OK, shipmates, here it is - my one big story. Its pretty long, and contains some explanations most of you wont need because it was written for a general audience. But this is the little storm Lee Lindquist mentioned in a comment earlier today. In February of 1976, my ship was heading back to the US after a six-month deployment in the Mediterranean (the Med, to sailors). The ship was an LPD, 569 feet long and displacing about 15,000 tons. The pilot house was about 90 ft above the waterline. We were about 150 miles off the coast and ran into an Atlantic winter storm. Her name was SHREVEPORT, named after the city in Louisiana. The Navy retired her in 2007. An Atlantic winter storm packs quite a punch, and in fact there were two storm systems, which is why what happened to us did. We were standing pretty much dead into the wind, which was running about 35-40 knots. The seas were heavy, around 40 feet, and were breaking on the bow of the ship and showering the pilot house with heavy spray. Despite the storm, the sky was clear. I relieved the watch as conning officer at about 2345 (15 min. before midnight). The ship was pitching and rolling. We had been part of a five-ship formation, but the commodore had given the order several hours before for each ship to follow the course that suited her best. Only one other ship was anywhere near us at that point, about a mile and a half from us. The ship’s surface radar was almost useless – much of the time it was shining up into the air or down at the water. We only saw the echo from the nearby ship about every third of fourth sweep of the radar. Just about midnight, the commodore called for the captain on the intercom (we were the flagship). I was the only one who could hear it, so I called to the captain, who was on the bridge, that the commodore wanted to talk to him. The captain left where he had been standing, right at the centerline, and made his way to the intercom box. Just as he pushed the talk switch, the ship pitched forward and down more sharply than before, and instead of the splashing sound of spray, I heard - and felt - a rumbling noise. Just as I concluded to myself that wed hit a solid wave, two of the pilot house windows burst in. Those windows were about 2 feet square and were made of multiple layers of laminated safety glass. Not bulletproof, but robust. Water poured through the empty frames, sweeping several people off their feet. I helped one other officer (the Officer of the Deck, my immediate supervisor) to his feet and ensured that the ship’s steering had not been damaged (it’s an electrical system.). I called out to the helmsman, “Do you have steering control?” No reply. I repeated the question and still no reply. On the third try I got the answer I hoped for, “Yes I do!” and replied, “Very well!” It wasn’t until some time later that I discovered what had happened to the helm. One of the windows that burst in was at the centerline, right in front of the helm console. The helmsman lost his nerve and fled, leaving the helm unattended. At the same time, the ship’s Executive Officer (XO), the second in command, was in the Combat Information Center (CIC), just aft of the pilot house. When he felt the unusual motion of the ship and the radars and phones went dead, he stepped out to the pilot house. Seeing the helm unattended, he took it himself, and steered for several minutes. The helmsman could have been court-martialed, but I don’t believe any charges were brought against him. The circumstance was extreme. In the Flag Bridge one level below the pilot house, the situation was a lot worse. The area was smaller, and more windows had broken. The water in there was chest-deep where it had been less than a foot in the pilot house. The people in there were being beaten to death. Happily for them, someone in Flag Plot (more or less corresponded to the CIC) opened the watertight door connecting to the Flag Bridge and the water level dropped to knee-deep. Several sailors waded out and rescued the commodore and several others including his second-in-command, the Chief Staff Officer (CSO). He was clinging to the base of his command chair in the proverbial death grip and they had to use force to pull him loose. He suffered several injuries; no one was quite sure which were from the wave and which from the rescue. What the rescuers didn’t realize was that one of the flag bridge team had been swept into Flag Plot by the rush of water. He was saved by the ship’s dentist, who waded in when he saw water pouring from one of the regular doors into the passageway. He stepped on the submerged officer, then dragged him up to the surface and propped him on his knee to resuscitate him. That was probably the closest we had to a casualty. That officer would surely have drowned if not rescued that quickly. The dentist got a commendation for that. The only man who saw the wave coming was the lookout on the open bridge. Because the sky was clear, there was enough starlight for him to catch a glimpse of the wall of water coming towards us and do the one thing that saved him – he turned around and grabbed a post. When the wave passed over the ship, he had his back to it and was being pressed against the post. He was soaked to the skin but unhurt. Except for the broken windows, the pilot house suffered no real damage. The Flag Bridge had more damage; most of the electrical and electronic devices were shorted out. The radar scopes going out was a puzzle. Someone thought that the antenna itself had been damaged or even carried away by the wave. We went out and lit the mast with the signal searchlights to find out. The antenna was there and seemed intact, but it wasn’t turning. Then, about 15 minutes later, it spontaneously started up again and worked normally. Some water had gotten in somewhere, obviously, but we all wondered that no fuses were blown. The commodore calling the captain was providentially timed. One of the pilot house windows that burst in was right where the captain had been standing just before. And one of the Flag Bridge windows that burst in was right in front of the commodore’s command chair. He was leaning to the side to push the intercom talk switch, so when the window burst in, the broken glass caught him a glancing blow to the side of his head, stunning him and tearing open his scalp, but he survived. Had the captain and the commodore not been talking on the intercom, they both would have probably been killed. As it was, there were no fatalities, though several people were injured, some seriously. The ship took damage, including some dramatically dished watertight doors; but the damage control people took care of it and we steamed on. One thing we did was what the commodore was going to recommend – Turn about and ride out the storm downwind. What hit us was a “rogue wave,” a super-wave that forms when two or more waves pile up on each other. The phenomenon is pretty well understood now, but back then it was just being identified. It must have been over 100 feet high. A wind-speed indicator in the pilot house was frozen at 90 mph. I’m not sure if the wind actually got that high or if the anemometers got shorted out and sent a false reading. Had things been a little different, the pilot house could have flooded, or some or all of us could have been swept overboard, or had things been more than a little different, the ship might have been sunk. The next day was one of the most beautiful I had ever seen. We went to Morehead City, NC and disembarked our Marines, then sailed up the coast to our homeport in Norfolk, VA. The sea often treats you that way. If you come through bad weather intact, you get perfect weather for a while as if it was a payback.
Posted on: Wed, 21 Jan 2015 22:12:06 +0000
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