Posted on 08/17/2017 6:38:47 PM PDT by beebuster2000
tales of heroism, but still no coherent explanation of what happened. I can't imagine how a US combat vessel did not see and avoid a container ship.
terribly sad loss of life, as usual the crew responded with heroism.
(Excerpt) Read more at abcnews.go.com ...
They are not very good snoopers if they don’t have a 360 view. Maybe it was one unfortunate chain of events. Perhaps it was the military obsession with 24/7 you tube or video games. Nonetheless, I am glad to hear those responsible can’t cost more lives.
There is a difference between fault and responsibility.
If they are hiding some social policy, I wouldn’t be surprised.
I guess they were using whatever they could find, including exercise equipment.
what is a kettle bell?
In a situation of all seriousness and gravity, that post somehow coaxed a chuckle out of me.
Sigh. I don't think the Navy can wiggle out of the stain of this, though I suspect they will try.
Thanks, TXnMA...I am going to look at it tonight.
I am at work now, but couldn’t resist reading some of the report.
They were in modified Zebra, so not completely dogged down as they would be at General Quarters.
It is awful to read the accounts. As I have said in the past, I am an amateur naval historian, and reading this account is sadly, so similar to accounts of ships in wartime being torpedoed in the small hours of the morning while the crew sleeps. Crew being thrown from their racks, disoriented, darkness, rapidly rising water. Confusion.
Awful. Just awful.
In my job, I have to engage in mishap investigation (not mishap in this fashion, but using much of the same thought processes) and have long held the belief:
"If the human mind can even visualize a situation, action, or event, it is not only possible that it can happen, it nearly becomes inevitable that it will happen."
Granted, conspiracy theorists will use that to bolster their claims, but they forget that when looking for causes, one has to triage and prioritize scenarios using things like Occam's Razor (The simplest explanation is the most likely one)
If someone slips on a banana peel and breaks their neck, sure...it is possible that it could be caused by an assassin or hit man placing it in the right place, aliens from outer space who saw it in a movie and replicated it, or falling from a passing open cockpit plane whose pilot was having a snack.
But most likely it was someone eating a banana walking down the sidewalk who simply dropped it there.
In this case, it isn't some secret CIA or Russian cloaking device, or islamists who hacked the ships computers, a CIA mission to spy on a factory that went awry, or anything like that.
It is most likely a poorly trained, poorly disciplined bridge crew, and as some other Freeper pointed out, all the holes in the swiss cheese lined up. If it never happened like this before, this theory might not separate itself as widely from the conspiracy theories.
But that fact that in the vast and overwhelming majority of these types of things that happened in the past, it turns out to be human error, not even a contributing engineering failure, but solely human error with normally functioning mechanical, computer, and electronic systems.
So, in the same way the Kaiser didn't get the course of the Titanic, have a German ship tow an iceberg in the path of the unsinkable Titanic to sink it and kill some rich capitalistic financier on board to pave the way for conquest in the upcoming world war or have aliens drop an iceberg there (choosing instead to attribute the cause to an arrogant, overconfident captain and crew who steamed at high speed into an ice field) this accident is going to NOT be attributed to a CIA or Russian cloaking device, skull and dagger mission to spy on a Japanese factory or aliens playing games with us, but will be found to be simply human fallibility.
People seem to have a very difficult time believing this, for some reason. I would too, possibly, except every single time I have ever stubbed my toe, it is a result of me not looking where I am going while being barefoot instead of having aliens move a chair in front of me while I am distracted.
There are rumors that the destroyer was the victim of an EMP attack that blinded it.
I have in my files the 5 Why investigation reports of 96(I just checked the number) incidents going back 20 years. They are from two businesses I was employed at and three I owned and operated. They range from scratched paint to a near fatal event. The summary of the last “Why?’ question can be binned into three basic categories that are about evenly distributed.
1. Some one screwed up.
2. Some one created a new unapproved way to do the work, i.e. broke a rule or rules.
3. WTF? How did they do that? Nontraditional answer but that is the conclusion.
In my records the third bin is where the worst injuries and damage occur. Also, number three is the one that keeps me up at night concerned that an employee will arrive in that category and the result will be a terrible injury and significant property damage.
Someday I am going to fully automate my operation, including the maintenance function.
“It is most likely a poorly trained, poorly disciplined bridge crew, and as some other Freeper pointed out, all the holes in the swiss cheese lined up. If it never happened like this before, this theory might not separate itself as widely from the conspiracy theories.”
You might find this account interesting. The comments to the article also worth reading.
http://taskandpurpose.com/fitzgeralds-watch-team-mine/
Good Luck! Are humans involved in any way? Double good luck!
rlmorel's Rule#3 (Related to alligators will fill the swamp far faster than you can drain it): "There will always be more capacity for humans to find ingenious ways of bypassing safeguards on processes than there are safeguards that can be thought of in advance to place on a process."
Jesus H. Christ. I felt my sphincter tighten just reading that. I have never, ever stood a bridge watch. But I have sailed boats in busy areas, and keeping an eye on other boats in a very busy sea space can go from “Huh. Look at that one” to “Hey! What the Hell is he doing?” to “Okay, we have to do something dramatic, because this guy is off the charts not responding correctly!”
People think there is some magic electronic bullet on ships that somehow reads the course and speed of everyone around them and adjusts everything so nobody ever hits each other.
In reality, there are manual rules of the road all mariners should know and follow, and non-electronic forms of decision making and human initiated courses of action...so having radar that can track a baseball shaped object traveling at high speed 40 miles away is no match for the level of human variability within established rules that ALWAYS have to be fallen back to, even if there is a total systems failure.
Thank you for that link. One can read that, and it has been repeated in some form or another as far back as there have been people that took to the water in ships.
And ships STILL run into each other.
“And ships STILL run into each other.”
I often wonder how planes collide.
This doesn't seem unjustified to bring them to task on the face of it, but that doesn't mean we can't feel sympathy.
I have found that most people with any experience in this type of situation that I have talked to tend to be harsher on the crew and less forgiving of this case. The truth of the matter is that every man who has ever been an OOD is going to be an armchair quarterback, as well as many of those who served on a bridge as a watchstander. It is 100% inevitable. (The trepidation many sailors feel when approaching a berth under the watchful and interested eyes of sometimes thousands of seen and unseen onlookers is justified...nobody will be harsher than those people, even if they do have the sympathy by remembering their own experiences.
And I think that is the way it has to be. In the comments, the author said "...We radioed the other ship. No answer. Earlier we had tried and failed with the ships behind us too. Often we wondered if merchant officers were awake..."
True. And the ACX Crystal may have been fast asleep. But by all accounts, it was on an undeviating course. And while other ships may be asleep a the helm, it is our job in the US Navy to be the ones who are wide awake, 24 hours a day, seven days a week when the screws are turning.
There is no denying that. That is their job, it is what they MUST do, and we DEPEND on them to do it. It is a harsh reality, and the assessments of failure will sound harsh as well.
And planes STILL collide, even with MORE ability to move and evade, and far more open space to do it in!
Sigh. One would think it would be impossible.
It is human nature to speculate on these types of events. We all like to apply our own experiences to judge what should or shouldn’t have happened. Better to withhold judgement until all the facts come out. Which I hope they do.
I think this is very interesting--I just finished reading the preliminary report, by the way. I read in another news' release that the "senior enlisted sailor" was the Command Master Chief (CMC).
The CMC's job on the ship is to be the liaison between the Commanding Officer and the enlisted crew members. The CMC is usually charged with maintaining the crew's morale, while still supporting all of the military policies of that particular command. They may have auxiliary duties such as being in charge of retention (re-enlistments), training, and on surface ships, promotion of their Enlisted Surface Warfare programs.
The CMC (in my opinion), is more of an honorary position. He (or she) is the role model who can regale the junior sailors with wild tales of port visits in the Philippines, France and other exotic locations. The can take a young sailor, missing home for the first time, and provide encouragement. The CMC can assist or direct training when needed, or identify where the training focus should be. The CMC, if respected, can be a good source of crew morale and cohesiveness. The CMC is not usually an "operational" role, meaning "essential" for regular shipboard functions, however.
For this reason, I think it's highly unusual that the CMC was also relieved. Not that I recall ALL of these incidents, but I certainly can't recall the CMC being relieved in similar accidents. This suggests that there may have been a systemic issue onboard the ship affecting a large portion of the crew. Perhaps military misconduct, in many forms, led to poor watchstanding habits. Perhaps shoddy maintenance on damage control equipment led to inoperable, or maybe unavailable equipment. [The report alluded to a "seized" eductor--a pump for removing water.] Perhaps crew training was in question, although the ship itself was considered "certified" for Damage Control operations earlier this year.
When I was in the Navy, I was on a ship, assigned to a berthing area that was below the waterline, very similar to the Berthing 2 that was flooded on the Fitz. My rack was also on the starboard side of the ship, just the side most affected. I can't imagine being awakened like that, in the middle of the night, to a rushing sea that filled the compartment in less than a couple minutes.
The sailors in that berthing area stayed relatively cool and calm, and many of them acted heroically, helping other shipmates and then saving their ship. There was no sleep for them that night, and likely well into the next day. Breakfast was likely delayed, and very abbreviated, as the ship lost power, and was busy with damage control efforts.
It indicates to me a failure in leadership.
That is what that kind of move means to me. Perhaps someone with more recent experience can comment on it.
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