Posted on 12/25/2008 3:51:29 PM PST by naturalman1975
BUT for a few desperate seconds, it would have been our worst military disaster since the Voyager.
The flood aboard the HMAS Dechaineux on February 12, 2003, was the catalyst for the series of submarine safety reforms revealed in The Australian today.
The incident remains seared in the minds of the submarine's 55 crew who came within 20 seconds of death.
"It changed my life," Able Seaman Geordie Bunting said later. "It is the closest I would like to come to death.
"I don't think there was anybody on our boat who wasn't shit-scared that day. Another five seconds and we would have been in big trouble ... another 10 and you have got to question whether we could have surfaced."
The accident happened off the coast of Perth when the Dechaineux had dived to its deepest depth in order to test its systems under full pressure.
Seaman Bunting was standing alone in the small lower motor room when he head a deafening noise.
"There was a loud bang ... then the water flooded in and I got tossed around like a washing machine. It was coming in so fast I thought it was all over."
A flexible seawater hose had broken, causing some 12,000 litres of water to flood in within seconds, filling up the room. The words "flooding, flooding, flooding in the motor room," echoed through the intercom as crewmates fished a near-unconscious Seaman Bunting out of the flooded motor room by his lapels.
In the control room, the officers instantly shut all of the submarine's external valves en masse, hoping it would stem the flood.
(Excerpt) Read more at theaustralian.news.com.au ...
I don’t see the relevance, but I’ll bite. Yes I have insurance, but only that which is required by the State of North Carolina. Come to think of it, all the hydrotesting I’ve done was required by ASME standards (therefore, by our insurance carriers).
FYI, the hydrotests I’ve done are at pressures equivalent to about a 6000 ft dive.
i’m with you- it kinda freaks me out to hear that they took her down to ‘see what happens’
“They are tested extensively...”
In the 60’s & 70’s I worked for a company that made “Sound Attenuation” hose for the US Navy’s nuclear submarines. General Dynamics was the customer - hose was covered by MIL-Specs) I was in the Tech Dept. Very critical operation, and rigorous testing on each piece we made. Very high burst presure (we had to run a burst at specified intervals). Never had an in-service failure. These hoses were what made our submarines very silent runners - our subs far exceeded the Russian capabilities in this area. All water in/out of the sub was conduited through these hoses, including cooling water for the reactors.
It's my understanding that, on nuclear boats, even when all ballast tanks are blown they still need engine power to get to the surface. I think that what killed the Thresher - lost power and went below crush depth. In the old fleet boats (WWII) I was on, if you blew the tanks, even with a flooded compartment, you went UP.
What contributed to the events that killed Thresher was the screen on her vent tube iced over preventing the ballast tank from being vented. Rickover created the SUBSAFE program to detect and prevent such engineering flaws.
Time to watch Das Boot again.
What? are they making the decks out of adobe blocks?
Thanks for your good work.
I once got to tour the plant that made the special electronics package for every U.S. nuclear submarine built, through the Ohio class. Very interesting.
On a side note, the manufacturing inside the building was far superior to the building itself. The building was put up in 1954. The exterior walls were tilt-up concrete slabs.
By the mid ‘80’s, the walls had begun tilting outwards. The building engineers stopped that by tying the slabs together with steel cables, and ratcheting in enough tension to bring the walls back to vertical. Of course, the obvious happened. The slabs began to tilt inwards. The engineers then anchored the walls to the ground outside with huge chains to stop the inwards tilt.
That must have worked, because the building survived the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989 without damage.
The whole thing is moot, now. The company sold the building and 50 acres to a housing developer for many millions. The developer promptly built million dollar houses.
A portion of that building remains, though. The basement was built as a bomb shelter. 1954 and all, you know. The demolition crew could not demolish the basement walls by conventional means, and would have had to use explosives. This was in the middle of a residential area, and an elementary school was just across the street. I don’t think so.
They ended up by moving the plat around, to accommodate the walls remaining just under the surface.
All the proto-testing in the world still won't assure that all production units are ok. Things fail; sometimes they fail in a big way.
ping
“Flooding in the motor room.”
heh. I believe we would say it was flooding in the engine room.
Wow... very scary. Fire and flooding... both very bad. Mere seconds always make the difference between a scary sea story and total disaster.
I had the singularly unique experience once of making the pipe over the 1MC: “Now Fire Fire Fire! Class bravo fire is reported in the engine room! This is not a drill!” and it scared the crap out of all of us. This was only a 210ft ship. Any fire is pretty big, and the engine room was pretty close to everything.
A fuel line had broken and sprayed No.2 diesel liberally around the space and a hot engine touched it off. Kafloomph. A quick-thinking (or non-thinking, really) machinist’s mate (coincidentally my roommate in off-base housing) instantly grabbed the twin-agent hoses and waded into the fire without even taking time to suit up. His quick action pretty much saved not only the ship, but the other engine as well. As it was the damage was only such that they could fairly quickly get the good engine back online, and the other one after some new hoses... and we could continue the patrol.
But even another minute or so would’ve changed the damage by a whole order of magnitude, at least. Seconds count. The very few first seconds made the difference between something to talk about at chow that night, or a night in liferafts. He got a nice commendation for it. I’m pretty sure I bought him a beer. :-)
Typically hoses have a burst rating of 4x working pressure.
Were these rated the same way?
Perhaps that is true on the newer boats but it is not true on the older SSNs & SSBNs I sailed on.
Good work.
Wow!
pinger
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