Remember the movie from the mid 90's? Looks like we actually have these kind of people in the armed forces. I have a feeling this is just the tip of the iceberg. [video=youtube;u_Mx1kA3irk]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_Mx1kA3irk[/video] http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/2926952/iPranged-a-submarine.html A US nuclear sub rammed another ship causing nearly £60MILLION damage - while its navigator was listening to his iPod. Sailors aboard the USS Hartford had also rigged up loudspeakers so they could play MUSIC on duty, an official report found last night. Sonar operators and radio men were missing from their posts. Others drove the attack sub while "with one hand on the controls and their shoes off", it said. The report slammed the navigator, who was listening to his iPod in his cabin while revising for an exam at the time. The captain, Commander Ryan Brookhart, was relieved of his duties after the Navy found that more than 30 errors, - including "an informal atmosphere" and "a weak command" - led to the "avoidable accident". Fifteen sailors on the Hartford were injured when it hit the transport ship USS New Orleans in the Persian Gulf in March 2009. Navy chiefs approved a whopping £57million repair bill for the Hartford and another £1.5million for the New Orleans.
Maybe our local submarine guy, BrianFromWA, can give us the inside scoop on this? Brian, is it dangerous to drive a submarine barefoot? Do you call it driving, piloting, or something else? Is revising for an exam the same as studying for an exam? Is music on a submarine always referred to as MUSIC? barfo
This British coverage is like many dirty events in the Iraq War--You notice that American media didn't report this. When I lived on Pearl Harbor Channel in the 6th grade I would run to the barbed wire fence when each sub or destroyer or aircraft carrier entered the base. I took many pictures.
I don't know about the reputation of The Sun in the UK (is it like the New York Times, or the Enquirer?) but my B.S.-meter twigs a bit when I see that a UK newspaper has an "exclusive" story utilizing the classified report of two US ships (one of them a nuclear sub?) in a collision in the Persian Gulf. It's not like this happened in the Thames River and were brought to a London shipyard for repairs. Couple things: 1. Anytime there's a collision, the CO of the ship "at fault" and the Navigator (and usually the Officer of the Deck) get relieved of their command/position. That's not to say they get kicked out of the Navy (though CO's are generally at a point where they can retire and are "encouraged" to do so), but that Navigator will not get promoted again. It could have been that the CO was asleep in his cabin and the Nav was studying in his stateroom--obviously their crew was not trained enough to not hit another ship, which reflects on them. Doesn't matter if there was any extra negligence or not, which is why implying that something "really negligent" had to happen to have the CO AND Navigator fired isn't necessarily correct. They'd have been fired anyway. 2. "Driving" the sub isn't exactly like driving a car. Simplistically, there are two positions that look identical, but are set up to do different functions, and are manned by the most junior qualified sailors on the ship. One (the helmsman) turns the wheel just like a car's steering wheel to control the rudder (course--where the nose of the ship gets pointed and how hard you're turning) and one (the planesman) whose job it is to control the diving planes (that points the nose of the ship up and down in the water to change depth). No, they are not permitted to remove their shoes, but that's a professionalism issue rather than a shiphandling danger. "One hand on the controls", though, is not a good practice, though (much like driving a car) there are times when you're picking up your coffee cup to drink, or stretching, and you tell the other guy that "he's got the wheel" or whatever. BTW, each of those junior personnel is (at the absolute minimum) directly supervised (i.e., within slapping distance) by a Diving Officer of the Watch--who cannot leave his chair and is one of the senior Chiefs aboard, and the Officer of the Deck, who cannot leave the Control Room for any reason. Uniform conditions, however, can be relaxed on the sub should the captain decide to do so. There were instances where the CO would allow ballcaps of your choice to be worn instead of the Navy issue ballcaps, or non-Navy sweatshirts and skullcaps (it can be both very warm and very cold on the sub, depending on where you are on the boat). "Navy chiefs approved a whopping 57 million pound repair bill". What, are they just going to say "well, this multi-billion dollar submarine has a ding in it, so we're just going to let it sit here?" 60M is about 1/30th the cost of a sub. Imagine if your 30k car was in a collision, and you had to spend $1,000 to get it back to new. Would you just say "eff this, let it rot" and keep paying it off? MUSIC is not allowed on duty. Either is music, or anything that would interfere with operations in the Control Room. If they rigged up speakers (and were allowed to get away with it--kind of hard to miss) that would be what the inspection team would see as a "weak command climate". But the constant harping on the Nav being in his stateroom? And listening to an iPod while writing an exam (division exams are given weekly as part of the crew's training cycle, and have to be approved by the Chief, the DivO, and the department head--Nav in this case)? If the report said anything about it, it might've been that he should've been in the Control Room during a piloting evolution (coming into port). But he's not required to be there, and normally isn't. And if he's not required to be there, who is anyone to tell him what he can't do with his "free time"?
The Sun is less legitimate than the Enquirer. At least the Enquirer broke the John Edwards baby-daddy story. The Sun is the UK version of The Globe. That said, looks like The Sun got this one right!
The accident occurred a year ago, on 3/20/09. The official report just came out. If you want to question The Sun, then look at more conservative British major media. They all picked up the story. In the U.S. I found it on a couple of minor sites, but nothing major, as expected. Similarly, in the first years of the Iraq War, I read about the torture, the destruction allowed of 5000-year old objects in the Baghdad museum, etc., only in the British media. The info was covered up in the American media, appearing only on antiwar sites. Here's an American site I found that you will accept, the Navy Times. http://www.navytimes.com/news/2010/04/navy_hartford_040610w/
According to that article, the cost appears to be 139.2 (Hartford) + 2.3 (New Orleans) = 141.5 million dollars. But the article also says the total repair cost for the Hartford is $86.9M, so don't ask me, I don't know....unless the 139.2 includes previous repairs before the collision...the article isn't clear. I read my dad's Air Force Times for decades till he died, and the paper isn't meant to be very informative beyond tidbits. (Air Force Times, Navy Times, Army Times, same outfit.)
Thanks for the link. It confirms my suspicion that the Sun did not have the "exclusive" on it, but copied almost word-for-word the Navy Times article. I could see Navy Times getting a hold of something like this. And well done to Electric Boat for getting a $100+M repair done for 86M. Was the rest of the post insinuating that the American print media is in the business of covering up bad things the American military does?
Abu Ghraib was a cover-up. I remember nothing about it in the New York Times. Same with the Haditha hoax.
Yeah right, the torture sites that the US media was forced to cover only because foreign media were covering it. Who themselves were forced to cover it because someone leaked out the pictures to antiwar sites. You think there was no coverup on torture? Have you seen the pictures? Not many, because most weren't put into those NY Times articles, even on its website. Was there any followup coverage of what happened to the people who took the pictures? Remember--there was going to be an "investigation" of the matter, as in, to stop the awful torture. Yeah right--the investigation was on who to punish for getting the word out about the torture. No coverage at all about the supposed investigation afterwards when it would have been over, just a promise that it would be investigated, then, end of coverage. No coverup on torture? There are many written reports from victims of torture on anti-torture websites (none in the US, where apparently such sites aren't allowed, because all such sites are foreign). The American media hasn't reported any of these stories, written by people with missing feet, etc.
You're talking, I state proudly, to probably the only person to have ever waded into the Pearl Harbor Channel to recover a floating lenscap and not gotten machine gunned. Another of my hangouts was up the mountains near Camp Smith, looking down on the harbor, from where a Japanese spy took pictures in 1941 to guide the Zeroes. Great view up there. Half of the kids I went to school with hated white people. P.S. The Camp Smith theater sucks. All they ever show are war movies. Good for motivating the Marines, though.
