuries.
The crew saved the ship by constantly running a low pressure blower meant for only intermittent use to force water out of the badly damaged forward ballast tanks, as well as using exhaust from the ship's diesel motor to augment the blower.
Despite the force of the blow, the nuclear reactor and the ship's turbine generators continued to operate normally, and even sensitive electronic and navigation gear continued to function.
On Jan. 20, Mooney was reassigned to Submarine Squadron 15 in Guam, pending the results of an investigation to determine the cause of the sub's grounding. Cmdr. Andrew Hale, the squadron's deputy commander, assumed duties as captain of the San Francisco.
The mast means that Mooney will not face a more serious proceeding known as a court martial, but the letter of reprimand and the decision to relieve him of command “for cause” means that his promising career is over, the Navy sources said.
In a related development, Lt. Cmdr. Jeff A. Davis, a spokesman for the Pacific submarine force commander, said late Friday night that assessment of the damage to the San Francisco is proceeding and that shipyard workers in Guam are planning to make temporary repairs to the bow of the ship so it can be moved under its own power to a shipyard where it can be repaired.
Although the location where it will be repaired has not been determined, Navy sources said it would likely be Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, or Bangor, Wash.
“These temporary repairs will be engineered to ensure a successful transit,” Davis said. “As part of having on-hand materials for potential use in these temporary repairs, a large steel dome about 20 feet high and 20 feet in diameter will be arriving at Guam in the next few days. As of now, no decisions have been made about when USS San Francisco will depart Guam, where it will go, or what her final disposition will be.”
Other Navy sources said that if the assessment determines it makes sense to repair rather than scrap the San Francisco, the Navy will likely use the entire bow section from the recently decommissioned USS Atlanta to replace the badly damaged bow of the San Francisco.
Surface turbulence as in "on the surface of the water?"
Agreed.
However (you knew there was a "however," otherwise why would I post), it is within the realm of possibility.
If you don't think that it is look up Dionisio Pulido.
I'll grant you, unlikely, particularly undetected (kinda hard to hide, even underwater) but still, possible.
It sounds like F. H. is refering to the surface of the sub.
Thank you.
Dionisio Pulido. That's the couple whose cornfield became the Paricutin volcano in one afternoon.
I would hope the USN checked out the geology of the mountain in question.
Agreed, but you have to admit that it isn't bloddy likely that NO ONE would have noticed the formation of a new 6,000 foot sea mount. It had to have some seismic effects that someone, somewhere, would have said "hey, look at this!"
By the same token, I think that the Navy should launch a program to update their charts, inch by inch, with the absolutely most precise possible instrumentation possible. Not just in this area, but worldwide.
We should have hyperaccurate surveys of the Earths surface, including under the oceans, that are constantly being updated and checked. That should be a basic part of our government's scientific and technological responsibility. As has been proven repeatedly, this type of investment truly returns a hundred fold what we put into it.
He's talking about the blade surface even though the worst cavitation is at the blade tips and the propeller vortex.
Yes, being an ex-ping jockey, I know what cavitation is. :-) I heard enough of others boats' cavitation.
Also studied it in relation to the cavitation that smaller recreational boats suffer. I have owned many over my lifetime. :-) The good thing about smaller boats is that you can actually hear the cavitation when it occurs and you can slow down. :-) It can really eat up a screw in a relatively short period of time and, as you say, right out on the tips and vortex.
I backtracked his responses/posts by number and none referred to "cavitation" so I must have missed some of his other posts.
The original question was the same old question about why the sonar wasn't in use at 35 knots. :-)
I can't blame people for asking the question, but it does get tiring answering them thread after thread. One of these days I'll work up the energy to compile the links so these nice folks can find the answers themselves.
I will answer for my partner, who is babysitting the well tonight, plank owner U.S.S. Stonewall Jackson (SSBN 634).
http://home.nc.rr.com/volman/Sub/index.html
More the boundary between the hull and the water. At low speed you have laminar flow. At higher speeds turbulent flow sets up. I used the term surface turbulence since my dealings with fluid flow is more through pipe and control valves. In the refinery noise is not an issue for the same reasons as a sub, more related to OSHA (85-90 dbA threshhold), and equipment damage due to vibration and erosion (a valve operating in cavitation is loud - and will not last long).
I don't deny that having a more accurate survey of the oceans' bottoms would be worthwhile, even if just to have saved one life. But it's not possible to instantly do this. The oceans are so enormous that even if every survey ship bent to the task, it would take years and probably decades to complete.
Many world war two boats were lost when they grounded and couldn't be refloated. This wasn't necessarily due to mistakes, but more to the limitations of the charts and the encouragement given to commanders to be aggressive and take risks.
Submarines in transit typically travel in well known and surveyed lanes. However, I don't know if there is such a strip between Guam and Australia (but my guess is that there is) or whether San Francisco was in it (my guess is that they were or this would have been mentioned after the admiral's mast results were made semipublic). If my two guesses are correct, it still doesn't explain how a large seamount was uncharted in a transit lane (only the phrase "discolored water" shows up on one of the two charts they had onboard).
If it is recent, one would think its creation would have been accompanied by detectable tremors, tidal waves, etc. that would have been noticed.
But who knows. Lots of guessing.
MPA and Ship's Diving Officer
USS San Francisco, 2003-04
Oh, what could you possibly know about submarines.... oh, what's that, diving officer you say... and on the San Francisco itself?
OK, maybe I'll grant that you might know just a touch more about it than someone who's claim to knowledge about submarines comes from old movies.... but only by a little bit! ;^>
Seriously, I agree that "hyper accurate survey maps" (there's one of my sources, "Hunt for Red October") is something for long term survey, likely by ships. However, I think that some of the radar mapping stuff that was proved out on the Shuttle should be able to spot something like a new sea mount in a region that is supposed to be open ocean with 6,000 foot depth. I mean, you don't have to have more than something like 100 meter resolution to get that.
We ought to be able to launch a program to put a radar satellite in orbit in short order, from off the shelf parts, to do that kind of gross survey of all of the oceans and have the survey completed relatively quickly. I think the main reason we haven't done it is international politics. The high res satellite based radars can easily do things like pick out buried missle silos and sensitive bunkers. After all, that was apparently the acknowledged intent of the first such Shuttle mission, the one where they picked out the buried river beds in the Sahara, to tell the Soviets that "we see you," that if we can pick that out we can pick out where they hide their missles.
Well, if we can open up the data and demonstrate that it's relatively low resolution I bet we can convince lots of folks that it's a good idea. Give the UN huggers free and unfettered access to the data stream. It won't show anybody anything we don't want them to see (unless we've got a secret underwater city somewhere we need to hide) and it might just turn up some interesting things.
(P.S. my son's an Aggie with 18 months left and has signed his contract for the Marines - so I guess he'll be butting heads with squids, particularly bubble heads, unless he gets stationed on one of the retasked Ohios, that is)
Great initial syory based on the info at hand. The two drydock fotos released by the Navy are extremely instructional tho. In a former life I used to build/rebuild/repair these things and there is reason in the pics to wonder about the Navy's story version.
Who believes that the entire seafloor has not been mapped to the last square yard at least 500 miles out and for 360 degrees around Guam? For half a century, since the days of Ed Beach and Dudly Morton the boats have been turning in their completed Nav charts and the info , including depth soundings, has been incorporated into the maps. Guam has been a subhub nearly forever and the navy's claim there is something new out there is not credible.
Besides the ships'voyage charts other agencies have been seismically, satelitely, sonically, and by direct survey mapping the oceans for the same half a century (no spellcheck please.) The Woods Hole guys keep track of new islands forming as in the new island forming in east Hawaii.
Vertical cliffs probably don't really exist deep underwater---erosion, etc. "The Abyss"was fiction. But just look at the actual damage! I don't see any rocks, coral, mud, or fish in the hi-res pics(2.5MB) and ships that hit bottom always bring home pieces of what they hit. True in had a "slow wash" coming home but it all never comes off.
The cupped hull plates on the ballast tank look more like depth charge damage than collision. The entire nose cone is GONE! Repeat GONE! The roundy shape under the tarp is the sonar sphere---the only piece in the bow that might be classified info so that the ship is now about six feet shorter than design. Note also the bolting ring, sort of yellowish, just forward of the cat walk. The port side UPPER Quarter of the ring is missing. This ring mounts the nose cone. The only reasonable way that could have been jerked loose is if the ship tried to drive into a cave or at least drive under a severe overhang which might explain why the ship intially was slow to rise.
The damage that I see could have as easily been from bows-on ship-to-ship as ship-to-rock reminiscent of the Russian "crazy Ivan" maneuvre. Is someone else missing a sub? The only reason we've heard about this is that a sailor died---the Navy just doesn't normally talk about ship dings.
And try the math: They said the ship took 30 hours to get home at 8 knots === 240 miles. But they say the "magic mountain" is either 350 or 400 miles out. That's a large error! Someone else will hit the same mountain before the Navy finds it again.
Bottom line is I'm just not buying the story about our billion dollar, newly refueled, sub heading south one sunny day for a winter cruise, being quiet for 400 miles, then cranking it up to "nine"and steep diving into a rock. On its face if the Navy's story is true then the Captain, his helpers, and all his bosses ought to be in a safe padded cell. Give me a call if you do and want to buy some really special real estate. thanx for humoring me, RS
You screen name is aptly taken. It must be interesting to go through life continually paranoid.
ET1(SS) RO
8801 NNPS, S5G (Idaho)
USS Buffalo (SSN-715) 88-91
USS Proteus (AS-19) 92 (just long enough to go to Australia)
USS Holland (AS-32) 92-94
USS Pogy (SSN-647) 94-96
NRD Los Angeles (NF Recruiter) 96-99 (and wife threatened to divorce me if I didn't get out--didn't take that much prodding, really)
Now a happy civilian puke.
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