nuclear-news

The USS San Francisco is an American nuclear powered submarine, one of the large Los Angeles-class submarines first laid down in 1972 and are among the U.S. Navy’s quietest submarines.

At the time of the collision, or grounding in Navy parlance, the USS San Francisco was near Guam on a peacetime training mission en route to Australia. The sub was at a depth of about 525 feet and skipping along at a crisp thirty-ish miles per hour.

The grounding was massive. Sailors in the dining room were tossed up to twenty-five feet across the mess-hall. One of the sub’s Petty Officers, Brian Barnes, recalled the incident during an interview with 60 minutes. “I remember just bodies everywhere,” he said. “Broken glass, stepping on plates, your shipmates moaning because they’re in pain, yelling.”

The bow of the USS San Francisco was shattered, the frontal thirty feet or so were crushed and exposed to the sea. Water was rushing into the sub—it was critical that an emergency blow be initiated in which air is pumped into the submarines ballast tanks to bring it up to the surface. ……  https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/what-happens-when-nuclear-submarine-hits-mountain-140687