I find it interesting that I had posted on this thread years ago about the shaft seals and how they worked.

I find that that post is now gone, as it many of my older posts concerning things of this nature....

Very interesting.

Back on topic:

Great Job Squeezmo.

We had failing shaft seals on my boats as well. Primary seals were blown and the secondaries leaked so bad that greater than 300 or so feet we had to run the drain pump constantly to keep up with the engress. Everyone, and I mean EVERYONE in the engineering department, knew how to put the emergency seals on. We had an unofficial afterwatch watch assigned just to monitor them.

We were on an OP and considerations of the mission took priority. Captain came back more than once and said we were overreacting. This is with a spash skirt rigged around the shaft seals and the home made 'octopus' to get the water to various funnels so that seawater went into the after drain tank instead of the bildges.

Fun days were had by all. We hit the USA and were in the dock immediately after the two week post deployement standdown. They bumped a boat to get us in.

Oh.. and that Captain?? He is NAVSEA08 now. That scares the hell out of me more than the badly leaking seals did.

How fast would the boat take on water? Could the crew even keep up with a failure like that? Could they even contain it?

BZ brother. :yeah:

Depends how deep they are and the outside sea pressure. The crew would have been in very serious danger.

USS Squalus sank in 1939 after failure of an induction valve. She was not very deep at the time:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Squalus_%28SS-192%29

HMS Thetis sank in 1939 after someone opened the torpedo tube door in error. She was on the surface at the time:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Thetis_(N25)


USS Thresher was lost in 1963 during a deep dive. The most likely theory appears to be the failure of a joint in a salt water piping system due to the sea pressure.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Thresher_(SSN-593)

Your link is to non-existent article on USS Sailfish (SS-192). Did you intend to link to this? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Squalus_(SS-192)

EDIT: Ah your link is broken because last ")" mark is not included in link.
EDIT#2: Same applies to all links.

strange, for some reason I cant get the proper links to show up in Wiki?

Flood rate
 

Our floodiing rate was about 5,000 GPM (calculated, and later confirmed using the high water marks in the bilge and the logs showing how long the flooding lasted). No way our pumps could keep up. As it was the drain pump was badly designed with gland seal from aux seawater.... so we lost seal pressure on the surface and the pump would get airbound sucking air in through the packing (yes, packing) if we tried to exceed about 75 GPM. We fixed that by hooking a submersible pump to a hose connection and pushing the water thru the pump... even then, it got us only 500 GPM (which was way above the pump ratings), so we had to stop the flooding to live.

36 inch pit
 

We also later found that the 597 had a corrosion pit in the engineroom bilges under some lead. When we cleaned it out we found it to be about 3 feet in diameter and half the hull thickeness deep (HY40). The Navy then limited us to a very shallow depth... a restriction promptly violated during a loss of CO2 removal casualty (the Engineroom Lower Level watch woke up the Control watchstanders as the ship was passing a grand and flying towards the bottom).

We had all kinds of close calls....

That's scary stuff.:salute: Thanks for your service.:salute:

Wow thanks for this story ! :salute:
Good job -


How was it done with the older Diesel subs - some of them also went down to 900 feet - what did they do to keep out the water ?

seals
 

mechanical seals seal tighter with increasing differential pressures.... with a good seal it leaks less at depth.