John Blackshoe Sends: Serendipity History – Swordfish and Warships (Part 4)

The crews of USS SWORDFISH (SS-193 and SSN-579) who qualified in Submarines wore the dolphin insignia, gold for officers and silver for enlisted.    

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Who designed the Dolphin insignia?

A - A head cheerleader in their sophomore year

B - The person who invented sonar

C - The person who set up Chicago’s first TV station

D - Someone who started the Kukla, Fran and Ollie puppet show

E - The man who invented the cruise control for cars

F - Someone who sailed a custom built Chinese junk on Lake Michigan

G - A Navy Captain, buried at Arlington

(Sources: A..F and G)

 

USS SWORDFISH (SSN-579)

Trouble in the back of the boat-  October 1985

The back of the boat is the “stern” and the space there is the “stern room.”   The engine room is the next one forward of the stern room, and then the reactor space and control room.

Here, sitting at the back of the stern room is an undated photo of Petty Officer Doug Hodge with the notation: “A great analogy of my military service.  Sitting in the stern room of the USS SWORDFISH  SSN 579. Smiling, laughing, joking.  I miss it all.”

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Petty Officer Hodges noted (on his Facebook page) that the stern room contained torpedo tubes [port tube shown over his left shoulder], ships laundry, nucleonic [lab for chemical testing of engineering water], signal ejector, small arms locker, explosive locker, shower, head, and some unbelievably uncomfortable berthing.”   Subs are small, and that is a LOT of stuff taking place in a very small space.   The two photos below from sister ship USS SKATE (SSN-578) show them getting a torpedo lined up to go into one of the two open torpedo tubes. The lower photo taken from near the forward end of the stern room shows how crowded it is.  There is a safety placard visible for pyrotechnic magazine, mentioned by Hodges.

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This stern compartment is very important in the next event!

The phrase “Months of boredom punctuated by moments of extreme terror" seems to have originated around the time of WW1, and has since been applied to all sorts of situations, including several other wars, flying, sailing, or even playing outfield in baseball. However, it certainly fits events aboard USS SWORDFISH one day ...

In late October 1985, Swordfish was delayed in departing Pearl Harbor due to the failure of the drain pump. A replacement was obtained from USS Skate, in the shipyard for decommissioning, but Swordfish put to sea before the pump was fully connected and tested, and the crew could not get the pump to operate. Since the engine room bilges could not be pumped, by the evening of 23 October, the first day at sea, the water in the engine room lower level bilge was over the deck plates (more than four feet [deep]). The crew tried to use a portable submersible pump, but were not successful. 

When the water level got high enough to get up into the bottoms of the motors for the main lube oil pumps, causing grounds, the captain came aft and saw the situation and decided to take the boat shallow to allow pumping bilges. When the planesmen put a slight up-angle on the boat to come shallow the water in the bilges instantly rushed aft, greatly increasing its effect on trim (this is known as "free surface effect", later classes of subs have flood control bulkheads in engineroom lower level to prevent this) and causing an up-angle of about 45 degrees. 

When "fire in engineroom lower level" was announced, due to water in the main lube oil pump motors, a man in the aft end of engineroom upper level opened the watertight door into the stern room, which swung into the stern room, to retrieve a fire extinguisher. Just then the up-angle increased dramatically and the bilge water began pouring in. The door was shut before the boat surfaced. With the boat on an even keel, the water came up to the deadlight [small glass window] in the door. 

The maneuvering watchstanders began to take the immediate actions for loss of shaft lube oil; the throttleman began to shut the throttles for the main engines. Without propulsion, the extreme up-angle caused the ship to quickly stop and begin moving backwards, sinking stern first. When the fire was announced, the Engineer had gone to Maneuvering (the control center of the engine room). He saw the depth gauge indicating a rapid increase in depth, ordered "Ahead Full" on his own initiative, and opened the starboard forward throttle himself in an effort to drive the ship to the surface. In Control, the Captain saw similar indications, and ordered "Blow Aft!". Before the Chief of the Watch could initiate the blow on the aft group the up-angle became so steep that he was unable to maintain footing and slid to the rear of the Control compartment. He quickly climbed back up to the emergency blow "chicken switches" and opened the after group valve. 

Swordfish surfaced successfully. However, during the up-angle the freshwater drain collecting tank vents were submerged and sucked contaminated water into the feed system. The steam generator water could not be analyzed immediately because nucleonics laboratory in the stern room had been inundated by the wave of bilgewater. After a while, the leading ELT [lab technician] found the necessary reagents and analyzed samples from both steam generators on the top hat in reactor compartment upper level. By this time the boat was in direct communication with Naval Reactors, which ordered the reactor shut down and cooled down and steam generators drained and refilled. The emergency diesel generator, located in engineroom lower level, initially had water in the generator from the incident but it was drained and the diesel was online before the reactor was shut down. The reactor was cooled down and steam generators were blown down with service air and refilled until all fresh water on the boat was exhausted, which was a couple of hours before arriving back in Pearl Harbor. Subsequent analysis of steam generator water revealed no leakage of reactor coolant into the steam generators. 

 

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The actions of the chief of the watch and the engineer saved Swordfish and her crew. The boat spent the rest of 1985 in port making repairs and returned to sea in January 1986, making a successful deployment to the western Pacific later in 1986. (Source)

Fortunately, no lives were lost in this incident, but it came close to losing the ship and entire crew.

 

Decommissioning and disposition

In 1989 SWORDFISH was decommissioned, but what do you do with a used submarine?   We don’t give away nuclear powered vessels to our friends or frenemies like we do with conventional ships.  Well, like most nuke things, there is a plan and process for that, very carefully spelled out and executed, but it  is slow.

SRP - the Ship-Submarine Recycling Program.

Here USS SWORDFISH (third out from the pier in the big bunch) and fifteen other slightly used, low mileage subs are waiting in Honest Uncle Sam’s used sub lot at Puget Sound Naval Shipyard in Bremerton, Washington on 17 May 1993.

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Under the SRP, nuclear vessels first have the nuclear fuel removed and shipped to the Navy’s nuclear site near Idaho Falls, ID.  Then all the other environmentally dangerous stuff (asbestos,  PCBs, etc) are removed.  The subs are cut into several sections, with the reactor section of the hull and all its contents are sealed and capped off on the ends with thic steel plates.  The other parts of the vessel, not containing any nuclear contanimation are then cut up int small pieces and scrapped as with any conventionally powered ship.  Recycling costs (including reactor storage) is about $25-50 million dollars per sub.

The reactor section is placed on a barge and taken 800 miles from Bremerton out into the Pacific, across the Columbia Bar, and up the Columbia River to the Department of Energy site at Hanford, WA. 

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A ginormous heavy duty wheeled transporter moves the reactor section into a trench where similar sections from other ships are neatly and securely placed.   When this trench is full, it will be covered with dirt, and the radiation will slowly decay over the next 600-1,000 years to safe levels.   

Here is a photo of the disposal trench in 2003 with 77 nuclear submarine reactors.  The Ex-SWORDFISH was recycled in 1995, and is in the left hand row, the fourth down of the smaller sections.  As of 2023, there are reactor sections from 123 submarines and 8 surface ships at Hanford.   Disposition of the eight reactors from ex-USS ENTERPRISE (CVN-65) will take several more years, although she was defueled long ago, and probably cost $1 billion or more, and we can expect to see that drag out longer with environmental lawsuits and contract award protests.

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Three U.S. submarine nuclear reactors are NOT at Hanford.   USS SCORPION (SSN-589) and USS THRESHER (SSN 593) were sunk in accidents and the reactors are still in their wrecks in the Atlantic.   USS SEAWOLF (SSN-575), our second nuke sub was made with a sodium cooled reactor which had problems, so it was replaced with a pressurized water reactor similar to those used on other U.S. nuclear powered ships.  The original SG2 reactor plant was then encapsulated in a stainless steel containment capsule, and sunk in the Atlantic at 9,000 feet.   

Thus endeth today’s lesson on U.S. Submarines named SWORDFISH.

Someday, there may be some stories about Swordfishes that fly ...