It was the year 1963, and the star of the U.S. Navy submarine fleet USS Thresher had just sunk. 129 crew members were reported dead and it would be one of the most embarrassing military failures of the decade but the events that took place would remain a mystery till the year 2020.
While the world knew about what happened, there was very little information on what really went down. The government had drawn a grey curtain on the incident and the little that was released was mutilated and redacted.
0:40 - The Life of the USS Thresher
2:25 - Tests and Sinking of the USS Thresher
4:50 - Search and Recovery
6:30 - The Cause of Destruction
9:35 - Bruce Rule's Electrical Failure Analysis
10:45 - Outro
I found this interesting
ReplyDeleteInteresting. I'd just read a day or two ago about deliberate sabotage at Navy shipyards. Substandard welds, etc, affecting subs too.
ReplyDeleteI remember that. I was twelve. Being a kid that went through air raids in school I remember people saying the Russians had sunk her. WWIII was gonna happen. It was a scary time.
ReplyDeleteI remember when this happened, I had just turned 11. I remember hearing about the loss of the sub but then never hearing why. Thanks for the link and info.
ReplyDeleteDepth / pressure calculator puts pressure at 1300 ft to be 576 psi. Almost 600 psi. Steam systems at commercial nukes operate at about 600 psi. That's a lot of pressure.
ReplyDeleteIt's hard for me to imagine silbrazed joints being exposed to seawater pressure on a sub. I can neither confirm nor deny.
Understand that engineering systems need seawater constantly for heat rejection (main engine and turbine generators, for example). So there is a need for piping systems inside the sub to be exposed to this 576 psi pressure, and the risk of failure is water flooding into the inside of the sub under 576 psi pressure.
Have worked on a sister ship in port.
Spaces are very very cramped. Fighting such a casualty would be damned near impossible. Spaces would fill with incredible speed.
Hull and seawater system integrity is tested by taking the ship to "test depth" and if you come back up you have passed the test. "How many times have you been to test depth?"
The old designs had hull penetrations for coolers wherever they needed to be, so there were a lot of places for leaks, plus there weren't as many testing requirements. High pressure inside a pipe is relatively easy to handle, it is high pressure outside a round structure that is a bitch, there are a lot of new failure modes beyond simple bursting. Buckling failure as an example, ant that is is part of what destroyed the Titan submersible. The loss of Thresher triggered a major redesign and new testing requirements (SubSafe). As an example, all boats since have an unpressurized fresh water cooling loop going back to an aux freshwater heat exchanger that is the only thing seeing sea pressure. None of the other coolers inside the boat ever see more than a few PSI.
ReplyDeleteMM1(SS) here, so we heard ALL about Thresher as part of our training.