Around the World Submerged (38 page)

Sunday, 24 April 1960 0436 Completed sealed-ship test, having run sealed for exactly two weeks. Remaining sealed is considerably less strenuous than ventilating once a day, and we are sorry to go back to the earlier routine. When you ventilate, you are attempting to conserve oxygen and at the same time trying to minimize time at periscope depth. It naturally develops that just before you ventilate the ship, her internal atmosphere is at its lowest in oxygen, its highest in carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide. At this time cigarettes are difficult to light, a little exertion sets one to panting, and generally one does not feel in the best of form. On the other hand, with the ship sealed, you maintain a steady atmosphere and set your equipment to keep it that way.

During the sealed-ship test we had replenished our oxygen in two ways. First, there were the oxygen banks—great steel cylinders in which pure oxygen was stored under high pressure. Located external to
Triton
’s pressure hull, in the ballast tanks, they were piped to manifolds forward and aft where we could automatically control the rate of revitalization as the pressure in the banks dwindled.

Our second revitalization system made use of a device borrowed from miners, who had for years employed “oxygen candles” as an emergency oxygen source. Our “candles” were much larger than the miners’, but they were made of the same materials and were handled in a very similar manner. Under average conditions, we burned them in a specially designed oxygen furnace at the rate of two per hour, though as previously mentioned, this rate had to be increased on Fridays. Each “candle,” when exhausted, produced a large, heavy iron
klinker, which in due course found its way to the garbage ejector.

The greatest problem in sealed operations, however, did not lie in maintaining the requisite oxygen content in our ship’s internal atmosphere. It was a matter of retaining the atmosphere itself, and this was a problem that remained with us the whole cruise.

To understand this, it must first be appreciated that many of a submarine’s mechanisms are operated by compressed air. After it is used, the air simply passes into the interior of the ship, where it becomes part of the ship’s internal atmosphere. During the first weeks of the cruise, therefore, the pressure built up slowly during the day and was suddenly vented off every night, when we extended our ventilation pipe to the surface and opened its cap. We discovered immediately that running all the air compressors at maximum capacity during the time we were renewing our atmosphere from outside was not enough to recharge as much air into our air banks as had been used. We were, in effect, slowly losing air. To combat this, we resorted to starting the air compressors well
before
raising our snorkel pipe, thus pumping the precious air back into the high-pressure air banks instead of belching it out when we opened the snorkel-head valve. This had the incidental disadvantage of increasing our “low-oxygen” symptoms and increasing the time we suffered from oxygen deficiency, but, worse, we still were not able to recharge as much air as we had used during the day.

Every night a check of the air banks showed that the maximum air-bank pressure we reached on charge was slightly less than it had been the previous night. Without compressed air a submarine cannot operate, a fact which had lain in my consciousness ever since depth charges had so damaged both of
Trigger’
s air compressors that it looked as if neither could be made to run again.

In
Triton
’s case, barring a breakdown of our compressors,
we could solve the problem by merely leaving the snorkel up longer and waiting until the compressors had been able to retrieve their position. But to do so would require a sacrifice of speed of advance, since neither periscope nor snorkel tube could withstand cruising speed. And even if we in this manner recovered the air lost, it seemed to me that this would be an admission of our inability to operate our ship properly.

Our real problem lay in the fact that not all the compressed air used during the day was being discharged back into the ship’s interior volume. Some of it, somehow, was escaping to the sea. Even after “pumping down” to atmospheric pressure, there was every day slightly less air in the air banks. Obviously, this had to be resolved before beginning the sealed-ship tests.

If there is no leak in an external air line, the most logical place to lose air in a submarine is in blowing sanitary tanks, and this was where, it turned out, we were losing ours. Sanitary tanks, as their name implies, are the collecting tanks for all the waste products from the ship, human and otherwise. Periodically they must be emptied, which is done with compressed air. Considerable pressure of air is required to overcome the pressure of the sea at depth, and when the blowing is finished, all this air must be vented—released—back into the ship. Despite large canisters of activated carbon filters in the vent line, the odor this air brings back with it is pungently distinguishable and fermentedly corrupt. A “good blow” scours the tank, and carries more of the noxious vapor out with the water, and investigation developed the possibility that a little too much “scouring” was costing us a lot of valuable compressed air—not to mention the betraying bubbles thereby sent to the surface.

During the war, we all preferred a little temporary stink to enemy bombs, and sanitary tanks were therefore never blown completely dry when submerged in enemy waters. In our new and modern submarine, this same old smelly lesson had to be learned again, though for an admittedly different reason. In
structions were issued to the tank blowers to keep a sizable water seal in all sanitary tanks at all times and to the rest of the crew to put clothespins on their noses if they were too uncomfortable during the venting periods.

The program was a success. Our air compressors began to gain on the air banks, and every night the final pressure stood a little higher instead of a little lower. And we suffered gamely whenever a sanitary tank was blown.

The man I felt sorriest for was Frank McConnell, the Electric Boat Guarantee Engineer. Good shipmate that he was, Frank never voiced a complaint, but more than once I saw him distractedly jump out of his bunk in the “attic” above the wardroom, unable to stay there longer. It may have been accidental—naturally the sanitary tank vent discharge had to go somewhere—but Will Adams said the vent piping was positively diabolical in its perfect aim at the head of Frank’s bunk.

As we ended the sealed-ship period, our air problems were behind us, but the memory remained. I found myself thinking that our first space travelers would have to solve this same problem in even more rigorous measure. Should they, through maloperation or misfortune, be unable to conserve their air supply, there would be no ready replenishment from an inexhaustible source only a few hundred feet away.

From the Log:

We have learned a lot about
Triton
during these two weeks of sealed-ship operations and are extremely gratified with the results. Among other things, we have had no difficulty at all in retaining our precious air inside the ship. But it was a good thing that we recognized the problem, or we might have.

The sealed-ship test, by design, had been scheduled to terminate on Sunday, the twenty-fourth of April. It would be a good way to finish off the circumnavigation, Will Adams had suggested, to give us something to think about during the last few days.

But on Sunday, as we resumed normal daily ventilation, I, for one, found it hard to keep from feeling a tingling excitement. Tomorrow, Monday, the twenty-fifth of April, we would have completed the first of our missions. With the return to St. Peter and St. Paul’s Rocks, carefully passing on the
western
side this time,
Triton
would become the first ship to accomplish the submariner’s dream of traveling, entirely submerged, completely around the world.

It would be on the sixtieth day of the circumnavigation,
by our reckoning, but a man perched on the Rocks would have counted the sunrise sixty-one times; for we had lost a day by making the circuit in a westerly direction, following the sun.

On the other hand, we had been forced to set our ship’s clocks back one hour twenty-three times. Twenty-three of our days had thus been twenty-five hours in length (the shift to daylight saving time had also occurred, and the twenty-fourth extra hour would be returned to us in October).

The last several weeks of our trip had been singularly free from malfunction of any parts of the ship. It seemed as though we had finally shaken most of the bugs out. As events were shortly to prove, however, our travail might have been almost over—but it was not yet, quite.

From the Log:

24 April 1960, Sunday 2001 Serious casualty in the after torpedo room. The manner in which this develops is illustrative of a point many naval officers are fond of making—there is no sudden alarm, no quick scurry of many people carrying out an expected drill. By the time anyone in authority even knew what had happened, the need for alarm was past. There was left only the correction of the trouble and clean up of the mess, which took some time. What took place is instructive:

The torpedoman on “Room Watch” in the after torpedo room, Allen W. Steele, TM3 (who had only last night been notified of his prospective advancement to Second Class), heard a loud report, nearly like an explosion as he later described it, followed by a heavy spraying noise. Turning, he saw clouds of oil vapor issuing from beneath the deck plates forward on the starboard side. Instantly realizing that this was serious trouble, Steele called the control room on the 7MC announcing system and reported a heavy hydraulic oil leak in the stern plane mechanism; then he plunged into the hydrant stream of oil hoping to find the leak and isolate it.

In the control room, Lt. Rubb was starting to make the routine
preparations to bring the ship to periscope depth. His first indication of trouble came when Raymond J. Comeau, Electrician’s Mate Second Class, at the stern plane controls, noticed failure to respond to a small movement of his control arm, and called out in a voice edged with concern, “The stern planes are not working right, sir!” At nearly the same moment, the report of a large hydraulic leak in the after torpedo room was received from Steele.

“Whitey” Rubb’s action was the one for which we have trained many times: “Shift to Emergency!” Comeau threw a single toggle switch, tested controls and reported them satisfactory. This restored control of the ship, but it did not solve the basic difficulty [the quickness with which this action was taken is demonstrated by the fact that planes and rudder automatically switch to emergency power if the pressure in the main system falls to 1000 1bs; this had not yet occurred].

In the after torpedo room, Steele determined the leak to be in the stern planes’ normal power-hydraulic system, and correctly diagnosed it as a massive hydraulic failure. His third immediate decision was also a correct one. Diving into the midst of the high-pressure spray, he reached the two quick-closing valves to the supply and return pipes and shut them. One came shut easily but the other, in the center of the 3000 1bs-per-square-inch oil spray, was very difficult to move because of the pressure unbalance across its seat and an extremely slippery handle. Desperately struggling with the valve, and aided by Arlan F. Martin, Engineman Third Class, who ran to his aid, Steele finally got it also shut. By this time, fifteen to thirty seconds after the onset of the leak, the entire after part of the compartment was filled with oil vapor and visibility was reduced to only a few feet. The fumes were choking; an explosive mixture undoubtedly existed.

With the closing of the isolation valves, the oil flow stopped immediately. Estimates later were that approximately 30 gallons of hydraulic oil had been lost into the after torpedo room bilges out of a 120-gallon system pressurized to 3000 1bs per square inch. Had Steele’s action not been so instantaneous and so precisely correct,
complete loss of the ship’s main hydraulic system must inevitably have happened within a few seconds more. This would have caused a momentary loss of all diving plane control and steering as well. Even with automatic shift to “emergency control,” the ship’s high speed at the time does not permit this possibility to be viewed other than with deepest concern.

Personnel who behaved with credit were Arlan F. Martin, Engineman Third Class, who ran to Steele’s assistance and participated with him in shutting the last and most difficult of the two hydraulic cutoff valves, and Ronald Dale Kettlehake, who had just entered the compartment in process of tracing some system required for submarine qualification. Realizing the possible danger to personnel from the oil spray which was rapidly fogging the atmosphere, he showed presence of mind by waking the dozen or more sleepers and routing them forward into the after engine room.

2002 Things had been happening so swiftly that the first anyone other than those dealing with it knew of the casualty was when Rubb ordered “Smoking lamp out!” “Rig after torpedo room for emergency ventilation.” There had been no confusion, no warning, not even any raised voices. Tom Thamm, our Damage Control Officer, quickly got to his feet and strode purposefully aft, followed by Jim Hay, his assistant.