The first sign of trouble for the USS Thresher was a garbled message about a
"minor difficulty" after the nuclear-powered submarine descended to
about 1,000 feet on what was supposed to be a routine test dive off Cape
Cod.
Minutes later, the crew of a rescue ship made out the ominous words
"exceeding test depth" and listened as the sub disintegrated under
the crushing pressure of the sea. Just like that, the Thresher was gone, along
with 129 men.
Fifty years ago, the deadliest submarine disaster in U.S.
history delivered a blow to national pride during the Cold War and became the
impetus for safety improvements. To this day, some designers and maintenance
personnel listen to an audio recording of a submarine disintegrating to
underscore the importance of safety.
"We can never, ever let that happen again," said Vice Adm. Kevin
McCoy, an engineer and former submariner who now serves as commander of the
Naval Sea Systems Command in Washington, D.C.
This weekend, hundreds who lost loved ones when the Thresher sank will
gather at memorial events in Portsmouth, N.H.,
and Kittery, Maine.
Built at Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in Kittery,
and based in Groton, Conn.,
the first-in-class Thresher was the world's most advanced fast attack submarine
when it was commissioned in 1961.
Featuring a cigar-shaped hull and nuclear propulsion, the 278-foot-long
submarine could travel underwater for unlimited distances. It could dive deeper
than earlier submarines, enduring pressure at unforgiving depths. It was
designed to be quieter, to avoid detection.
On April 10, 1963, the
submarine already had undergone initial sea trials and was back in the ocean
about 220 miles off Cape Cod, Mass.,
for deep-dive testing. Some submariners are baffled by the initial message
about a minor difficulty because it's believed a brazed joint on an interior
pipe had burst — a problem anything but minor.
The Navy believes sea water sprayed onto an electrical panel, shorting it
out and causing an emergency shutdown of the nuclear reactor.
The submarine alerted the USS Skylark, a rescue ship trailing it, that it
was attempting to surface by emptying its ballast tanks. But that system
failed, and the sub descended below crush depth.
Understanding their dire situation, Navy crew members and civilian
technicians would have scrambled to close valves to try to stem the flooding,
struggled with a ballast system disabled by ice, and worked to restore
propulsion by restarting the reactor, a 20-minute process.
Their deaths would have been instant because of the force of the violent
implosion. The sub's remnants came to a rest on the ocean floor at a depth of
8,500 feet.
There was nothing the divers on the Skylark could do.
"It's one of those times when there's silence," recalled Danny
Miller, one of the Skylark divers, now 70 and living in Farmington, Mo.
"You don't know what to say. You don't know how to feel. You just know
something tragic has happened."
The Thresher wreckage covers a mile of ocean floor, according to University
of Rhode Island oceanographer
Robert Ballard, who used his 1985 discovery of RMS Titanic as a Cold War cover
for the fact that he had surveyed the Thresher on the same mission.
"It was like someone put the submarine in a shredding machine,"
Ballard said in a recent interview. "It was breathtaking. There were only
a couple of parts that looked like a submarine."
Word of the disaster spread quickly.
Paul O'Connor, now a union president at Portsmouth Naval Shipyard, remembers
seeing the bulletin on TV. He was 6. Barbara Currier, whose husband, Paul, was
a civilian worker on the Thresher, was shopping with her daughters when she
heard the news on the radio in a store.
What followed was a blur of activity for families. Navy officers in dress
whites showed up on doorsteps. Friends and neighbors brought food.
After the submarine was declared sunk, President John F. Kennedy ordered the
nation's flags lowered to half-staff. International leaders sent condolences.
"The men, they were heroes. Most of them were doing what they wanted to
do for their country to keep the country safe," said Currier, 86, who
never remarried and still lives in the same house in Exeter, N.H. "They
were pushing things to the limit."
For the families, the silver lining is that subs are now safer. The Navy
accelerated safety improvements and created a program called
"SUBSAFE," an extensive series of design modifications, training and
other improvements.
People involved in the SUBSAFE program are required to watch a documentary
about the Thresher that ends with an actual underwater recording featuring the
eerie sounds of metal creaking and bending as a U.S. Navy submarine breaks
apart with the loss of all hands.
"Every job we do, we need to have in the back of our minds that we have
the lives of the sailors in our hands. It's that critical and it's that
literal," said O'Connor, president of the Metal Trades Council.
Hundreds of family and friends of the Thresher's crew, along with sailors
who previously served on the submarine, will gather Saturday for a memorial
service in Portsmouth, N.H.
A day later, neighboring Kittery
will dedicate a flagpole that stretches 129 feet high in remembrance of the
number of lives lost.
Because of their tender ages, and the lack of a body or proper grave site,
children like Vivian Lindstrom, who lost her father, Samuel Dabruzzi, a Navy
electronics technician, were unable to grieve properly.
Thanks to the reunions, they at least know they're not alone, said
Lindstrom, of Glenwood City, Wis.
"We've experienced the same things, felt the same things," she
said. "We feel like family. We call ourselves the Thresher family."
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