dock.
'We are much too big for a decent submarine,' he mumbled and wandered off to other tasks.
Feeling dumb, Jim and I clutched the throttles as we waited for the next 'emergency.'
Obviously, it would be difficult for us to figure out what was going on elsewhere in the submarine. Inside the engine-room hull, where there were no windows and no information about depth or speed, it was easy to visualize the worst possible disaster at the slightest provocation: The back-emergency bell became a terrible impending collision; the blast of an alarm from the steam panel, a major steam leak; the alarm horns over the reactor panel, an unsafe nuclear reactor condition or something even worse. This phenomenon, we were to discover, was especially a problem during intense activities when several alarms were shrieking, men were shouting, and turbines were screaming. This was the curse of working in the engine room. We spent an inordinate amount of time wondering just exactly what was happening elsewhere in the boat.
The
'Dive, dive!' were the only words called out by the chief of the watch at the ballast control panel. We heard no Klaxon noises or other horns, and there was nothing to suggest that this dive, the first since the
Idle conversation throughout the
Sandy Gallivan, chief of the watch at the ballast control panel, opened the ballast tank vent valves. He flipped switches to start and stop pumps in the bowels of the submarine, thus controlling the transfer of water and fine- tuning the boat's buoyancy and balance. In the engine room, Randy Nicholson adjusted the reactor controls to maintain adequate steam energy for the propulsion turbines. Donald Svedlow, sitting next to him, controlled the electrical systems. Diving required tightly coordinated choreography of machinery and highly trained men. From one end of the boat to the other, the men were working, watching, thinking, and continuously seeking optimal performance from the equipment under their control.
The captain scanned the ocean surface through the starboard periscope. He ordered the diving officer to have the planesmen maintain periscope depth and zero angle, in order to leave nothing above the surface of the water but the small tubes and lenses of the two periscopes.
'Now, attention all hands!' the captain called through the IMC loudspeakers, 'The ship is at periscope depth. All hands check for leaks!'
The captain was directing everyone on board-the enlisted men and officers, the scientists in the bow compartment, and the few civilian shipyard technicians along for the sea trials-to search for any seawater leaks that could suddenly flood the boat and kill us all. This extremely serious business precluded the joking and light banter among crew members that usually occurred during their routine tasks of running the boat. There was nothing routine about searching for flaws in the dry dock modifications, during which so many pressure boundaries had been opened and welded shut again.
The entire process was simultaneously intense and inspiring. There was a powerful awareness of being surrounded by the dark pressures of our submerged existence. We could almost feel the suffocating enclosure of the ocean as we committed ourselves to the experience of moving below its surface.
With flashlights in hand, we peered into every dark recess; studied each cluster of pipes filled with seawater; and scrutinized every valve, pipe flange, and pressure hull fitting. We waved our lights toward the oily waters of the bilge to look for rising levels and studied the curved steel on the inside of the pressure hull as we searched for tiny telltale streams of salt water. We listened carefully for the hissing sounds of hidden high-pressure leaks that could expand and rupture the hull when we moved deeper into the ocean. The USS
During the next five hours, we moved deeper into the ocean in 100-foot increments. At each level of our descent, we searched for leaks. As the pressure around us increased, a parallel force in our minds began to develop, a psychological pressure further riveting our attention on the job before us.
When the captain called over the loudspeaker, 'Rig ship for deep submergence,' we were ready to take the final step of easing our boat into the deepest and darkest corner of our submergence envelope, where the extreme pressures of the Pacific Ocean could further threaten our world inside the
The doors between the compartments were now locked and dogged tightly shut, isolating the crew into small pockets of men throughout the submarine[3].
I moved slowly up and down the engine room passageways as I examined the clusters of seawater pipes around me and checked for anything that looked abnormal. If flooding occurred from a broken pipe-a sudden disaster of roaring high-pressure water at that depth-none of us in the engine room would survive. Instant death would be certain. All of us had known of this risk when we volunteered for submarine duty. The remainder of the crew might have a chance of survival
Another dark fact from my qualifications work emerged. Should flooding occur in the huge Special Project compartment and high-pressure seawater flooded the cavernous hangar space in the front third of the ship, the weight of the water would certainly take all of us straight to the bottom. The Soviet Navy had already lost a submarine in this manner, years before, when the hangar space in a Whisky twin-cylinder missile submarine flooded. To make a bad situation worse, the Special Project hangar compartment was the one space in the
I directed my flashlight toward the clusters of pipes carrying seawater to the propulsion systems and wondered how long the reactor could provide useful power if one of the pipes ruptured and the engine room was lost. The loss of the USS
That was the year I had joined the Navy. Hopefully, after three years, the engineers responsible for the design parameters of U.S. submarines had modified the
We finally reached our test depth, the deepest allowed for the
Captain Gillon finally announced that the