Sea Stories -Page one

by Dick Zimmerman 70-71

    For those of you who missed the thrills that came with a 1200 pound steam plant engineering billet, there was an auxiliary machinery cooling water pump in each fireroom. As you might gather from its name, this pump provided water to cool all the other pumps in the fire room. There was an emergency valve that could be opened if the cooling water pump broke down, which would then send a backup supply of water from the firemain into the machinery cooling system.

    Toward the end of my tour as Chief Engineer in 1971, we had a much-needed overhaul at Hunter's Point Naval Shipyard. Just before the overhaul began, I had noticed that the emergency cooling water valve in the after fireroom was obstructed in some way, so that opening it did nothing to feed the cooling main. This was a critical shortcoming - with a 1200 pound plant, you always wanted to make sure you had every backup system ready to go, because you very often needed it.

    I didn't have an MPA (Main Propulsion Assistant) until a few days before I left the ship, so I told one of my Chief BTs to make sure the clogged valve was taken care of by ship's force during the overhaul. There was so much major work required that getting valves done by the yardbirds was out of the question.

    One night toward the end of the overhaul, when all the machinery was back aboard, I was inspecting my spaces. I checked to see if this repair had been made, and could see that no water was getting through the valve. I had a little talk with the Chief BT who was supposed to handle this but let it slip his mind. Funny, he never once forgot to watch those Swedish skin flicks they often showed in the Chiefs' Lounge, so I guess his memory lapses were selective. After our talk, the Chief had the BTs on duty in the fireroom isolate the valve, and pull it right on the spot.

    But the line was leaking badly when they tried to remove the valve because the other valves in the firemain were not holding well enough to isolate that spot in the line. There were always lots of problems with valves in salt water lines, because the salt water would eat right through the valve seats and disks. We had several major work items more critical than sea water valves, so we didn't get enough valve work done during the overhaul.

    To get that emergency valve out of the line to look at it and then to put it back in place, we had to get the firemain pressure off the valve. We were getting shore-based firemain at the time, so that meant we had to secure the firemain supply. This would leave the ship with no firefighting water in the event of a fire. But securing the firemain was the only way we could get the job done, and hopefully, it wouldn't take too long.

    Our new CO, Commander Thearle, had just taken command earlier that same day
so we now were calling him Captain Thearle. However, I remembered him best as Lieutenant Thearle back at the Naval Academy, since he Class A'd both me and my roommate, Gil Crouse, during our First Class year for selling sandwiches to hungry plebes in Bancroft Hall when he was the Officer of the Watch. Even though the guys in the Class of '68 had a plebe year that fell far short of ours, they were sufficiently deprived of food in the mess hall to make our sandwich-selling scheme quite lucrative until Thearle put an abrupt end to it. But the sandwiches are another story.

    The problem I was now faced with was figuring out the following. If he had Class A'd me for the not-so-terrible offense of selling sandwiches, what the hell would he do if, on the day he assumed command of a guided missile destroyer, his new ship burned down to the keel because I had secured the firemain and we couldn't fight a fire that started in that vulnerable moment? I even rehearsed the possible ways to tell him, which all started
out with the lame words, "Captain Thearle, you probably won't believe this, but ..." Everybody always dumped things into the XO's lap, so I wasn't about to go that route. If a disaster resulted from my action, I knew I would have to go straight to the new captain with the bad news. I figured Thearle would then bring back the ancient practice of keelhauling using a hydraulic windlass as a modern touch, or maybe he could come up with something even worse.

    Just for a moment, I considered leaving the problem as it was, since I would be departing the ship in a few days, and I could let my relief worry about it. But that didn't seem right - I had been through a lot on this ship, having met many challenges, most of which we had overcome. I wasn't about to wrap up this fantastic experience that I figured I would always treasure, by leaving something knowingly undone.

    It was with a great deal of caution that I very nervously had the shore firemain supply secured so we could fix the emergency valve. I stationed a man with sound-powered phones right next to the valve topside where the firemain came aboard, and had another talker on the other end right next to me in the after fireroom. Now to get all the water that was already aboard in the firemain piping out of the system, we went ahead and pulled the emergency cooling water valve, which let out all the residual water right into our bilges. Even though it's now 1999 and this happened in 1971, I can still see BT3 Ihrig perched atop a handrail loosening the bolts on the flanges that held this valve in the line, and I can still see the sudden gush of water when he got the valve out. As soon as the leftover water was drained from the line, which only took a few seconds, the flow stopped.

    The surge of water also seemed to clear whatever had been lodged in the emergency line, so we put the valve back into the line and turned the shore supply of firemain back on. We checked to make sure that the emergency backup worked the way it was supposed to, and it did. Everything got taken care of in just a few minutes, so Captain Thearle didn't have to hear about his new command going up in flames on his first day, and I didn't have to worry about what he would do to me after the fire.

by Dave Malone 77-80

    This is one of my fondest memories of WestPac 79. It occurred during the very first few days of the cruise. I hadn't thought a whole lot about it until my former CO, Roger Barnett, reminded me of the incident about a month ago. He wasn't supposed to know about it, but I guess he found out anyway.

    The Buchanan apparently had come a long way in the years previous to 1979. In 1974 she won the Arleigh Burke Award, which was for the most improved unit in the Pacific fleet. We had been trying to continue that tradition ever since. Buchanan was in excellent fighting trim, thanks to a skipper who kept after us night and day, making sure that if the ship had to fight that she and her crew would be more than up to the task. So, imagine our surprise (and perhaps a bit of resentment) when the squadron E when to the USS Brooke (FFG-1). As far as we were concerned, that E painted proudly on her stack was rightly the property of USS Buchanan (DDG-14) and her crew.

    Well, things have a way of evening out some. Buchanan, along with the rest of DesRon31, got underway for WestPac on February 21, 1979. We were bound for Pearl Harbor for a bit of well deserved R&R, on our way to the front lines of the Cold War with the Soviet Union...the Western Pacific.

    We had been at sea for just one day when the ship decreased her speed and went DIW, dead-in-water. When things like that occur, a sailor will sit and wait, and stare patiently at the 1MC for the message that he knows is coming. And come it did, along with the shrill sound of the Bosun's pipe. It was the "All Hands" call...the long, long version. That meant one thing. The old man had a message for us, and with the ship at DIW, things didn't look too good. "This is the Captain speaking. Apparently the USS Brooke has had an engineering malfunction, and is unable to get underway again. Since we have two engines rather than one, we have been ordered to send her a tow line and we will proceed to tow her until we meet the tug being sent to us from Pearl Harbor." And with the departing voice of the bosun of the watch "That is all", we were left in silence.

    Resignation of the situation changed to anger, and changed again to frustration. "Hey, that one screw ship is going to kill our liberty in Pearl." "Not fair, man!" And so the crew did what it did best. It grumbled and groused about the situation. But a good sailor knows how to take a bowl of lemons and make the most splendid lemonade.

    About an hour later a group of sailors began making their way from the ASROC deck down along the port side O1 level and down the port side ladder to the main deck. This is where I caught sight of the crowd. What's going on here? I wondered. Why is this big group of sailors making their way to the fantail, and why those smiling faces? And then I saw why. Like a group of players in a Chinese New Year parade carrying a long paper dragon, raising it and dipping it as they went, the sailors had the longest cotton sheet I had ever seen. On closer inspection I saw that it was actually several bed sheets sewn together, end on end. Realizing what they were up to, I quickly joined the crowd and laid a hold of the sheets has we headed for the fantail where the tow line could be seen stretching back to Brooke, some 200 yards astern.

    Using the lifelines as a support, the sheet was stretched from one side of the fantail to the other, securely fastened to the lifeline. Painted on the sheets, facing outward for every man jack on the Brooke to see was
DDG-14 tows the Big 1. Awarded towing E.

    We wondered what kind of reaction we were going to get out of the Brooke. It didn't take too long to find out. Like prairie dogs popping up out of their holes, one after another pair of binoculars began popping up on the bridge wings of the Brooke and on the signal bridge. We were getting our desired effect. They may have had the squadron E, but the squadron E was being towed to Pearl Harbor by Buchanan.

    Soon, we noticed a flurry of activity on the fantail of the Brooke. What was going on there? What was that, flashing in the sun? "Hey", exclaimed one of our crew, "The rotten SOB's are putting a rat guard on the tow line!" And so they were, and we watched dumbfounded as a deck hand on Brooke lashed the tin funnel tightly onto the line.

    Well, that certainly stole some thunder from our act of defiance. Jubilation turned to glee, however, when a bosun observed that the deck hand had inadvertently lashed rat guard on backwards. We had been there a few minutes, and we'd had our fun. It hadn't occurred to us what the bridge might think about it, until the fun was had. So, we did what came natural. We all dispersed in different directions before the brass found out. And apparently, it had been a pretty well kept secret. Maybe someone paid off the after lookout to not report it? We never heard another word about it. We'd had our fun, all the while showing the Brooke which ship in the squadron was truly the most outstanding.

Whiskey On Board

By Sam Camp 71 – 75

    March 20, 1972. We were off the coast of Nam - off the DMZ waiting for "call fire" from ground and air spotters, just cruising up and down the coast operating only the #2A Boiler in the after fire room, supplying steam to the main engines in both the #1 and #2 Engine Rooms. Myself (at the time a BTFN and standing messenger watch), BT1 Harvey Sherrill (Standing Top watch), BT3 Ewing (Standing Upper level/ Pump man watch) and BTFN EJ Miller (standing Burner man watch) were standing the 4 to 12 watch, heard a loud noise and received a low pressure alarm on the main boiler feed water system. Upon investigating, we found the #2B Main feed water pump in flames.

    The main feed water pumps were steam turbine driven and operated on 1275 psig superheated steam. The shaft on the turbine for some unexplained reason decided to break at this point in time, causing pieces of metal to fly around the upper level of the fire room and breaking a lubricating oil line on the pump, resulting in an oil fire.

    The turbine was running away, the governor failed to trip and shut the steam admission valve to the turbine. We immediately brought a standby boiler feed water pump online to restore feed water supply to the only boiler online and prevented the boiler from being shut down due to low water conditions. The next course of action was to stop the feed water pump turbine from further destroying itself and possibly killing us with the pieces of metal flying around. We were able to close the steam isolation valve to the turbine and stop the turbine from rotating. Next came the task of putting out the fire. Grabbing a couple of 10# Purple "K" extinguishers we attacked, only to find that the fire extinguishers would not work.

    We figured out later that the dry powder in the extinguishers had been compacted by the vibration of the ship. We then grabbed the 50# extinguisher cart and were able to put the fire out. By then General Quarters had been sounded and all kinds of people were on the fly. When normal operating conditions were restored, and general quarters secured, we were taken to Sick Bay, checked out and given a dose of "Medicinal Whiskey" to counter act the adrenaline rush and to calm the nerves. Nice surprise and well received I might add. I still have a copy of the USS BUCHANAN DDG-14 Plan of the Day (POD) summarizing that event. Of course the POD doesn't include the medical treatment provided.

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