Crunch.

[edschweppe]

Y'know, I'm really glad that my naval career never brought me to the Straits of Hormuz.

From the Navy Times:

An attack submarine and an amphib are out of action following a collision Friday during a nighttime transit through the narrow Strait of Hormuz.

The attack submarine Hartford and the amphibious transport dock New Orleans collided at 1 a.m. local time while moving into the Persian Gulf through the narrow passage between Iran and Oman.

Fifteen Hartford sailors were injured in the collision but were able to return to duty. No injuries were reported aboard New Orleans.

Details of the incident remain unclear. Hartford was "submerged but near the surface" at the time of the collision, according to Navy officials.

Today, Fifth Fleet Public Affairs released a statement, saying that both ships had arrived in Bahrain "to further assess and evaluate the damage that resulted from their collision at sea." They also released several pictures, showing Hartford's sail being significantly damaged (as in being knocked way off vertical). The damage to New Orleans appears to be entirely underwater.

Looking at the pictures, it would appear that the port side of Hartford's sail hit the starboard side of New Orleans' hull - and hit hard. Now, the Straits of Hormuz are notoriously shallow, and there is a lot of shipping going through not that much in the way of shipping lanes. It's way too early to judge what went wrong, but clearly something did.

Comments

[wcg.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I saw this a couple of days ago. Not good.

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

There goes another career (or two) down the tubes . . .

[glinda-w.livejournal.com]

*looks at picture* *looks at angle of sail*

Holy [deleted expletive]!

[carl-schweppe.livejournal.com]

why does stuff like this happen? Is it bad piloting on one or the other ship? or should they not have been that close to one another?

[curiousangel.livejournal.com]

I'd seen some discussion in various places, but the most thorough seemed to be over at Bubblehead's blog (http://bubbleheads.blogspot.com/2009/03/uss-hartford-collides-with-us-amphib.html), where there's a lot of discussion in the comments. Bubblehead posted something over at Information Dissemination (http://informationdissemination.blogspot.com/2009/03/navy-ships-collide-in-strait-of-hormuz.html) in the comments that seemed plausible to me... but I was an Air Force guy, so what the hell do I know?

His scenario is that Hartford was at periscope depth transiting the Strait at low speed, when the OOD sees New Orleans overtaking, calls for "Emergency Deep", but they don't have a lot of deep to use (around 200-300 feet, according to some estimates). Bad stuff ensues, including Hartford rolling quite a bit when hit, and it's just the good training of the crew that the injuries weren't any worse.