Posted on 06/20/2017 8:43:40 AM PDT by 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.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
Well said.
I once toured a WWII Submarine (its in Mobile, Alabama - great tour). Anyway, the guide described the SOP for the doors - some alarm is sounded, and everybody shuts the doors ASAP...and that’s the cruel rules they have to live by.
I think there may be some very interesting physics involved.
Let's start by thinking about what happens when an aircraft at high altitude loses cabin pressure.
Just prior to decompression, the passengers are all breathing normally. They inhale a mixture of relatively inert nitrogen and about 21 percent oxygen. When exhaled, the air still contains about 16 percent oxygen.
Each breath only exchanges a small fraction of the total lung volume during breathing at rest. There is quite a bit of air with perhaps 18 or 19 percent oxygen available in the lungs.
Imagine now that a person intentionally holds their breath. The amount of oxygen in the lungs slowly falls as it is carried away by the blood and is replaced by carbon dioxide. For perhaps several minutes, the amount of oxygen in the blood is relatively unaffected because of that available oxygen already in the lungs.
Now lets imagine that person on an airplane has just experienced an unexpected decompression. The environment is suddenly at one-third atmospheric pressure, which means that there would be only one-third as much oxygen available. The greater pressure in the lungs would force a person to exhale forcefully about two-thirds of the air in their lungs. The oxygen content in the lungs would fall to one third of what it was due to the pressure change.
With so little oxygen now in the lungs, any oxygen in the blood that reaches the lungs is going to diffuse into the lungs instead of in the normal direction. Unconsciousness would quickly follow in just seconds instead of minutes. Getting to an oxygen mask quickly becomes a matter of life and death.
Now let's imagine what happens to a drowning person. They exhale air and inhale water. After just a couple of breaths, the lungs contain water instead of air. The passage of oxygen into the blood ceases immediately and unconsciousness occurs quickly.
If anyone has a better explanation I'd be delighted to hear it. I thought this through once because I was curious as to why one can't simply hold their breath during an airplane decompression event. The force of the air pressure in their lungs doesn't allow them to hold onto the life preserving oxygen.
Or, considering the type of ship they were on, simply didn't follow SOP. The watchstanders didn't do their jobs.
That is not the case. I served on an aircraft carrier and slept in a compartment that had two hatches. One was a deck hatch overhead with a ladder going up to the next deck. The other was a bulkhead hatch that was access to a storage compartment that didn't have any other access.
The more hatches you put on a ship, the more difficult it is to maintain watertight integrity.
I understand you, but the evidence (to me) indicates that the cargo vessel was not bearing down on the Fitzgerald as if it were coming broadside, particularly if the two vessels are traveling in much the same direction in the dark.
Rather than the seemingly far-fetched (to me) scenario of a 30,000 ton cargo ship chasing down and steering an intercept course to deliberately ram a vessel a third of its size and far more agile and speedy, it is far more likely to me that even if the watches on the Fitzgerald had been aware of the vessel, the interpretation of the relative courses in the dark may not have seemed threatening until it became threatening.
I have been told, and I believe it, that overtaking another vessel traveling in the same direction at night in close proximity is not a slam dunk deal.
Also, nothing against the Navy, but they have far more to lose by admitting they weren’t able to transmit a message for close to an hour, and had to resort to satellite phones to do it. With the Captain injured or incapacitated, and the ship taking on water and listing, I believe there was pandemonium on the bridge of the Fitzgerald, and trying to find a working sat phone may not have been their primary concern off the bat.
There are a large number of people who seem to WANT this to be some kind of act of terrorism, and until all the evidence is in, I won’t rule it out, but in the many cases of ship and aircraft mishaps, it is the fallibility of humans (sometimes compounded by an equipment malfunction of some kind) that is the culprit.
As gruesome as this must sound to civilians, it was likely the correct thing to do. Had those hatches not been quickly sealed, the entire ship may have been lost.
You're assuming that by freeing those 7--assuming they weren't badly injured during the collision--everyone else on the ship would've been rescued if the ship sank. We'll never know of course, but it's possible that the loss of those 7 may have saved the remainder of the crew onboard.
Nothing warms the hearts of Democrats more than stories about dead U.S. military personnel...
They say you never have to attribute hostile intent when simple stupidity will do.
In my submarine training, the sounding of the collision alarm was enough to get the ship sealed, whether we were on the surface or submerged. Saving the ship is much more important than saving a few in the leaking compartment(s). It's what you did, not what you thought about like in the movies.
Another illustration of the abject leadership failure by the CO is the Fitz.
The sailors trapped had AT LEAST one minute to get out of their compartment...and for some reason did not.
Perhaps they didn’t take the GQ call seriously. Even after the ramming and flooding.
The safety features installed on our ships, however advanced, cannot account for every foreseeable danger or circumstance.
My heart breaks for these shipmates and their families. I do not in any way minimize the loss of life. That said, my read of available reports is that had they not set "zebra" on that part of the ship, the ship would have been lost, along with many more lives.
Very True. That was standard operations policy when I was in also.
The sea always wins in the end. American heroes, rest in peace and I pray that God gives your families and friends strength and courage to face these difficult days ahead.
I was on an Adams class DDG. Those were one of McNamera’s screw ups. Aluminum above the main deck because of the weight of the electronics suite and weapons. It definitely had sea keeping issues. I knew of no other access to our berthing compartment other than the ladder. There was a ladder down to the missile computer room below. Other hatches accessed the shaft alleys below.
I think it boils down to Occam’s Razor...what is most likely at first glance is usually correct.
To me, what is more likely:
1. A 30,000 ton sluggish cargo vessel transiting one Japanese port to another, somehow getting a plan together to arrange to have their vessel in the vicinity of US navy vessel (without knowing the exact mission or plan, even if you have eyes that can watch the vessel leave port) in a position where they can ram the vessel. Then, make the large, lumbering vessel perform really really unusual maneuvers that even under the worst of circumstances would attract the attention of an employer who clearly would be monitoring the vessel’s progress at all time, and do it in such a way they could corner and ram a specific vessel that could run circles around them, and probably would have men on watch at all times.
2. A civilian vessel on autopilot, manned by minimum watches in the wee hours of the morning, with the lone bored crewman on the bridge surfing porn or reading a book, not paying attention in the least, and a US Destroyer traveling at an oblique angle towards the civilian vessel though in the same direction, where all the watches on the US Navy ship know that the OOD (some LTJG or LT) knows about it because they were probably informed by the bridge that there was a ship off the starboard bow traveling in the same direction, and in the night, the two ships crept closer and closer, someone wasn’t watching the distance or misjudged it. The junior officer standing watch may have thought “Should I wake up the Captain?” as the others on the bridge eyed him, and when he decided against waking the Captain (who wants to get chewed out for no good reason?) everyone relaxed, because the OOD was managing the situation until someone said “Sir, she is getting much closer!” followed by “Well, let me know if she gets within 2500 yards” from the OOD who thinks “That is what the Captain told me”, only to be followed by “ Sir, she is at HOLY CRAP!” and “HARD PORT!” from the OOD as he looks over.
To me, the first one is just improbable (not impossible, after 9/11) but improbable.
The second, that one is as old as the sea.
Perhaps you are mis-remembering. Or perhaps subs are different.
I have never seen a *watertight* compartment on a US Navy ship with more than one *escape* hatch. It may have more than one watertight hatch that leads to another area on the same deck, but every one I have ever seen only has one escape hatch to the deck above. The more hatches, the less your chances of maintaining watertight integrity.
And standing orders in the event that a compartment is taking on water faster than you can get it back to sea is to dog it off - even if there are sailors inside. It sucks but as others have pointed out - you save the ship no matter what. Hundreds and sometimes thousands of lives may depend on that vessel staying afloat.
It’s been SOP at sea for ages. The ship comes first.
This was where my thoughts ended up. I was a Surface Warfare qualified officer and spent a lot of time as OOD underway on small boys in that area.
Every ship I ever served on has a notebook on the bridge called the Captain's Night Order book. He writes it out longhand every night even though most of it is repetitive. Every oncoming OOD and JOOD reads it before assuming the watch. One of the sections contains conditions when the CO is to be awakened and informed. A common one if if the wind shifts more than 45 degrees. One of those conditions is always there and concerns a vessel with a CPA (Closest Point of Approach) of 1000 yards or less.
It pains me to say this but the fact that the captain was asleep when his ship was hit leads me to suspect that the ultimate cause of this horrible accident was negligent watch standing. In this type of collision at night it almost always is.
People tend to discount the human nature element of a junior officer who doesn’t want to bother his superior officer, even though he may have standing orders to do so.
Look at what happened to Halsey in the Battle of Leyte Gulf, where his handlers did him a disservice by refusing to wake him.
Happens all the time. But with a bad outcome, usually not more than once per person!
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