Posted on 11/13/2021 5:58:31 AM PST by Roman_War_Criminal
A metallurgist in the US state of Washington has pleaded guilty to fraud after she spent decades faking the results of strength tests on steel that was being used to make Navy submarines.
Prosecutors say Elaine Marie Thomas, 67, gave false positive readings for strength and toughness tests in at least 240 cases between 1985 and 2017.
Authorities did not disclose which vessels were affected.
But there was no indication that any submarine hulls had failed.
Ms Thomas, of Auburn, Washington, was the director of metallurgy at a foundry in Tacoma that supplied steel castings used by Navy contractors to make submarine hulls, the US Attorney's Office for the Western District of Washington said in a statement.
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.com ...
wow
“A metallurgist in the US state of Washington...”
Uh huhhhhh
When confronted with the falsified results, Ms Thomas suggested that in some cases she gave metal positive results because she thought it was “stupid” that the Navy required the tests to be conducted at -100F (-70C), the Associated Press reports.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
There’s a reason the Navy has exacting standards for SUBS that operate at depth under crushing pressures. Just think what would have happened if we’d lost a sub or subs due to this idiot.
There should be a requirement that people responsible for QA of submarines construction be aboard while taking the sub to test depth for the first time.
Falsifying the records to make our subs less effective walks awfully close to the line of treason.
I’d bet she’s a far-left communist Democrat who loves Biden.
Look at our culture today, people don’t do their work and just fake it. Lazy.
Her lawyer has the nerve to say that this is a rare case not motivated by greed. BS. As Chief Metallurgist for a company charging for ultra-performance steel castings, it was her job not only to do testing, but to design a manufacturing process that met the specs for the ultra-high performance steel they were being paid a fortune to produce. Passing material that underperformed the specs saved the company vast sums on re-dos, adjusting their process to achieve better results, or maybe losing the contract altogether. At minimum, she kept her job and was rewarded for her “success”. Did the owners of the company know she was cheating?
If those are the only tests she falsified, and did tests properly at higher temps, such as 25 degrees F, she's probably right and all is well.
Searching for the coldest temps, it looks like these isn't any water where a sub could go that's less than 28 degrees F.
Perhaps investigate why one would test at such low temps.
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You know, way back when I took a rock climbing class the rule was who-ever tied the knots was the first person on the rope. It made for very conscientious knot tying. Same thing here. If you say it's good, put your life on the line with the others.
Probably the only saving grace here is that this was just a test. As long as the manufacturer was on the ball and doing things right, the steel is probably just fine. But the test was supposed to help ensure no mistakes were made. Adds risk to every one of those ships out there. Maybe the steel is fine, maybe it isn't and they are eating into their margins of safety on every dive.
Amazing! This has happened before, and if this woman has been doing this since the mid-80’s the investigators need to keep digging and see if they missed her during the past investigations of the fraud involved with the largest public bond defaults in history, the Washington Public Power debacle.
I was an outside salesman for a Seattle Steel Processing and Valve Company back in the early ‘80’s. We sold pipe, valves and domestic rolled and cold forged steel.
The state of Washington had decided to build a series of nuclear reactors for power generation. It was called the Washington Public Power System or Whoops, for short.
The contracts called for us and every industrial supplier to provide domestically produced materials with independent lab certification. We had a crew that did nothing but prepare samples of inventory to metallurgical sampling for the WPPS buyers.
During this time, government construction was booming. WPPS, The Washington State Ferry system was building 8 or 9 new Evergreen Class ferries, Boeing was ramping up cruise missile and space craft assemblies and the Navy was building new everything at the 3 Harbor Island shipyards.
Domestic steel, pipe and valves were hard to get because of demand. So there were a few bad actors who started faking certs and actually painting or altering the appearance of imported products to match the domestic counterparts.
The WPPS failed resulting in the largest US Bond failure in American history. A whistleblower informed the Justice Department about the widespread fraud and the FBI swooped in and started looking for suspect lot numbers of steel and valve inventories.
The FBI took 20 tons of steel and valves to verify from my employer. We didn’t doctor any material. However, there were National steel and valve executives who did and if my memory serves me correctly, a senior Vice President of Familian Plumbing, I believe, actually did some time in the gray bar hotel.
Jail this SOB and throw away the key. I guarantee she remembers the time I just described.
All critical fabrication operations keep newly delivered materials in quarantine until various quality assurance tests are done to ensure the nature and quality of the stuff.
The big question is: how many times did the Navy QA lab find substantive differences between the material's certificate and the actual testing values?
Perhaps our subs are capable of things you’re not thinking about.
I worked as a designer at a small company that made slip rings for M1 tank turrets and a lot of aerospace projects. We got raided by the FBI one morning as a slip ring failed and started a fire inside a tank. Turns out the contact brushes were procured at a discount rate down in Mexico and were contaminated with flamable material that ignited under heavy current draw. I found a new job soon after.
Did she test for bridges, buildings too?
The answer would be any sub -- SSN or SSBN -- constructed with steel made since 1985. That would be pretty much all of them as subs have a service design life of less than 30 years now. They no longer re-core the reactors as it's considered too expensive, and just retire the boat.
The shipyard often has representatives aboard until the Navy buys off on the vessel.
She’s probably just lazy at doing her job properly — or she was falsifying records at the direction of someone above her. Considering they are already talking about a lighter prison sentence pre-trial, I would guess that she’s giving evidence against her superiors.
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