Collapse Depth

The big ship reacted almost instantly to the emergency blow; Duggan could feel the angle in his feet. They were starting to point up. But, he could see on his depth gage, the ship’s depth didn’t immediately respond. They continued to drift down, albeit at a slower rate. Then their descent seemed to stop, and they hovered for a moment. And then, almost imperceptibly, they began to rise. Duggan realized that he’d been holding his breath; he exhaled loudly.

“Going up?” said Barnes.

“Yes.”

“Thank God.”

Duggan sat back down in his chair and thought to himself: whatever happens now, we’re moving up. Things are improving.

A blaring alarm on the electrical panel yanked him back into the crisis. Patterson cut out the alarm and scanned his panel. “Erratic voltage,” he said, and Duggan could see it. All the AC voltage meters were drifting around. Electrical voltage was one of the most static indicators in maneuvering, seeing the needles move around made the panel seem funhouse bizarre. Patterson reached to the center of his panel, on instinct: the ground detector. He turned a switch and took a reading. “Fuck,” he said.

Duggan didn’t wait for Patterson to announce it to him, he could see it himself. He keyed the 7MC mike to control. The ground detector was an exponential meter that could measure the resistance of a specified electrical bus to ground in Ohms; the normal reading was 8, the symbol for infinity. On the panel now the readout was in the thousands of Ohms, and dropping. He knew what had happened, and while he couldn’t have done anything about it, he cursed himself for not anticipating it: the floodwater had grounded some piece (or pieces) of equipment.

“Lowering grounds on the port AC electrical bus,” he announced into the 7MC. “Commencing ground isolation.” He released the microphone key and spoke to Patterson. “Start dropping busses.”

The roaming electrician appeared at the entrance to maneuvering to assist, a checklist on his clipboard.

“Dropping the port non-vital bus,” said Patterson, without waiting for an order. He turned a black switch on his panel, and the blue light for the bus went dark. But the Ohmmeter continued to drop. He flipped the switch back on.

“Port DC bus,” he said. He was moving fast, as the grounds continued to drop. With every switch he threw, equipment was de-energized, potentially affecting the casualty control efforts. But there was no question that they should do it. If that ground got to zero, it meant a complete short: an electrical fire. The old submarine saying was: if you don’t find the ground…the ground will find you.

“It’s got to be on the port vital bus,” said Patterson. They’d tried everything else, so by process of elimination, it had to be. But the equipment on that bus was, by definition, vital. The ground isolation had to proceed slightly more deliberately lest they make a bad situation worse.

Duggan grabbed the 7MC again. “Commencing isolation on the port vital bus.”

The roaming electrician flipped to a new check list. “Number two main feed pump.”

“No,” said Duggan. “Start with whatever is in the forward compartment. That’s where the floodwater is.”

He scanned the list. “Ten loads in all forward on that bus. First on the list is forward ventilation.”

“Start there,” said Duggan.

“Too late!” said Patterson. The needle on the ground detector was swinging counter clockwise, plunging like a punctured balloon. They all stared at it. Just a moment passed before once again they heard the adrenalin-inducing crackle of the 4MC speaker.

Fire in the forward compartment!

Jabo was working right next to Hallorann, trying to supervise the frantic efforts of about six men crammed into a very small space in the front of the torpedo room. The work consisted of two efforts: removing the water that had poured into the space, and stopping the flooding.

Hallorann was working with two others to remove water. They’d already sunk a submersible pump into the torpedo room bilge and hooked it up to the trim header. It had been an exhausting task. The submersible pump was heavy and everything had to be done in a soaking, frigid torrent of sea water. Hallorann had only recently learned to operate the pump, working on his quals, but he’d taken control of the operation, attacking the flooding, shoving the pump into the deepest part of the bilge. His hands were so cold that at one point he dropped the spanner wrench into the flooded bilge; without hesitating he went completely underwater to retrieve it. He came up shivering and soaking, with the wrench in hand, and they completed the connection. When they turned the pump on, he felt a small sense of triumph when the outlet hose went rigid; they were getting water out of there and it felt good. By then, the second submersible pump had arrived from the Crew’s Mess. The crewmen went to work hooking it up, the effort and the cold water sapping them of strength.