Judge Orders Navy to Release USS Thresher Disaster Documents

USNI News ^ | 2/11/2020 | ben werner

[freedumb2003]

The (redacted) boat (redacted) sank (redacted).

YAY! We finally have The Truth.

(PS: Submarines are “boats”)

[null and void]

Labor strife sabotage?

[Repeal The 17th]

USS Thresher-1963
USS Scorpion-1968
I remember them both very well.

[TexasGator]

STP.

I was on 652.

[TexasGator]

No.

[Rebelbase]

Animation speculation from Wiki.

[Tijeras_Slim]

Well past time.

[AndyJackson]

The requested documents – more than 50 years old – should be unclassified and releasable by now under federal declassification rules

I don't take a position on whether this information should be declassified, but I want to correct the above statement. Naval Nuclear Propulsion Information is excluded from the general declassification schedule.

[Repeal The 17th]

The “puffer fish”!

[Bryanw92]

>> PS: Submarines are “boats”)

We use ship and boat interchangeably. Tradition calls it a boat, but a nuclear powered warship that can take out a fleet or a small nation without missing a hot meal is definitely worthy of being called a ship.

[Bryanw92]

I was on 652 too for my last 6 months in the Navy. I was on 616 and 588 before that.

[Fester Chugabrew]

Well, there’s a piece of history to explore.

[Bryanw92]

>> he thinks there are valuable lessons to be learned.

Fortunately for me and the rest of the crew of the Scamp, the right lessons were learned. We had the exact same casualty in 1986 with the same plant failures and also at test depth. Our boat was older than Thresher so it had very few Subsafe systems, but we did have the Emergency Blow modifications that came out after Thresher’s sinking. The second blow worked and we lived.

[RaceBannon]

https://youtu.be/4FUmZql0_Fc

[John S Mosby]

In-law (passed away) was in same class and suite-mate to the Thresher's captain,John Wesley Harvey, at US Naval Academy. They were close friends, and he said he knew the risks. And wish he was alive to learn these details. One thing is certain— the faulty weld in a critical pipe that was for salt water, and thus silver brazed for pressure integrity upon prior examination 14% of the silver brazing was insufficient for pressure applications- a rate that then was determined as “acceptable”. It was later determine by NIS to be deliberate shoddy work in a pattern-(the union violence and deliberate sabotage during construction, a conclusion, but not down to the individuals) but not conclusively singled out as “the” cause. Rather an entire set of design flaws that led to the disaster.

Something to think about- there were 17 civilian contractors—experts in their field, aboard to observe the sea trials— and they were lost with the crew. And, our listening net (no longer top secret) picked up the sound of the failure of an electrical buss that shut down the reactor coolant pumps, causing it to scram— shut down. And from there— no control and the boat could not maintain buoyancy and exceeded crush depth and imploded.

[RaceBannon]

blind mans bluff
https://youtu.be/qGGSJEp0cXA

[Repeal The 17th]

Many many years ago, I came in contact with a guy
who said his background was Naval Intelligence...
(who knows if it was true???)

Anyhow, I asked what he knew about Thresher and Scorpion,
and he said something like
“they went somewhere they should not have gone”.

At the time I thought that meant:
they were messing around with the Russians.

After a while I realized that meant:
they were messing around with new technology and water depths.

Went too deep and crushed their hulls...
maybe because of a lot of things...
bad gauges, bad piping, bad information...whatever...
Many a good man lies in Davy Jone’s Locker.

[Bryanw92]

The reactor scram didn’t doom it. That happened late in the casualty.

[SubMareener]

When I worked at the Naval Underwater System Center in Newport, one of my co-workers was supposed to ride Thresher on that last dive. He was bumped by a “VIP”. After that, he would never ride again.