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Navy: No more civilians at helm
©New York Times © St. Petersburg Times, published February 16, 2001 WASHINGTON -- The Navy has tightened its rules on allowing civilians to participate in training exercises aboard submarines, at least until the investigation into the sinking of a Japanese fishing trawler off Hawaii is completed, Pentagon officials said Thursday. President Bush also said that he would ask Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to review all the the services' policies on allowing civilians to participate in military exercises, considered one of the Pentagon's most effective public relations tools. Civilian visitors were at the controls of two important stations aboard a nuclear attack submarine, the Greeneville, when it collided with a Japanese fishing vessel last Friday during a rapid surfacing maneuver off Honolulu. Nine of the people who were aboard the fishing boat are missing and presumed dead. Navy officials maintain that there is no evidence that the presence of the civilians at the controls contributed to the collision. But as a precaution, the Navy has ordered all submarine commanders to keep civilian visitors from sitting at control panels and have told the commanders not to perform emergency surfacing maneuvers with civilians onboard. On the Today show on NBC Thursday morning, one of the civilians on board the Greeneville, identified as John Hall, an oil and gas executive from Houston, described how he had been allowed to push the levers that put air into the ballast tanks, causing the submarine to rise. Hall said that moments after the nose of the submarine broke through the surface, he heard a loud noise and felt the submarine shudder. Asked what the captain, Cmdr. Scott Waddle, said at that moment, Hall replied, "I remember his words pretty vivid. He said, "Jesus, what the hell was that?' " Waddle has been relieved of his post pending the results of investigations by the Navy and the National Transportation Safety Board. A preliminary report by Rear Adm. Charles Griffiths Jr., a submarine group commander, could be completed as early as today. Adm. Thomas B. Fargo, commander of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, will then decide whether the findings warrant court-martialing the submarine's captain or crew. Meanwhile, the Coast Guard said Thursday it was calling off its active search for survivors. A spokesman in Honolulu said the search would move to passive status -- an effort to recover remains rather than to find survivors. Several submarine veterans, including three retired admirals, said in interviews that it was hard to fathom how the Greeneville's crew could have failed to detect the fishing trawler when it was so nearby, at least based on new information from the civilians and the Pentagon. One possibility, they said, was that the Greeneville's officers had failed to raise the periscopes high enough to catch sight of the 191-foot trawler. The admirals, all former submarine commanders, said that when a submarine first checks to see if it is safe to surface, it normally raises one of its periscopes as little as 6 inches to a foot above the waves. Then, if a full rotation of the periscope does not reveal any ships nearby, a common precaution is to raise the submarine -- and thus the periscope -- even higher. The admirals said that in a drill in local waters, it would be common to raise the periscope at least 4 to 6 feet above the sea level. And in seas with swells, they would have raised the boat enough to lift the periscope as much as 20 to 30 feet above the waves to enable them to survey much greater distances, all three of the admirals said. Navy officials have said that there were swells of several feet over the Greeneville. They have not disclosed how high the periscope was raised. Submarine veterans also said that if the fishing trawler was moving at 11 knots, as its captain has said, it should have been making enough noise to register on the Greeneville's sophisticated passive sonar systems. But they said that there can be limitations in the ability to track vessels that are either directly in front of or behind a submarine. "Without knowing more about the acoustic conditions, it's very hard to know why they didn't detect them," said retired Vice Adm. Bernard M. Kauderer, a former commander of submarines in the Atlantic Fleet. But, he said, "it sounds like they didn't get it at all." "It seems like a combination of misses," he said. "Someone should have gotten it." Adm. Stephen R. Pietropaoli, a Navy spokesman, said in a Pentagon briefing Thursday that he did not know whether the Greeneville was within a training area that is marked on public maps when the collision occurred. But he said the submarine's assigned operating area was "far broader" than the area marked on the maps. But Kauderer said training maneuvers are typically conducted inside those designated areas, which are noted on maps specifically to warn private vessels of possible submarine activity. Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, the ranking Democrat on the armed services committee, said Thursday that senior Navy officials told congressional officials on Wednesday that Waddle should have been able to see at least five nautical miles through his periscope. He said that in the few minutes it took the submarine to dive 400 feet and then rise back up, the fishing trawler could probably have moved only about two miles. That would have put the vessel well within periscope range when Cmdr. Waddle made his visual check, Levin said. The Navy has refused to release the names of the 16 civilians who were on the Greeneville, citing privacy issues and the ongoing investigation. Fourteen of those people were part of a group who had contributed money to the USS Missouri Memorial Association. Their trip was arranged by a Navy admiral who was forced to retire in 1995 after he made an offensive remark about the rape of a 12-year-old Okinawan girl. Both Hall and Todd Thoman, another civilian interviewed on Today, live in Houston and used to work for Fossil Bay Resources Ltd., an independent oil and gas company in Texas. They could not be reached for further comment Thursday. Don Hess, the executive vice president of the USS Missouri Memorial Association, said in a statement that the company had paid $7,500 to sponsor a golf tournament meant to raise money for the battleship memorial. But Hess said that the tournament was postponed and that the fee was returned to the company last December. - Information from the Los Angeles Times was used in this report.
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