"Major submarine accidents remain isolated but costly" Topic

"When the periscope of the USS Montpelier rose from the water during training off the coast of Florida on Oct. 13, 2012, the submarine crew saw a Navy cruiser approaching a mere 100 to 200 yards away.

The cruiser USS San Jacinto tried to reverse, but it was too late.

The Montpelier-San Jacinto collision was one of 906 submarine accidents from late 2004 through 2013, according to data obtained from the Naval Safety Center by The Day through a Freedom of Information Act request…"
Full article here.
link

Amicalement
Armand

Wow, that's a lot of accidents.

About 100 per year, or around 2 per week.

Time for some remedial safety training.

That includes workplace accidents as well, dropping a hatch on your hand, sticking your fingers in an electrical socket.

We average about 2 per week around my house :-)

My brother-in-law served on the USS Alexander Hamilton back in the late '80s. He said some of the things he saw would make your hair curl, including near collisions, unsafe handling of nuclear fuel, and lots of the minor accidents that VonTed talks about, most of which were never reported "officially."

Guess what? I was involved in a Class A mishap (personnel permanently disabled) back in November 2001. It may have been reported as a Class B, initially, since I can still walk but was later medically discharged.

Know what happened?

I slipped and fell from 3rd level to lower level (about 12 feet vertically) and broke my back. No clue to this very day what caused me to slip. And boy, do I wish I had a clue about that!

We're conflating "serious damage to ship" and "serious damage to personnel" with this reporting standard.

There was pretty much NOTHING the Captain or crew could have done to prevent my fall. I know, because I proofread the mishap report! And you're going to rake us over the coals as if we'd run into a another ship?!? No, Senator, you need to pull your ing head out of your ass.

=====
Electrical shocks aren't supposed to happen, but I've been nailed by a capacitor that didn't bleed down as it was supposed to. Followed the procedure to the letter, and took a 720VDC whack to the arm from a strobe light power supply. Class B mishap (or would have been had I been in the Navy when it happened), and nothing could have foreseeably prevented that shock, since manually grounding out the capacitor is MORE likely to shock the person!

My other crew managed to lose a towed buoy antenna. Sea conditions were within specifications, but high, so they were keeping an eye on the buoy cable tension. They watched the cable tension spike twice in succession, and as they recommended to the Officer of the Deck to stow the buoy, the cable tension spiked again and then went to zero. $2 USDm worth of towed buoy antenna lost. There's another Class A mishap, where following the procedure as written would not have prevented the event.

Wow!.
That's a lot of heavy accidents my friend.
Hope you are now well.

Amicalement
Armand

I'm mostly better now, Armand, thanks for your concern.

I gave those as examples of things that are pure accidents, that *will* happen to someone, eventually. They aren't something that you can really take actions to prevent, either.

It's like the assumption that every driver will be in an accident roughly once every 10 years. That's just what the probabilities say, that the chance of being in an accident approaches 100% the longer you drive.