U.S. Navy ship goes aground due to bad charts

[imaraguen]

i suspect they were cm93s...i know there are geograph problems with cm93s,and specifically the phillipines

[sailorF54]

Originally Posted by imaraguen

i suspect they were cm93s...i know there are geograph problems with cm93s,and specifically the phillipines

There are many thousands of users of both CM93 V2 and V3. It would definitively help if you could give a specific example. There are many ways in which geolocalization can be checked...

[hellosailor]

Given all the malicious tampering that is done with Warez every day, it would not be surprising if someone said "Let's shift everything over a quarter mile and then make these charts available as Warez."

Stolen goods don't come with a warranty.

[tropicalescape]

There is more to this then bad charts and anteaters...I belive there is a PI boat on a reef that China claims(they are now claiming Okanawa as chinese) and they(china)belive the Ps are going to build a "base of ops" as they "appear" to "remove the ship" from the reef...The South China Sea/The East Phillipian sea or what ever one wants to call it is about to become one of the worst places a crusing sailor could be,think I will run my boat up on a shore some where out there and claim it as my own!

[S/V Alchemy]

While it would be naive to rule out elements of malice in this situation, incompetence and eroding standards of watch-keeping seem more likely. Nobody was looking out the front of the boat, it seems, or checking out the forward-looking sonar, which a minesweeper, more than any other similarly sized vessel, would have had as a matter of course.

[Randy]

I haven't paid much attention to this thread with all the talk of inaccurate charting which in this case is irrelevant and time will show this to be factual. It may or may not become known that the Captain and XO were new to the ship and inadequate bridge discipline caused the grounding. The OOD who'd been on the ship for a couple of years arrogantly ignored his qmow's navigational plotting and advice. This is the long and short of the incident taken from internal investigation.

[ElGatoGordo]

Where can we see the internal investigation? I think I missed that

[Randy]

Well, it's internal

[ElGatoGordo]

And you have seen it?

[hellosailor]

Alchemy, you're rashly assuming their forward looking sonar was functioning and deployed at the time of the grounding. Two assumptions, until and unless that's confirmed.

Bigger assumption: That the USN will tell the public the truth about what happened out there.

[S/V Alchemy]

Yes, I may in fact be rash in assuming that the device that gives a minesweeper its ability to minesweep might have been operational on a vessel on patrol.

But I was actually thinking that the radar, the line of surf visible from the bridge to human lookouts, the FLIR cameras and basic prudence in keeping a sufficient offing in the vicinity of a reef known to be poorly charted might have also played a role.

As for the bigger assumption, the evidence was chopped up and barged away and is probably part of the walls of a new subdivision in Guam by now.

[hellosailor]

I used to know a guy who was on one of the first USN ships to have forward sonar. Theirs was lowered or raised, deployed or not, the idea being that when it wasn't needed it was raised up safely into the hull to protect it and reduce their draft requirements.

And sure enough one day, the captain "bought" the sonar, by ignoring some advice to retract it.

But those are warships, it someone isn't working or gets busted, that doesn't mean you can clock out and go home, does it? <G>

Likewise, you never tell anyone anything that would give them an edge over you. As much as I believe those are "my" ships and I'm entitled to know everything about them, I also know that "my" employees at DoD have equally legitimate reasons to lie about all sorts of things. They might be reluctant to tell the world "Uh, yeah, we had some real idiots in charge of that ship". So all I can hope for, is that some serious ass will be kicked--out of public view.

Now, who stole those strawberries ?! There has to be a duplicate key, I tell you.

[S/V Alchemy]

Fair enough. I grasp that it wasn't a pleasure jaunt on a booze cruiser. But I have to question if that's SOP in today's U.S. Navy...where watch-standing is no longer required or at least observed. I wonder if the Chinese Navy loses ships like that?

I dunno, man...cruising couples in 40 foot sailboats manage to avoid reefs every day. It takes someone like the people in this book to go below and watch a movie. With all the advantages in nav and observation we possess today, losing your boat to a charted (even if mispositioned) reef is very nearly inexcusable negligence. Hitting an awash container is, by contrast, a lot easier to understand.

"Black Wave" annoyed me so much I gave it the only negative book review I've ever written about other cruisers. If some watchstander writes (a very unlikely prospect) about the loss of Guardian, I suspect I'll have the same reaction.

[donradcliffe]

The internal review is now out
http://www.cpf.navy.mil/foia/reading...-grounding.pdf

The admirals aren't too happy with the officers:

"This tragic mishap was wholly preventable, and was the product of poor voyage planning, poor execution, and unfortunate circumstances...The watch team's observations of visual cues in the hours leading up to the grounding, combined with electronic cues and alarms, should have triggered immediate steps to resolve warnings and reconcile differences."

I would venture that several navy careers ended with this debacle.

[delmarrey]

http://www.cpf.navy.mil/foia/reading...-grounding.pdf

I see the word failure quite often throughout the doc. Must have still been hung over from Subic.