“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 Viperfish was our declared sanctuary from the outside forces of nature, and we would allow no violations of her integrity.
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 Viperfish.
The doors between the compartments were now locked and dogged tightly shut, isolating the crew into small pockets of men throughout the submarine* 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 if the boat was able to surface quickly enough, if the reactor stayed operational long enough, and if the design of the Viperfish allowed for sufficient buoyancy.
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 Viperfish with a huge hole penetrating the bottom of the hull.
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 Thresher was in the background of our consciousness, always suppressed, yet always present. The details of her sinking in 1963 had never been fully clarified by the Navy Department. Presumably, she was lost, with 129 men on board, because of an engine-room leak, and her engineering problems were quickly compounded by the SCRAM* of her reactor and ice clogging in the high-pressure blowing system, which prevented her from surfacing. 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 Viperfish under the safety provisions of the SUBSAFE program (a comprehensive retrofit program developed to prevent another such disaster).
We finally reached our test depth, the deepest allowed for the Viperfish, and we studied our seawater pipes. We would never intentionally move below this depth. The performance envelope of the Viperfish was not designed for deeper penetration or greater pressures. There was only one defined level below that point-the depth associated with the end of a submarine’s life, the crush depth, from which nobody returns. When a submarine moves through this final pressure limit, sonar systems for hundreds of miles around pick up the strange sounds of bursting pipes and collapsing bulkheads, the curious staccato of the dying submarine’s screams, like the rapid popping of popcorn, as the vessel implodes upon herself and plunges to the ocean floor.
Captain Gillon finally announced that the Viperfish was free of leaks at our test depth. We planed up, blew the water out of our ballast tanks, and thundered up to the surface, where 120 men began to breathe easily again.
* To maintain the watertight integrity of the compartments, each massive steel door between compartments has a central handle and a series of clamps that seal the door when the handle is turned. A door is “dogged” when the handle is turned, thus sealing the door.
* SCRAM refers to “safety control reactor ax man,” a term given to the man responsible for cutting the rope holding the control rods out of an experimental reactor core during a test at the University of Chicago. When the rods dropped back into the core, the reactor was shut down. Although the system for shutting down a nuclear reactor is now profoundly different, the term SCRAM, meaning a total and complete emergency shutdown, has been retained.
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