Sea Story #1

 "While we wait for life, life passes." - Lucius Annaeus Seneca

Sea stories are a rich naval tradition.  The stories may or may not be true.  They may be true, but so embellished that they barely describe the original event.  One never knows the truth or untruth of the sea story - It may merely be a big lie meant to be entertaining.  The civilian counterpart to a sea story might be the "urban legend", but a sea story usually has a lot more plausibility.

I've had it in the back of my mind to share a few of the sea stories that I heard way back when.  It's been long enough that it shouldn't be possible to identify my sources.  And so here we go with Sea Story #1.

Background:  Whenever a submarine has had maintenance done on SUBSAFE systems, they are pressure tested afterwards, to ensure that seawater will not catastrophically leak into the ship.  It's possible to isolate and pressure test seawater piping while in port, but it's not possible to test stuff like the periscope or the propulsion shaft seals - stuff on the exterior of the ship.  After any of those items are worked on, the ship makes a dive to test depth, and stays there for several minutes, to ensure the repairs will hold.  

A run to test depth is not done casually.  Test depth doesn't leave much margin for errors or casualties, and so the ship has a narrow speed envelope.  A jam dive or flooding that begins at test depth leaves little time to recover.

This sea story begins following some work on a ship's SUBSAFE systems in Guam during a Western Pacific Cruise (WestPac).  The ship got underway, and after diving and getting into deep water, the captain ordered the descent to test depth.

This story was told to me in the late 1980's by someone who was on board that ship in the engine room during that dive.  Shortly after reaching test depth, a three inch seawater coupling (unrelated to the work performed in Guam) sheared apart with an incredible bang, and there were two three inch streams of water coming into the ship - from each end of the sheared off pipe.

 The guy told me that it made a roar like the deepest, loudest pipe organ note you've ever heard, and that it nearly made him crap his pants.  The entire engine room went cold and was enveloped in heavy mist.  There were immediate grounds on every section of the electrical system.  

The flooding alarm was sounded, and immediate actions were taken - the officer in charge closed the seawater hull and backup valves for the entire engine room, which stopped the flooding.  Shutting off all seawater cooling systems meant that the main condensers also lost seawater cooling, so the main engines and steam turbine generators had just a minute or two of operation before failing.  The ship did an unplanned emergency blow from test depth.  Fortunately there was no surface traffic where they popped up.

Follow-up investigation revealed that the bolts used to hold the coupling together were generic hardware-store steel bolts.  They should have been SUBSAFE bolts made from a specific alloy.  SUBSAFE parts are tested, and they are tightly controlled via chain of custody from manufacture to installation.  They are specific parts for a specific use, and are not even allowed to be stored with non-SUBSAFE parts.  It was a mystery how ordinary bolts wound up in a SUBSAFE pipe flange, but it's not a mystery why they failed.  They rusted over time, and then broke when stressed past their remaining strength.

Fortunately the sheared off seawater pipe wasn't in a critical system, and the crew was able to quickly restore seawater cooling to the main engines and turbine generators, once they determined the source of the leak.  It went from a heart-stopping, "holy sh*t" moment, back to more or less routine in a matter of a few minutes.  The outcome could have been a lot worse, had it the failure happened in a slightly larger pipe.

Anyhow, everyone made it out alive, and no one had to do any time in the brig.  That's the sum of my knowledge about this sea story.