ClassX Video Lessons Youtube Channel SmarterEveryDay How to Fight Fire or Flooding on a Nuclear Submarine – Smarter Every Day 244
Welcome to an exciting exploration of life aboard a U.S. Navy nuclear submarine, where we delve into the critical skills needed to handle emergencies like fires and flooding. This article is inspired by a unique experience on a submarine in the Arctic, highlighting the importance of being prepared for any situation that could threaten the vessel and its crew.
In the context of a submarine, a “casualty” refers to any problem that could endanger the ship, such as a fire or flooding. The crew is rigorously trained to respond quickly and effectively to these emergencies to ensure the safety of the submarine and everyone on board.
One of the first things you learn on a submarine is how to handle a fire. The confined environment means there’s no fresh air, so submarines are equipped with Emergency Air Breathing (EAB) systems. These systems provide air through manifolds located throughout the submarine. In the event of a fire, the first step is to secure an air supply by plugging into these systems.
To use the EAB, you connect a hose to the manifold, ensuring a secure fit. The hose is clipped to the left side of your belt, allowing you to find it easily in a smoke-filled compartment. Sharing air is possible by connecting to another person’s hose if necessary. Once connected, you wear a mask and tighten the straps to ensure a good seal, then cover your head with a flash hood for protection against heat.
In the event of a fire, an announcement is made over the submarine’s speaker system, followed by a general alarm. The crew is trained to respond immediately, knowing exactly where to find and use the EAB systems. The goal is to have the fire extinguished within a minute to prevent smoke from filling the submarine’s compartments.
Flooding is another critical emergency that can occur, especially in areas like the torpedo room, which is directly connected to the sea. Submarines are equipped with portable submersible pumps to remove water quickly. These pumps are connected to large hoses, similar to fire hoses, to efficiently pump water out of the submarine.
The pumps must operate at a pressure higher than the surrounding sea pressure to effectively remove water. The crew is trained to manage these pumps and ensure they maintain the necessary flow to prevent flooding from escalating.
In the event of a leak, the crew can apply temporary patches to pipes to stop flooding. This involves using a piece of bent steel with rubber to create a gasket, secured with a chain wrench and strapping. While not a permanent fix, these patches allow the submarine to continue operating until a more permanent repair can be made.
Every crew member, regardless of their primary role, is trained in damage control. This means that everyone, from the cook to the captain, knows how to respond to casualties like fires and flooding. This comprehensive training ensures that the submarine can handle emergencies effectively, maintaining the safety of the vessel and its crew.
Life on a nuclear submarine requires a high level of preparedness and teamwork. The ability to respond to emergencies like fires and flooding is crucial, and the crew’s training ensures they are ready to tackle any challenge. This article provides a glimpse into the rigorous training and skills required to keep a submarine and its crew safe under the sea.
Engage in a virtual simulation where you can practice responding to a fire on a nuclear submarine. You’ll need to locate and connect to the Emergency Air Breathing (EAB) system, don your protective gear, and work with teammates to extinguish the fire. This activity will help you understand the urgency and coordination required in real-life scenarios.
Participate in a hands-on workshop where you will learn to operate portable submersible pumps and manage flooding situations. You’ll practice setting up the pumps and hoses, ensuring they function at the necessary pressure to combat flooding effectively. This exercise will reinforce your understanding of the equipment and techniques used in flood control.
Take part in a role-playing exercise where you and your peers are assigned different roles on a submarine. You’ll be presented with various casualty scenarios, such as leaks or fires, and must collaborate to apply temporary repairs or extinguish fires. This activity emphasizes teamwork and quick decision-making in emergency situations.
Engage in a communication drill designed to improve your ability to convey critical information during an emergency. You’ll practice making announcements, coordinating with team members, and ensuring everyone is informed and responsive. This drill will enhance your communication skills, which are vital in managing submarine emergencies.
Join a review session where you will discuss and analyze the comprehensive training methods used on submarines. You’ll explore the importance of cross-training and how every crew member, regardless of their primary role, contributes to damage control. This session will deepen your appreciation for the rigorous training and teamwork required to maintain safety on a submarine.
Here’s a sanitized version of the transcript:
—
(upbeat music) (submarine sonar ping) – Hey, it’s me, Destin. Welcome back to Smarter Every Day. Earlier this year, I had an amazing opportunity to board a U.S. Navy nuclear submarine on an ice flow in the Arctic. This is the next video in a Smarter Every Day deep dive series into submarines and how they work. So far, we’ve learned about the command structure and how torpedo tubes work, and there’s a lot more videos to come.
Given the fact that while on board this submarine, we’re literally under several feet of ice, it’s very important to me to understand how to handle situations that could jeopardize the boat. We have to be able to fix these problems from within the submarine because a small issue could escalate quickly. So the word of the day for this video is: Casualty. What is a casualty? A casualty is any kind of problem, such as a fire or flooding.
One of the biggest things we train for is to rapidly and aggressively address any kind of casualty to save the ship and each other. So that’s what we spend a majority of our time training for.
– This is Matt. Chief Charleton is going to walk us through the different ways of responding to fire or flooding on the boat.
– Okay, we just got in, and we have to get trained on what to do in the event of a fire.
– If you sink it, there’s no ability to surface and no fresh air, right? So we have Emergency Air Breathing systems. You have these manifolds all over the boat. You turn this right, and it’s just a little plug that will fall out. If you look on the deck here, if you have a rectangular non-skid pattern, that means it’s directly overhead. If you have one of these triangular shapes, then it’s kind of on the bulkhead, and you have to look for it.
– Got it.
– So the first step you want to do is save yourself. Plug the hose in for an air supply. (air hisses) You have to shove it up in there. Some of them are a little stickier than others. Always clip this on your belt on the left side because in a smoke-filled compartment, you won’t be able to see anything, so you have to feel around. If someone always puts it on their left side, then you know where it’s going to be.
– Okay.
– If somebody taps you, you can plug into someone else.
– Oh, okay, you share.
– Yep, and then you put your chin in the bottom here and pull the straps up over your face. Tighten the bottom two straps tight, then the top. Pull the flash hood over like that to protect you from heat damage. Obviously, you want to roll your sleeves down if it’s hot and get out of the affected space as soon as possible. This will let you breathe in a smoke-filled compartment.
– Yes, sir.
– Okay.
– Can I try it?
– Yep.
– First things first, I’m going to put this on my belt.
– Left side.
– Left side, left side. Just plug it straight in, or do I need to shove it way up in there? (air hisses) You’ll hear it click. There you go.
– Oh, nice. All right, then you pull your mask on.
– Done?
– All right, so now if you want to check and make sure you’ve got a good seal, take a breath in, twist that clockwise, and hold it because it’s going to pop out. Make sure you have a good face seal. If you get any air in there, then you’re not going to get a good seal.
– (air hisses)
– So now plug it back in. (air hisses) Good to go.
– Cool, that’s easy. And the right thing to do is for me to yell “air” before I do that, right?
– You can, that’s just a submarine thing. You want to let people know that “Hey, I’m going to cause a noise.” It’s not really normal to have air anywhere. If we hear that, it could perk somebody’s ears up and say, “Hey, what’s going on?”
– Got you.
– So in a fire, I would not worry about that.
– Nobody cares in a fire, so I say—
– In a fire, if you’re going around saying “air,” we’ll all look at you like you’re crazy.
– Air! So I did that wrong?
– Yeah.
– (laughing) I’m supposed to hold it when I do it.
– (indistinct)
– Yeah, okay, yeah. The things you learn on the first day on a submarine.
– So where would this be located?
– The crew’s mess is a centralized area for everyone that’s off; we’re just going to hang out here anyway.
– Yeah.
– If a fire were to happen right now, they would just grab this. They’re not going to run into the rack, grab an EAB, and then run to the unaffected compartment.
– So what does the call sound like in the event of a fire?
– There would be an announcement on the 1MC, which is the general speaker, followed by a general alarm. It bongs for about 26 seconds, then it turns off, and then they’ll announce fire. It will do a big long announcement for where it is, what the class is, how to route the hoses, things like that.
– We’re going to come back and see how they actually fight a fire together. But first, let’s head down and see what they do if water starts to flood the boat.
– Okay, so we’re in the torpedo room, which is awesome. That’s a torpedo by my foot, you know, normal stuff. But my understanding is this is the room that’s most likely to flood, is that correct?
– Yes, sir.
– Now why is that?
– We have the torpedo tubes that are directly to sea.
– Okay, got it.
– If you get a leak there or something, it’s going to come in, and water’s going to be everywhere here, and you have to get it out fast.
– Absolutely.
– And so this is a pump, you’re telling me?
– Yes, sir. So that’s a portable submersible pump. I could put this in any of our bilges and connect it to pump the water off.
– What do you connect it to?
– It’s a big hose, essentially the fire hose that we have here, but a lot bigger.
– So how long would it take to empty that bucket?
– As soon as you turn that pump on, it’s going to empty in about five seconds.
– That’s impressive.
– That’s why we have two fire hoses here, fully pressurized. We have to discharge both of those simultaneously and maintain the drain rate of the submersible pump.
– That is a serious pump.
– You’ll see it jump a few inches when they turn it on, just from that unusual surge. Then the hose will immediately pressurize, pressurize the drain header, and then they’ll use the drain pump, which is back aft, to pump all the water off the ship.
– Really?
– Yes.
– So it has to pump it at a pressure that’s higher than the depth that we’re at, right?
– Correct, yeah, so the variable speed. We’ll use that to pump overboard and overcome sea pressure.
– That’s amazing.
– So that pump line is going to come alive.
– Yep.
– So it’ll smack him upside the head.
– Right in the face.
– I probably deserve it. (laughs)
– (pump whirring) (water gushing)
– Whoa.
– As you can see, it’s kind of keeping up there, so now they’re having to throttle to maintain flow. You want to keep it covered, but obviously, we don’t want to make a mess because the more mess you make, the more you have to clean up later.
– Right.
– So we can go ahead and…
– Kill.
– I’m closing it.
– Secure the drain pump.
– All right, shut the bilge.
– They’re shut.
– Mine’s shut.
– (water splashing) (indistinct)
– Surge pump, surge pump.
– Stand by.
– It’s the hose back filling.
– Some of it is, yeah.
– Yeah.
– Start the pump.
– Start the pump.
– (indistinct)
– All right, stop the pump.
– Stop the pump.
– And stop the drain pump.
– That’s a lot.
– That is a lot.
– So like, a little bit of water got on the floor.
– A little bit.
– So what happens to that water?
– There’s actually a bilge underneath here, so we’ll go in and there’s a bilge we can use to pump that out with a pump. The rest of it that we can’t get, that’s below the section, we can use a regular vacuum cleaner. Clean that up, dump it into a funnel, and it’ll fill up one of the submersible bilges that we have.
– Really?
– Yes.
– And we’ll consolidate all that stuff, and then we pump it overboard.
– Wow. That’s amazing. Can I follow that hose?
– Yeah.
– I can follow that hose?
– So I’m following that drain hose.
– So I went this way? (whispering) Oh man, straight through where people sleep. This is where people sleep. Right there. This where it goes?
– That’s where it ends up.
– That’s right down there, and goes to the trim system.
– Back in the crew mess, quickly becoming one of my favorite places.
– Yeah? What are we doing?
– Right now we’re going to do a simulation of putting a temporary patch on the pipe that would have been leaking during the flooding drill that we’re doing.
– It’s just copper pipe.
– It’s just a copper pipe. It’s open-ended just for the simulation.
– What kind of material is this?
– It’s a piece of bent steel with rubber on the inside, so that way when we actually put pressure on it, it kind of digs in and creates a gasket.
– Yeah.
– Holds everything together.
– Cool, rock and roll. Does this happen a lot?
– No.
– It’s a bad day if it does this.
– Oh yeah, a horrible day.
– And so what they’re doing now is applying this chain wrench. What that’s going to do is hold that and band it in place so that they can apply the strapping to it and then eventually secure that, which is what’s actually going to hold the pressure. But in the meantime, they’re not just going to hold that with their hands because depending on what your depth is, that could be too much force for one person to hold. It’s going to be about a two-person job. They’ve got their personal protective equipment on, and the gloves so they don’t cut themselves on the metal of the straps. They apply the patch to the pipe, kind of off from where the leak is, so the leak is still going to be going on. Imagine like straight out this way.
– Yep.
– But this is going to be off-center, so that you can get the chain wrench on there, so that when you roll it over where the leak is, it doesn’t fly off and hit you in the face.
– So now that he’s holding that, he’s got the chain wrench on there, he’s going to apply the strapping, and that’s what’s going to hold the pressure on the pipe. They do it on one side, they’ll dog it down, which is what he has there. They’ll apply that to wind that up, and that will create tension on the band.
– Oh, got it, I see it now.
– Yep, so as he winds that up, that’ll apply the tension. Once you start to see a crease along the edge of here on the strapping, that’s when you know it’s actually taken the pressure off of the leak and applying it to the strong back.
– So the blue is called the strong back?
– Yep.
– And what’s the gasket material called?
– It’s just a gasket.
– Got it.
– The rubber…
– Got it.
– So that’s the band. So this is a permanent band? Or, well, it’s not a permanent fix, but it’s pretty close to it.
– This would be as close as we can get without doing some sort of weld repair or pulling into port and getting someone to come down here and fix the pipe for us. So in the meantime, this would allow us to restore the system. If it was something that we needed to operate the ship, we could do that by applying this emergency patch, and that would stop the flooding.
– So you’re at sea, at depth, you spring a leak, this is what you do.
– Yep.
– So are you maintenance, or what’s your—
– Me?
– What’s your title?
– So I am a machinist mate, so I’m a mechanic, but I just work back in the engine room. But damage control is an important part for everyone to do.
– So you have, you said machinist, so do you guys have a mill and a lathe on the ship?
– We do.
– Really, can you show me that?
– I can’t unfortunately.
– Oh, you can’t?
– It’s back in the engine room.
– Ah, everything’s in the engine room.
– Everything cool is in the engine room.
– Oh, man.
– Every person on board has to be able to stop flooding, put fires out, and respond to casualties. If you see a person with their submarine dolphins on, that means they have proven that they know how to do that. So far, you’ve seen a nuclear machinist mate, a non-nuclear machinist mate, and in a second, you’ll see a cook come out and fight a fire, electricians down in the torpedo room, sonar techs. So no matter what your job is on a submarine, you have to know how to fight a casualty. The two big ones for us are fire and flooding.
– Really?
– So that’s what’s unique about serving as a… Other communities have special guys whose whole job is to do damage control. But everyone here, from the cook to the captain, knows how to stop a casualty.
– That’s awesome. That’s a big deal.
– So this is it, huh?
– So that’s it.
– That’s it. Done deal.
– So she’s sealed up, huh?
– Yep, so in a matter of three to four minutes, we’re now able to ascend about 2000 pounds of pressure with just this temporary patch that we have.
– That’ll handle 2000 TSI?
– Yes.
– Yes.
– Wow.
– And with every additional band, that’s an extra thousand, if it’s applied properly.
– Really?
– Yes.
– Wow. So, man, that’s legit. It’s a little bit harder when it’s spraying on you though, I’m assuming.
– Oh yeah, that definitely is.
– You guys ever done it?
– We do a trainer every now and again, up at the upper basin, you know, sub school portion, and they actually have things spraying on you. You gotta run around, try and get it before the water gets too high.
– Oh really?
– Yeah.
– So water’s coming in on you.
– Oh yeah.
– It’ll fill up like a swimming pool, so they pump thousands of gallons a minute through this big rupture in a pipe, and you gotta get in there, and you’re wading waist deep, hands cold, you got all the tools you need, you’re trying to apply this emergency patch. But we send as many people as we can to that, and it’s pretty awesome training.
– Oh yeah, ’cause just because the water’s coming up, that means you just got to work faster, right?
– Yeah, if you do it in the wintertime, the water is significantly colder, so—
– Really?
– Extra motivation to get the pipe wrench on there quickly.
– Wow, that’s amazing.
– The captain’s about to simulate a fire, and you’re going to put it out?
– I’m not putting it out. So here, we’re testing the rapid responders on the ship. Our metric is a minute. We want a minute; we want guys in here, extinguishing agent on the fire because within about two minutes, if there’s a fire about the size of a trash bag, it would make the forward compartment, control room fill with smoke, and you won’t be able to see.
– So we practice all the time to quickly secure the power to put the fire out, and then watch standers… And again, like I said before, you’ll see nuke electricians, you’ll see a cook, you’ll see nuke mechanics, or you’ll see sonar techs. They all come rapidly respond, and the senior chief’s going to talk you through that whole sequence of events. But it’s going to be right there.
– Do they know it’s coming?
– Oh no, we do it all the time, surprise.
– Okay, cool, sweet.
– This time yes, but normally we do it all the time as a surprise.
– Yeah, sweet.
– So he’ll walk you through this—
– So are you about to start a fire by plugging in something?
– When I get the word. (laughs)
– Again, the name of the game is we can’t really light off a fire onboard, so we have to simulate everything we do and clue people in with just something visual or something audible. We use a small bicycle light here that simulates that there’s a fire in this electrical component, so somebody should call that away. If it were to spread, say to the surrounding area, this is all lagged, so that’s all flammable material. We would plug these rope lights in, and it would spread to the surrounding area, right? And then from there, it would go either in the outboards and up where it would go just straight up if it’s in an open space, right? So you always man the scene, as well as the vertical spread so that you can attack that if it were to light off.
– So what I’ll do right now is I’ll light off this electrical fire, and then our Galley Watch Captain will call that away in this space.
– Code red, Code red. Code red, code red. Code red on forward compartment. Red for panel P
Fire – An uncontrolled combustion process that releases heat, light, and various reaction products, often requiring immediate attention in engineering environments to prevent damage or injury. – The engineering team conducted a thorough risk assessment to ensure that all fire hazards in the laboratory were adequately mitigated.
Flooding – The overflow of a large amount of water beyond its normal confines, especially over what is normally dry land, which can affect the operation of engineering systems and structures. – Engineers designed the dam with advanced materials to withstand potential flooding during extreme weather conditions.
Submarine – A watercraft capable of independent operation underwater, often used in engineering studies related to fluid dynamics and pressure systems. – The engineering students analyzed the structural integrity of a submarine hull under varying pressure conditions.
Crew – A group of people working together on a particular engineering project or operation, especially in challenging environments like offshore platforms or space missions. – The engineering crew worked tirelessly to complete the installation of the new offshore wind turbine.
Training – The process of learning the skills necessary for a particular job or activity, especially in technical fields like engineering where precision and safety are paramount. – The engineering department implemented a rigorous training program to ensure all personnel were proficient in the latest safety protocols.
Emergency – A serious, unexpected, and often dangerous situation requiring immediate action, particularly relevant in engineering contexts where system failures can have critical consequences. – The engineering team conducted regular drills to prepare for any emergency that might arise during the construction project.
Pumps – Mechanical devices used to move fluids, such as liquids or gases, by mechanical action, crucial in various engineering applications like water treatment and oil extraction. – The engineers optimized the design of the pumps to increase efficiency and reduce energy consumption in the water treatment facility.
Pressure – The force exerted per unit area, often a critical parameter in engineering calculations for designing structures and systems that can withstand external and internal forces. – The engineering team conducted tests to measure the pressure tolerance of the new pipeline under extreme conditions.
Repairs – The process of restoring something that is damaged or malfunctioning to a good condition, an essential aspect of maintenance engineering to ensure the longevity and safety of equipment. – The engineering department scheduled regular inspections and repairs to maintain the operational efficiency of the manufacturing equipment.
Safety – The condition of being protected from or unlikely to cause danger, risk, or injury, a fundamental consideration in all engineering disciplines to protect both people and the environment. – The engineering firm prioritized safety by implementing comprehensive risk management strategies across all projects.
