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Fire May Leave US Nuclear Sub Damaged Beyond Repair
Hugh Pickens writes "AP reports that a fire that swept through a nuclear-powered submarine in dry dock at Portsmouth Naval Shipyard has caused such extensive damage to its forward compartments that the 22-year-old Los Angeles-class attack submarine might have to be scrapped. 'These submarines were designed decades ago. So they're no longer state of the art,' says analyst Loren Thompson. 'If this vessel returns to service, I will be amazed.' The fire broke out while the Miami was on a 20-month stay at the shipyard for an overhaul, and it took firefighters from more than a dozen agencies twelve hours to put out the fire, described as intense, smoky, and a 'hot scary mess.' 'It takes a lot of guts to go into a burning building. But the idea of going into a submarine full of hot toxic smoke — that's real courage,' said U.S. Rep. Chellie Pingree after meeting with the shipyard commander. Firefighters isolated the flames so they would not spread to nuclear propulsion spaces at the rear of the submarine. There was nuclear fuel on board the sub, but the reactor has been shut down for two months and was unaffected. Rear Admiral Rick Breckenridge says an investigation has been launched into what caused the fire, but he expects that investigation to take a long time to complete and wouldn't say if human error has been ruled out as a cause of the fire, or if the focus is on mechanical issues."
Pardon my ignorance here. But I have a question.
I know that fire in a sub is considered one of the most dangerous threats there is (every crew-member is trained in fire suppression on a sub). But since this ship was presumably unmanned and in dry dock, and presumably also still air-tight, why didn't they just close all the hatches in the effected areas and shut off the oxygen? I can't imagine a fire in such an enclosed space would last very long without incoming oxygen.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
Well, that's confusing... The article is from a newspaper in Seattle, about a Los Angeles class boat in Portsmouth, Maine named Miami...
that may have been what they did. The ship was probably not full of people, and it may have just taken time to get to the hatches to seal it off.
There's a few reasons. First off, there's no way to shut off the oxygen on a sub from the outside, so the fire had to be controlled for that to happen. Second, the sub may be old, and it may end up being scrapped, but those things are expensive as hell, and they had to try to save it. Third, the top priority was making sure the reactor was safe, it would be a bit dangerous to just shut the door on a burning nuclear reactor and just cross your fingers that it goes out before something catastrophic happens.
First, it doesn't get rid of the heat, so it will reignite as soon as the space is re-entered and there may well have been hull cuts made for the overhaul that would have made that impossible anyway.
is uncomfortably spinning in his grave...
Two crew members, three shipyard firefighters and two civilian firefighters were hurt, but their injuries were minor, officials said. Officials were waiting Thursday to begin venting smoke and noxious fumes so workers could go inside the submarine to assess the damage. Workers had to let fire-damaged compartments cool enough for fresh air to be safely introduced without risk of another fire.
My work here is dung.
Assuming that a military press release is accurate is like trusting the multiple paedophile rapist who offers to babysit your kids.
The simple fact is that we do not really know what happened. As one of your wiser founding fathers noted, the man who only reads newspapers (or their modern equivalent) is less informed than one who reads nothing at all.
yep, fire is usually considered the #1 hazard aboard space ships and subs. Simply because the first thing you normally do when there's a fire is evacuate, something that's not such an easy option for them. And that's just compounded by the low availability of breathable air.
I don't know on the hatches, I'd expect a sub to have the usual complement of watertight compartments, so as long as the fire didn't get hot enough to melt or deform bulkheads (which it may, which is why they stopped using aluminum for warship superstructure) they should have simply been able to close the doors.
But maybe they had problems getting the people out first. Subs don't have too many doors on them, and if the fire is between 25 crew and the door and there's no other route, sealing off isn't an option.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
"It takes a lot of guts to go into a burning building. But the idea of going into a submarine full of hot toxic smoke — that's real courage."
I wasn't aware burning buildings didn't involve hot toxic smoke, unlike submarines. Do burning buildings have warm aromatic vapors instead?
They probably couldn't shut off the oxygen without access to the compartments themselves, especially if the control room was on fire (which apparently it was). Same with sealing the rooms: if they can't get to the rooms, it's hard to seal them off. Ideally, I suppose there would be automated systems capable of shutting off air and sealing specific sections, but these subs are a 40 year old design, and this one was in for a refit, so I don't imagine it has systems capable of that. You normally want a sub to keep supplying air to every section, and you certainly don't want an automated system glitching and shutting it off, so even if you could install such a system, it might not be worth it. Barring that, doing it manually would probably be possible, except for the part where the section you want to seal off is already on fire.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
When a boat is in dry dock chances are it is not air tight. That is when some heavy maintenance is going on and one of the first things they do is start making hull access cuts in the boat so they can get stuff in and out of it. Plus those hatches do not just flop close you have to use hydraulics from the inside to close them, there are usually all kinds of cables and stuff running through those hatches like power and air since everything is shutdown.
You also cannot assume the ship is unmanned. When my Sub was in dry dock it was constantly manned with at least a few people on watch and who knows how many ship yard guys down there doing work. The fact that the fire got so bad is surprising to me. Anytime there was any kind of hotwork going on there were firewatches stationed.
Maybe the air inside was highly phlogisticated.
"Molest me not with this pocket calculator stuff."
- Deep Thought
And never will be. These vessels are a relic of the cold war. We don't need them any more, and they are taking up huge amounts of money that the country DOES NOT HAVE.
This should be a good point to take stock of the situation, realize we no longer need to be spending more on our military than every other country in the world combined, and stop spending our grandkid's money.
The ocean is freezing, the sub is well insulated, that traps heat. Even if you stop the rapid oxidation of the material in the compartment the heat does not dissipate instantly, so as soon as you open the compartment the fire will start again. Also the stored heat will continue to deform/ weaken the material that makes up the compartment.
Look at the coal fires that have been raging underground in PA for decades.
That is not to say that they did not seal off compartments, just that the whole situation is more complicated than just sealing the compartment until there are no visible flames.
From TFA: "Ships in the USS Miami's class cost about $900 million at the time to build. The newest attack submarines, the Virginia class, cost about $2.6 billion apiece." So yes I would be amazed if this vessel returns to service, but I would also if it is replaced with a new one...
http://www.transparency.org
...I gues we'll have to scrap it then. So ... fire on a submarine, right? Can happen, can happen. New for nerds indeeed.
This ship was into a 20 month overhaul. Most of the systems were probably not under power anyway, probably only lighting and maybe ventilation running. Don't know about shipyards but on other construction sites most of the doors are bolted open or removed as they are obstacles.
What the hell was burning? The subs are nuclear powered so it wasn't fuel. What are we talking about here? Bedding? I just don't understand.
As other people pointed out, why weren't the hatches just closed? A fire won't last long if the hatches are closed.
Finally, there has to be some kind of fire suppression system on these subs. Don't tell me all they've got are some hand held fire extinguishers.
Anyway, this is of course very sad. But I find it more weird then anything else.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Just a few facts
1. 2,600 Million dollars for a new sub or the wages.
2. This is the equivilent of the median income of 52,000 families for a year.
3. Kepler Mission cost (program that has found hundreds of exoplanets) is around $600 Million
4. ITER cost (fusing program) - $16,000 Million.
5. $47,000 per year to incarcerate a prisoner in California
6. Cost of head start program per child = $5,800
Nope. No real point. Just make of it what you will
-- MyLongNickName
Some sites put the cost of refueling and refitting a nuclear submarine at nearly a billion dollars so I would expect in current day dollars Seawolfs which is the class that followed LA class ships were North of two billion each.
I would expect the costs to repair one have to be close a new one, the difference being it might be easier to fund a repair instead of a new ship. Still I would have expected a fire to cause damage to the hull to be sufficient enough that major sections would have to be replaced. Let alone I have seen what fires that don't even burn the entire interior of a vehicle do to what remains and frankly the clean up would involve gutting any area smoke reached.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
I doubt any person in charge of fighting such a fire would trust that sealing off the compartments would starve the fire. In the Stark incident, the ship's metal was burning. http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/policy/navy/nrtc/14057_ppr_ch4.pdf http://jacksonville.com/tu-online/stories/051805/met_18768709.shtml
Everything else gets turned into one, why not this?
Some folks in the community are already bandying about the idea that this boat be turned into a moored training ship for nuclear propulsion training, the way they did with the MTS-626 and MTS-635.
On those ships, you do not need to have all of the electronics gear, torpedo armaments, or anything else... you just need an operational reactor, which is all towards the aft end of the boat in the first place. As the fire occurred in the forward end of the boat, this is a very likely scenario. Since the MTS-626 and MTS-635 are getting older by the day (they are old Lafayette class boats built in the early 60's!) and there is a need for replacement anyway, this seems like a good way to go.
There's lots of "hot work" (welding, grinding) on a boat during overhaul. Starting a fire is easier than not. There's supposed to be a fire watch posted on station with fire extinguishers in hand during work, but with more nooks and crannies than an English muffin, it's not hard to imagine an ember falling behind some fixed-in-place furniture and starting some long-lost paper smoldering until eventually it flashed over long after the job was done. Just speculation, but fires are the number one enemy of boats and ships, so much so that the Navy spends more time training personnel for firefighting than anything else.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Why scrap it? It sounds like something the Canadian navy would be interested in buying! http://www.ctv.ca/CTVNews/TopStories/20111111/w5-deep-sea-dud-111112/
Well I can't answer your question directly but consider...
The USS Coral Sea was being scrapped in Baltimore in the 90's when it caught fire. This would happen regularly, but this particular time was different. The fire raged for several hours, then eventually got so hot that the reaction continued without the benefit of oxygen (not sure it can be called "fire" at this point). The heat was so intense that the now "burning" mass melted through the decks into the water and oil filled bilge, then through the hull into the harbor and dropped to the bottom of the harbor under about 25 feet of water... where it continued to "burn" in the mud for 15 minutes covering the entire downtown area in a stream induced fog.
Hi there. Ex-submariner here. One reason was that they likely could not close the hatches. Being in one of these extended dry dock periods usually means that they have all sorts of hoses, wires, etc. going through the hatches making them neigh impossible to close without taking a hatchet to them all. Not to mention, if they were doing any sort of work on the sea water piping, which may be plausible since they were in dry dock, then the fire would still be supplied from the lack of piping that is normally there due to the repair.
My first guess of how this fire happened is that someone had done some welding in a compartment and something caught fire. Usually the Navy is pretty good about removing flamables in the area. They even go so far to have a "fire watch" for several hours after the welding was done to ensure that nothing catches fire. it will be interesting to hear what the root cause is.
Another interesting fact about L.A. class submarines, of which the Miami is included. There is only one water tight door interior to the sub, and that is the one that separates the forward part of the ship to the rear (ie engineering which was apparently not affected). Compare that to the submarine that I was on (Sturgeon Class), there were two water right doors for just the forward part of the ship, and two in the engine room. Basically, if you ever have flooding in an LA class sub, you are going down. At least in a Strugeon class, if 3 of the 5 compartments were completely flooded, you could still survive.
It wasn't in drydock yet, it was still pier side. I'm pretty sure that means there were no hull cuts yet. http://rt.com/usa/news/uss-miami-submarine-fire-064/
Just cut it in half.
Mini-sub! A whole new class of warfare. They will never see what hit them!
I highly suspect that a sub does not have a "cut off all oxygen" button somewhere.
Every ship is manned until it is decommissioned. One third of the crew is on board at all times to stand security watches and maintain the ship. For various reasons listed in other comments, just shutting the hatches was unacceptable - even if you had been able to stop the fire that way, the risk of reflash and the damage would be unacceptable. Submariners do not run from fires.
Never mind. The first two photos show diesel exhaust while it was being docked. The rest of the photos are during the actual fire.
Well the fire could do a fair amount of damage before it used up all the Oxygen... These subs are designed to keep people alive for extended periods... I would expect there is enough oxygen for a wide spreading fire.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
This is why smoking is bad.
sudo make me a sandwich
There's plenty of oxygen on board that you don't want a fire to get to: emergency oxygen bottles, and the oxygen supply in torpedos, for instance. If you abandon ship, you risk major explosions before the fire goes out.
When metal burns, depleting it's oxygen supply doesn't always help. When I was in, the SOP for burning metal was to push it overboard and let it sink to the bottom where it could burn out safely.
Those are Cold War relics, although some have been converted for modern times with Tomahawks.
This is an attack sub, perfect for protecting other warships, protecting general shipping, delivering SEAL teams, and launching conventional tactical strikes against land-based targets. These are the backbone of our fleet, and relatively cheap given the number that have been produced. In general, as far as bang-for-buck in Navy equipment, they are about the best -- very effective and very hard to kill.
Good point. We need to stop protecting all these other nations of the world. Let North Korea overrun the South, let China take over Taiwan, etc. Let them fully pay for their own defense.
Of the thousands of things the federal government spends money on without constitutional authority, at least Navy spending one of the few things that is actually authorized.
I wish the best to my shipmates on the Miami. Fire is our greatest fear and the few scares I've been through have always brought out the best the crew has to offer. I have no doubt that every one responded courageously befitting the dolphins on their chests.
"I can't imagine a fire in such an enclosed space would last very long without incoming oxygen"
That depends on what is burning. One material may serve as an oxidizer for another material. Thermite for example. If they were overhauling it it could have been from oxy-acetolyne or solvent. High explosive without a detonator will not explode but will burn. I.e. torpedoes. Modern torpedos also have engines driven by a variety of fuels. I'm not sure what they were using on the Miami but hydrogen peroxide torpedoes were, I think, used by the US for a while before being discarded as being too dangerous.
There are probably other nasty things on a sub I do not know of.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
There is a 250 volt battery with a huge amount of potential energy. You have basically a medium size bedroom full of batteries that are 6 feet tall.
The battery can keep the lights running for about 1.5 hours while also supplying power to move it through the water and power the reactor plant to do a restart.
We calculated one time that if all the energy in the battery was released at once (not possible, we knew that), it would blow the sub 1.5 miles into the air.
I hope that someday we will be able to put away our fears and prejudices and just laugh at people. - Jack Handey
Not knowing in this specific case, but subs in dry dock usually have their hatches stuffed with cables and pipes. The ship is not self-sustaining, so everything needed (like power and water) comes in through the hatches. They can't be shut easily.
Also, there is usually crew on board, particularly in the reactor spaces. They don't just leave the reactor "unwatched", even it if is shut down.
Closing the hatches and letting it burn itself out would be a lot like just giving up, too.
You are right on many points, but there were no torpedoes on board during this period. They are removed for exactly the reasons you listed.
Pardon my ignorance here. But I have a question.
I know that fire in a sub is considered one of the most dangerous threats there is (every crew-member is trained in fire suppression on a sub). But since this ship was presumably unmanned and in dry dock, and presumably also still air-tight, why didn't they just close all the hatches in the effected areas and shut off the oxygen? I can't imagine a fire in such an enclosed space would last very long without incoming oxygen.
I am a former submariner.
1 - A submarine in dry dock is basically a ship on ship. A problem on one constitutes a problem on the other.
2 - There is a lot of piping throughout the boat. It contains either oxygen (@ 10's of PSI) or hydraulic fluid (@ thousands of PSI). If the piping burst, its source is a giant tank containing much more of the stuff in a different location of the boat. There are isolation valves, however, which may mitigate the problem for a while.
3 - There's this thing called a nuclear reactor. It's shut-down while in dry-dock but still requires power to keep it safe.
4 - Separating the reactor and the forward compartment is a giant tank containing thousands of gallons of diesel fuel oil. If it over heats, well, yeah, kiss your asses goodbye.
5 - There's a HUGE battery on the boat for when the boat needs to run off of battery power. It contains an enormous amount of energy - so much so that if it caught fire and exploded, the sub, the dry-dock and the facilities surrounding it would be damn near vaporised. I think anything within a few miles would *easily* have its windows blown out if not flattened.
6 - If the reactor has a problem, you'll basically have Fukushima on your hands.
7 - Submarine fires (when the get large enough) dont stay a single class of fire for long. There is too much hydraulic fluid, electrical line and combustible materials for it to remain one class of fire for long - ergo, one can not simply spray water (seawater, btw) to extinguish it.
So, no. Shuttering the place up and trying to starve the fire isn't exactly a proactive manner to extinguish a fire.
Throw in skeleton crews (most systems shut down), lots of welding, oil and whatnot all over the deck and you have a recipe for disaster on your hands. I'm surprised there arn't more fires of this magnitude more often.
More questions? Guess I'll read below and answer some there, too.
That's standard procedure for welding (mandated by the insurance companies). And welding could well still be the root cause: in one place I worked, a fire broke out after smoldering unnoticed for over eight hours.
Or it could be a short-circuit and we just got lucky that it occurred on a drydock rather than at sea. Or *drumroll* terrorism.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Correct... tons of nasty things.
There is a LOT of hydraulic oil in systems throughout the submarine, for example. These are high pressure systems - so as soon as the heat from the fire causes a breach in the hydraulic system somewhere, you'd have finely misted hydraulic fluid feeding the fire big time.
The general atmosphere on a submarine is fairly oily/nasty as well. Even with the various air cleaning systems, pretty much everything on a boat that old is going to be impregnated with a mixture of diesel, cooking oil, and hydraulic oil just like my clothes were everytime I spent time onboard. So even things that weren't originally very flammible could be made flammable over time.
Plenty of pure oxygen onboard, as well as a LOT of high pressure air (~3000 psi) stored in airbanks for emergency blow and other uses (including the Emergency Air Breathing (EAB) system that the people fighting the fire were no doubt using).
Many torpedo fuels burn on their own without external oxygen... although I'd be surprised if any torpedoes were still onboard. It's SOP to offload torpedoes prior to an extended shipyard period.
Assuming that everything is a lie is even more useless; it is impossible to be informed when you refuse to accept information.
And where did you read that quote? I bet it's a lie.
Also, additional holes are often cut into the sub hull, to access locations inaccessible from the interior, to bring large equipment in/out, and to provide convenient (horizontal) human access.
It's because they were burning it down for the insurance money, lol.
Ex sub nuc here. Spent lots of time in overhaul and worked on other boats during short overhauls.
Lots of "hot-work" (welding, cutting with torches) going on during an overhaul. Get pipe insulation hot enough and it will burn.
The inside of the sub has lots of sound dampening material (things like rubber and insulation) to keep sound from the inside from reaching the hull and going out into the water. The steel of the hull is also coated with rubber to absorb and contain sound. All that will burn.
We carried diesel for the backup generator, and tanks of hydrogen. Add to that the battery, oxygen canisters, lubricants, and assorted chemicals. There is a lot of fuel.
yep, fire is usually considered the #1 hazard aboard space ships and subs. Simply because the first thing you normally do when there's a fire is evacuate, something that's not such an easy option for them.
Evacuating ship is *not* the first thing submariners do. They attack fires with a vengeance. One, it's stealing our oxygen. Two, it's polluting our oxygen supply with *deadly* gases. Three, it can kill you fairly quickly. Some exhaust gases on board submarine cause damn near instant death.
And that's just compounded by the low availability of breathable air.
Actually, you're close. Underway (that means out to sea) subs purposefully keep their oxygen levels low - very low. So low that a cigarette will immediately extinguish when the smoker is not inhaling. It must be re-lit before each puff.
But that's not important. The important part is that whatever is attempting to catch fire would smoulder for a bit before flaming up - thereby catching the eye/ear/nose of the watch or any other passing crew member.
In port, oxygen levels are normal to the atmospheric oxygen levels of the surrounding city. (By the way, Norfolk, VA smells bad. - Norfolk sub sailors know what I'm talking about. ;P )
I don't know on the hatches, I'd expect a sub to have the usual complement of watertight compartments, so as long as the fire didn't get hot enough to melt or deform bulkheads (which it may, which is why they stopped using aluminum for warship superstructure) they should have simply been able to close the doors.
Let me address this. While in dry dock, the boats have all kinds of cabling in the way preventing hatches from being closed. Forgot about that in my first post on this topic. So, no, you typically cant just walk up and close the hatch - not that you'd want to. See my previous post, above.
But maybe they had problems getting the people out first. Subs don't have too many doors on them, and if the fire is between 25 crew and the door and there's no other route, sealing off isn't an option.
I find it hard to come to a conclusion where this would become a problem. There are multiple exits in most areas that are 'dead ends'. There'd have to be a pretty messed up situation that prevented ~25 people from escaping a location without them trying the emergency route *before* the emergency route became blocked.
I think, therefore I lie.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Except he is not assuming everything is a lie. He instead injects his own phobic reality, disparages the military with a brutal and disgusting analogy, all the while contributing nothing to the topic.
I would feel better about the whole comment if I could dismiss this guy as a perfect troll. Unfortunately, I suspect he is not toying with us at all and most likely believes his paranoid delusion as the most likely explanation.
Darwinism fails to explain why mental debilitation like this survives.
described as intense, smoky, and a 'hot scary mess.'
That description also matches a girl from the Fine Arts department that I dated when I was in college.
Physically, she could be described as cuddly, but in practice, that was only true when she was passed out from self-inflicted pharmaceutical abuse.
I can see the fnords!
There is also the door to thew diesel room, which is air tight if not watertight. It would probably contain a fire.
The ship is never unmanned. There is always people in the engineering spaces except for very few limited special conditions during a defueling of the reactor and there is at least one person forward of the engineering spaces as a roving watchstander.
I'm not sure about the specific conditions while in drydock but normally, any temporary setup (hoses, pipes etc) that passes through a water tight door has to have a quick disconnect or a way to isolate or cut the obstruction away so the door can be shut easily and quickly. I don't recall ANY circumstance where the reactor tunnel water tight door (the door that separates the forward part of the ship from the engineering spaces above the reactor compartment) could ever have anything passing through it and that door had to be shut at all times unless you are actually passing through it.
As for fire and flooding on a sub? I went through one flooding and two fires. The flooding was pretty bad and scary but at least you are "aware". You can still see, hear, and move around freely to isolate and fix it. Any type of fire almost immediately fills the entire compartment with heavy smoke, even small transformers, coils, actuators, etc can have a much bigger bark then a bite. It is scary. In 10 seconds you can't see or breathe and running away is NEVER an option. There is no "fire" department or any safe place to go. You have to immediately respond and act quickly to save you and your shipmates lives. The ship has breathing masks spread out in places and standard air type valves to plug them into all around the ship and you are trained how and where to find them in the dark. It is very scary when you have to unplug your mask, hold your breath and walk 10-20 feet in complete blinding smoke hoping you can find the next place to plug in your mask. All of this while trying to roll out a fire hose in an area about 2.5 feet wide with cabinets and pipes all around and fumbling with your mask and its hose and coordinate with other people you can not see and barely hear. You also have to check and make sure the air is cut off between compartments, luckily, the valves and air pipes can be shut from the adjacent compartments. It's hard to describe in words in a forum post but there is a lot going on. Submariners train for this and other situations over and over and over again. You have to know where every piece of damage control gear is on the ship, every hose, every type of extinguisher, every pump, every locker with breathing masks, know how to find the connections where to plug your mask in, who is in charge when, what information to relay, how to secure your space, how to remove an electrical panel, know what is flooding or on fire and how to get the power off to it etc.. If you give the wrong location of the source and someone shuts that source down, you could be screwed because the fire/flooding will rage on and you lost some other vital capability by shutting down good running equipment. Same extensive training with flooding, reactor "issues", loss of propulsion etc as well. You spend more time training and running exercises than anything else. I was on a submarine for about 10 years. Everyone makes jokes, picks on nubs, did some hazing within new Navy guidelines etc but when the shit hit the fan or something was going wrong, people stepped up and had your back 100% every single time. The option to walk or run away from a threat is not there. Stepping outside for a while is not an option.
Happy Memorial Day to my fellow shipmates and those that have served in the armed forces. I Thank You.
If I recall correctly, the access to the diesel room was not much more than a deck plating segment that had hinges on it. Now this may not be true to all Sturgeon class submarines*, but I would think that it might do an ok job suffocating a fire, but I wouldn't count on it.
* More interesting submarine trivia. The Sturgeon class submarine was horrible for 'configuration management'. If a chief wanted to add a sheet metal locker somewhere in the engine room, he could pretty much get it. However, on LA class subs, this was strictly verbotten, from what I have been told. An LA class, is an LS class! The reason I put in the caveat about the deck plates on Sturgeon class boats is that the Sturgeon class was the wild west for custom fixes/hacks.
I was surface, but I imagine like most extended drydock maintenance periods there were holes cut in the hull either for repair or to allow for certain maintenance to be performed. Since they were in the yards, I'm amazed an Oxygen or acetylene tank didn't explode. One thing I do wonder about is what is there for fuel? On the ships I was on, maybe a chair could burn or a desktop, but there really wasn't much else to fuel a fire unless it was an electrical fire or a liquid fuel fire.
I thank God I was never stuck in no-fuck.
I once took an excursion to Reddit, and later HN. Unlimited up/down voting sucks when dealing with a hive-mind.
The third of the crew requirement is so they can man at least one watch fully and get underway. But they're not getting underway when completely shutdown, in the shipyard, in drydock, with the reactor de-fueled, at night... under those conditions, there would have been only a handful or so of crew onboard. Maybe three forward, four aft, and two topside. The balance of the duty section would have been asleep on the residence barge or in the barracks.
For that matter, there's probably not even a full crew assigned or present at the moment. When a boat goes in the yards, they transfer non-essential and junior personnel away. Of the crew that remains, a fair portion will be away at schools or temporarily assigned to other boats either for experience or to keep their skills sharp.
(Been there done that when we brought the 655 out of overhaul at Newport News.)
1. it's possible that it would NOT be air tight during a major overhaul (like this one). it's also likely that there were cables and hoses going through hatches preventing closure.
2. the spaces are still pretty large and a fire could go quite a while doing a lot of damage, just relying on consuming all the oxygen to put it out, even if they could seal it off. The ops compartment, where this fire occurred, is one of the largest compartments. I believe it is the largest compartment on a 688 class boat.
3. even in drydock there can be people aboard (crew and/or shipyard personnel)
I was a submariner on a boomer that underwent a refueling overhaul at PNSY about twenty years ago.
We had a shipyard worker die in the bilge while working on our boat (I think it was a heart attack or the like).
We also had a small electrical fire that was easily controlled and didn't do a lot of harm.
Bummer.
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
The hatches would have been unable to be shut due to conditions in the vicinity of the operating mechanism.
Training in Fire suppression is not the answer... they should outright ban people bringing Fire on board. I knew when Amazon priced Fire at $200 price point, they were up to no good!
Former Navy Nuke
Not necessarily. Once the reactor has been shutdown long enough, it no longer requires power to cooling pumps to maintain temperature.
Umm, no.
If you're underway, and things go so completely south that every failsafe in the system fails unsafe, then your boat is going to sink.
If, on the other hand, you're in a drydock for an extended maintenance cycle, then the reactor has been shutdown long enough to be cold, and you won't even need the Main Cooling Pumps to keep things stable and safe.
Note that, whatever other problems they may have, Navy nuclear powerplants don't keep spent fuel rods laying around to cause problems...
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Now, see it's responses like this (and many more in this thread) that make Slashdot great. And to think people say that there are no thoughtful or informative discussions still going on here.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
I just went through a thirty month ERO on an SSBN; I'm not speaking without experience. We maintained a third of the crew on board or, during the most extensive work(which the Miami had not yet reached) on a barge a hundred yards away to maintain watches and do work. Granted, SSBN/SSN have some differences, but overall we follow the same guidance. Anyway, my original point was to correct the claim that the ship was probably unmanned.
I'm sure that the nuclear operators stayed at their watch stations during all this
Why? The reactor's probably completely shutdown in drydock anyway, but....SCRAM the reactor, grab your jacket, and exit stage left like everyone else. It's a PWR reactor - not a liquid metal reactor that would be permanently damaged by shutdown.
Is there really a point to sticking around? I'm genuinely curious.
Please help metamoderate.
yep, fire is usually considered the #1 hazard aboard space ships and subs. Simply because the first thing you normally do when there's a fire is evacuate, something that's not such an easy option for them.
Evacuating ship is *not* the first thing submariners do. They attack fires with a vengeance. One, it's stealing our oxygen. Two, it's polluting our oxygen supply with *deadly* gases. Three, it can kill you fairly quickly. Some exhaust gases on board submarine cause damn near instant death.
He (fairly obviously) meant that when you're NOT on a sub or spaceship, the first thing you do is evacuate. Building on fire? Evacuate quickly. Sub on fire? Evacuating quickly isn't an option.
Glad I could oblige :D
Nope. No real point. Just make of it what you will
-- MyLongNickName
Umm, doesn't your habit of signing with your sig in the comment kind of defeat the whole AC commenter thing? Not trying to be an ass, but probably succeeding. I generally find your comments useful/insightful/funny/etc
It just means I was too lazy to log in. Nothing more.
HAHAHA DISREGARD THAT, I SUCK COCKS
-- MyLongNickName
As I recall, one of the things I had to be able to do on the boat was to go from the forward end of the engineering spaces to the stern, wearing an EAB, with black plastic taped over the faceplate so I couldn't see anything.
Yes, remembering exactly how many steps it is to the next air connection is really tough when you're holding your breath and can't see....
Note, by the way, that a hull insulation fire means the entire compartment is completely full of opaque black smoke. If you can't fight the fire blindfolded with your head tethered to the nearest air connector, then you're screwed....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Shipyard...
I'd be willing the bet the same thing that is most likely to have started the fire is what kept it going. Oxy-acetylene welding. Sometimes they run really long lines through a ship rather than trying to move huge tanks around inside the ship. Some guy screws up welding in another area or compartment and cuts into the lines supplying another welder... If somebody didn't notice right away nor think to cut the service supply to the lines... Usually there's a fire watch posted in those spaces during welding to make sure crap like this doesn't happen, but perhaps somebody in command neglected to cover certain areas because of clearance requirements involved in entering certain spaces. Shipyard guys also tend not to give a f***, so if welding was supposed to stop because the assigned fire watch had to go on a head break... Either that or a communication breakdown. Can't hear worth a damn with the needlegun and grinder next to your head. "I'M GOING TO THE HEAD!" "WHAAAAT?! GO AHEAD? OK." Anyhow... I never was on a sub, but I was familiar enough with how the shipyard did things when the carrier I was on was there.
If not welding, somebody could have been painting a space or resurfacing a deck. Until paint and certain other coatings cure, that's pretty much free fuel just sitting there for a class bravo. Just takes one welder or a guy with a grinder close enough nearby... Still those usually tend to be flash fires that go out quick. (Air or fuel typically doesn't last long in a confined space.)
Of course it could be something else random too. Maybe somebody left some OBA canisters lying around somewhere or something stupid like that. Nice free supply of an oxydizer, provided there's some fuel around and something to set it off.
If they can't get some of the expensive subsystems to re-outfit the sub (the hull is likely stilll very much intact), it's likely they'll keep it around in mothballs for spare parts. Otherwise, just lengthen the yard in-service period since it's already where it needs to be for repairs.
And the English county of Hampshire is named after the Shire.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
...While in dry dock, the boats have all kinds of cabling in the way preventing hatches from being closed. Forgot about that in my first post on this topic. So, no, you typically cant just walk up and close the hatch - not that you'd want to.
It is my understanding that since the sinking of the Guitarro, quick-disconnects for such cables are mandatory:
http://www.history.navy.mil/library/special/guitarro.htm#rec
I read that modern US subs use convection cooling for the reactor at lower power settings, to keep noise down. Would this sub be too old for that to be the case?
also former Navy Nuke
mod parent up
Not air tight - in the shipyard, welders cut holes in the hull to allow for the removal and replacement of equipment too big for the hatches.
Many components on a sub can supply oxygen - the pressurized air and oxygen tanks, the oxygen generator, the "candles". And there's the battery; there are around 130 cells in a submarine's battery and each cell is about 14x14 inches on the top and about 8 feet tall. All that acidic electrolyte and stored chemical energy can do a number without any additional oxygen.
There was probably no torpedoes or their fuel on board.
One person stated "Every ship is manned until it is decommissioned. One third of the crew is on board at all times to stand security watches and maintain the ship" but this is not so in the shipyard. At times all we had was the topside watch, the shutdown reactor operator and the engine room watch.
WELDERS CAUSE FIRES. WELDERS ARE ALL COMMUNISTS. Welders caught my sub on fire twice and then left without reporting it.
I did a decom in Puget Sound in the mid 90's. The final reactor shutdown was in August and if I remember correctly we did not shutoff the final cooling pump for the last time until January. Before it was shut off for good, we were only running them a few minutes a time maybe once a day. I was involved in the meetings as I was one of the few reactor operators still on board but I don't remember how much was procedural/scheduling delays and how much was decay heat. I believe we were over 15000 EFPH so we had a decent power history for decay heat but it did die off quickly.
Four and five. Drain the diesel tank since it's not needed at dry-dock. Five discharge the battery for the same reason.
yep, fire is usually considered the #1 hazard aboard space ships and subs. Simply because the first thing you normally do when there's a fire is evacuate, something that's not such an easy option for them.
Evacuating ship is *not* the first thing submariners do. They attack fires with a vengeance. One, it's stealing our oxygen. Two, it's polluting our oxygen supply with *deadly* gases. Three, it can kill you fairly quickly. Some exhaust gases on board submarine cause damn near instant death.
CORRECT! Attack the fire with a vengance. We were highly trained in fire fighting. In fact for me to be qualified submarines, I had to put on a complete fire fighter outfit including the Oxygen Breathing Apperatus (OBA) and light it off successfully breathing air from it in complete darkness by myself (no assistance) in under 1 minute. To this day, after I have been out of the USN for ten years, I still have an inate fear of fires... and just as an side note, I have been onboard a submarine for three fires, all of which were extinguished within 10 minutes of starting thanks to the excellent training and response time of my fellow shipmates.
And that's just compounded by the low availability of breathable air.
Actually, you're close. Underway (that means out to sea) subs purposefully keep their oxygen levels low - very low. So low that a cigarette will immediately extinguish when the smoker is not inhaling. It must be re-lit before each puff.
But that's not important. The important part is that whatever is attempting to catch fire would smoulder for a bit before flaming up - thereby catching the eye/ear/nose of the watch or any other passing crew member.
In port, oxygen levels are normal to the atmospheric oxygen levels of the surrounding city. (By the way, Norfolk, VA smells bad. - Norfolk sub sailors know what I'm talking about. ;P )
This is not correct. Actually the atmosphere in the boat while underway is 19-21% oxygen. Atmospheric oxygen levels are around 20% worldwide. The atmosphere on the ship is no different in any way from the atmosphere that you are currently in most likely (gas wise). What IS different is the pressure which changes with the depth the ship is at, the amount of time since the ship has "equalized pressure" by putting the exaust mast up, and the amount of people on the ship (you all breathe out more than you breathe in).
I don't know on the hatches, I'd expect a sub to have the usual complement of watertight compartments, so as long as the fire didn't get hot enough to melt or deform bulkheads (which it may, which is why they stopped using aluminum for warship superstructure) they should have simply been able to close the doors.
Let me address this. While in dry dock, the boats have all kinds of cabling in the way preventing hatches from being closed. Forgot about that in my first post on this topic. So, no, you typically cant just walk up and close the hatch - not that you'd want to. See my previous post, above.
First of all, there are only a few water tight hatches on a submarine within the people tank depending on what kind of sub you are on. This number is rather low and I wont go into detail about it. The hatches that close to the outside of the ship are also minimal. There are only two or three depending again on the type of submarine. The idea of cabling being through the door is correct though, there is a ton of cabling in dry dock that goes through any number of these hatches and those cables are generally live so just shutting the hatch presents more danger than leaving it open. There should be a plan however that details what is attached to each cable so that they can be removed in just this kind of
Maybe I'm just being a dumbass but it seems to me like there must be some kind of optics that would solve this problem, even if they have to have THz imagers on the out-facing side...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
And that's just compounded by the low availability of breathable air.
Actually, you're close. Underway (that means out to sea) subs purposefully keep their oxygen levels low - very low. So low that a cigarette will immediately extinguish when the smoker is not inhaling. It must be re-lit before each puff.
But that's not important. The important part is that whatever is attempting to catch fire would smoulder for a bit before flaming up - thereby catching the eye/ear/nose of the watch or any other passing crew member.
In port, oxygen levels are normal to the atmospheric oxygen levels of the surrounding city. (By the way, Norfolk, VA smells bad. - Norfolk sub sailors know what I'm talking about. ;P )
This is not correct. Actually the atmosphere in the boat while underway is 19-21% oxygen. Atmospheric oxygen levels are around 20% worldwide. The atmosphere on the ship is no different in any way from the atmosphere that you are currently in most likely (gas wise). What IS different is the pressure which changes with the depth the ship is at, the amount of time since the ship has "equalized pressure" by putting the exaust mast up, and the amount of people on the ship (you all breathe out more than you breathe in).
And this is where *your* boat took chances. Our boat kept the oxygen levels at about 13% to 15%. Yes, you read that correctly. Again, the smokers had to inhale *deeply* while attempting to light their cigarettes so they could create enough air-draw across the surface of their *lighters* to get the lighter to even light so they could light their cigarette. Low oxygen levels starve fires.
You say you've been in 3 fires and they were extinguished within 10 minutes? I'm very glad you did. However, wow. Amazing. How many captains did your boat(s) go through? While we had our own scares we only had 1 real fire on board while underway and it was nothing more than a smoking rag. Someone left it on top of the CO2 Candle where it began to smoke. It was amazing. I was one of the few who showed up in an EAB. Three guys showed up in their skivvies. People were on it *instantly*.
The only other time we had a near miss (and the scariest moment of my life, hands down) was when our 4500lbs Hydraulic line ruptured in the engine room. It was spraying 4500lbs PSI hydraulic fluid into the engine room. If the roving watch underway hadn't been standing *right* next to the kill switch when it ruptured I might not be here today. We surfaced and remained surfaced for 3 days drawing circles on nav charts in sea state 3 to sea state 4 seas. If the oxygen levels were any higher AND (I stress AND) the fluid would have sprayed at 4500psi for more than 30 seconds, it would have been a flame-thrower.
It's purely up to the CO on what level of O2 he wants the boat to run around at. Maybe they've enacted some regulation since I got out in late 1996; but, don't sit there and say I'm not correct. Certainly, in port the ship's O2 levels are in keeping with the surround local atmosphere - ~20%. Our boat kept O2 levels low purposefully under-weigh.
But maybe they had problems getting the people out first. Subs don't have too many doors on them, and if the fire is between 25 crew and the door and there's no other route, sealing off isn't an option.
I find it hard to come to a conclusion where this would become a problem. There are multiple exits in most areas that are 'dead ends'. There'd have to be a pretty messed up situation that prevented ~25 people from escaping a location without them trying the emergency route *before* the emergency route became blocked.
Okay so oddly enough there isnt really an "emergency route" on the ship for reasons that I wont detail here (it would take too long to explain). I do have to say that there are contingency plans in place for this kind of thing un
In the forward section of a 688-boat, there are 3 water-tight (and air tight) hatches. Forward escape trunk, weapons-loading hatch, and the hatch leading to the engine room. All of the internal doors are privacy / sound, not for water / air-tightness.
(for all you other bubbleheads here, yes, I know there's actually 4 water-tight hatches in the forward compartment, but I don't think the washing machine is relevant to this topic)
I'm not crazy,I'm actively irresponsible.
OK, forgive me, brother. I'm a cone-er!
The shutdown reactor operator and likely the roving watch would have remained on board throughout the fire. Since most systems would have been out of service and depressurized including the galley, my guess is that a shipyard worker was torch cutting and caught something on the other side on fire without the fire watch being able to notice. Now every single thing in the forward compartment has been rendered no longer subsafe until tested....every pipe... wire... even the hull ...less losses because it is too compromised but at least the fire did a lot of the decommissioning work.
Better it was now rather than later
I'm pretty sure I can think of one major reason a SSBN would have far more crew present and on hand at all times when in drydock vs a SSN... I think the B has something to do with it but I'm not sure
Yes, it was. I stood in front of it for 17 hours Thursday.
Indeed, underwater welding (arc/stick welding) wouldn't work if you needed an oxygen source other than whatever oxidizes from the metal/seawater itself.
A standard thermal imager will do a good job here. Common smokes do not contain particles large enough to absorb/scatter 4-12 um infrared. (There are special obscurant smoke compositions against thermal imagers, but these are pretty difficult to keep in the air.) But the imagers are (so far) costly.
Many people on board. All evacuated forward, no fire aft, stayed to safeguard reactor plant.
Numerous hull cuts, impossible to seal off with anything more than kevlar blankets, which is what they did.
We had a thermal imager back in the early 90's on my boat. It was called a NIFTI which I believe meant Naval Fire Fighting Thermal Imaging Device. It worked and it was better then nothing but it was far from perfect. It was not for a person to see where they were going, it was searching for the hot spots and the source of the fire so you could direct the hoses or remove power from the right place. I was asked to fix it once personally by the captain, even he knew a reactor operator could troubleshoot and repair things better than a coner ET could ;). It turned out to be nothing but a bad solder connection.
The phrase I was taught to use when someone asked questions like that started with "I can neither confirm nor deny..."
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
the presence of other oxidizing agents? the possibility of explosion due to above? There are lots of compressed gasses on a sub.
Might you think there were oxidizers onboard besides breathable air?
No, oxygen is not involved in arc welding. Heat from electrical resistance melts the parts being welded without burning anything.
People should not fear their government. Governments should fear their people.