USS Thresher (SSN-593)

[fuzeman]

Newly released documents indicate we may have to adjust the history regarding the sinking of the USS Thresher (SSN-593)
Seems there was some communications with it much later than disclosed.

[LCADolby]

I saw that this morning, been following that channel for a while, great stuff.

Unbelievable that the crew were alive for 24hours or more and government just said "imploded and dead".

[Maverick]

Could the Navy have been able to mount a rescue n 24 hours? A real rescue not just sailing in circles above the wreck impotently because they don't have the tech to recover that deep.

[guncrasher]

tragic story. first time I heard of the thresher was from the book with sorense's beach. that was 20 years ago. then I saw a YouTube video about the real thresher.  was amazed.


semp

[Devil 505]

Could the Navy have been able to mount a rescue n 24 hours? A real rescue not just sailing in circles above the wreck impotently because they don't have the tech to recover that deep.

To me that's the real question.

If the Navy believed that rescue was not possible, then it makes sense to report the crew was lost in an implosion. At least the families of the dead can believe they died relatively painlessly.

Just look at the current situation in the Florida condo collapse. All those families of the buried hoping for some miracle when there was little hope of a timely rescue from the rubble.

[Oldman731]

first time I heard of the thresher was from the book with sorense's beach. that was 20 years ago.

I was in Fifth Grade.  It was big news at the time.  The Weekly Reader had some difficulty explaining the loss of life to elementary school kids, in a way that didn't sound accurately horrible.

- oldman

[Drano]

The Weekly Reader! Man that takes ya back!

Sent from my Moto Z (2) using Tapatalk

[Chris79]

My grand father helped build the damn thing, he was a pipe fitter for electric boat if memory serves

[fuzeman]

I watched another show about it that came out in 1964 with Dan Rather in it, man he was YOUNG. The technology was just not there to do much. They could not even locate the wreckage accurately for some time and the depth it was at was much deeper than anything we had at the time. That diving bell we had didn't have a easy time with the Squalus and that was in much shallower water. The Trieste deep sea submersible was brought in and even that didn't have an easy time. The Navy and deep sea Oceanographers got together for the deep dives that finally located her and brought up some wreckage.

[guncrasher]

I kind of doubt that the thresher was still in one piece hours or a day later.  the hull was scatter over such a large field.  not only that the right in the first few seconds he says there were 37 pings within 9 minutes then they stopped pinging because the battery probably ran out.  then communications later, where there different batteries, never been in a submarine, dont know anything about submarines.  I dont know, but it's going on eternal patrol.

the thing about lying to us is overrated, like somebody else responded.  during ww2, they always died as heroes.  that's what I like to think, because they were.


semp

[Nefarious]

I kind of doubt that the thresher was still in one piece hours or a day later.  the hull was scatter over such a large field.  not only that the right in the first few seconds he says there were 37 pings within 9 minutes then they stopped pinging because the battery probably ran out.  then communications later, where there different batteries, never been in a submarine, dont know anything about submarines.  I dont know, but it's going on eternal patrol.

the thing about lying to us is overrated, like somebody else responded.  during ww2, they always died as heroes.  that's what I like to think, because they were.


semp

I'm only speculating but I think what the podcaster was implying was that the Thresher possibly suffered from some sort of failure at depth, and perhaps some sort of heroics on board saved the Thresher from sinking but nothing could be done to resurface the boat.

If it was flooding slowly, perhaps it took several hours or days to pass crush depth.

[MiloMorai]

There will always be those that are gullible.

The THRESHER pressure-hull imploded at 09:18:24 ROMEO Time Zone on 10 April 1963 at a depth of 2400-feet with an energy released equal to the explosion of 22,500 pounds of TNT at that depth. The crew died in less than 47 milliseconds. Minimum time required for human recognition of an event is 80-100 milliseconds.

"This UTUBE video is false, the SEAWOLF report the presenter is reading from is correct, but the final report certified it was false readings. SEAWOLF was confused by the active sonar and noise created by the destroyers and the diesel submarine SEA OWL searching for THRESHER on 11 April 1963, the day after she was lost. She mistook all sounds from the searching ships as banging on the hull and sonar pings from THRESHER. It was a mistake.

"The presenter is very wrong in much of what he says. He blames the Navy for not telling us the crew was alive for 24 hours. This video has already been removed from some submarine pages."

Bruce Rule was a Lieutenant at the time and was the analysis officer for the SOSUS Evaluation Center in Norfolk, Virginia; he analyzed the LoFARGrams and testified to the Naval Court of Inquiry. After leaving the Navy in September 1963, Rule spent the next 42 years as the lead acoustic analyst for the Office of Naval Intelligence.3 Key information from Rule’s LoFARGram analysis that was redacted from the released portions of the inquiry’s report includes the following points:

The Thresher ran main coolant pumps (MCPs) in fast speed until they stopped at 0911. If power from steam-driven ship’s service turbine generators (SSTGs) failed, slow-speed MCPs could run using power generated by the ship’s service motor generators. Fast-speed MCPs did not have this capability.

The Thresher’s MCPs gradually varied in speed up to 24 revolutions per minute (rpm) about five times over a two-minute period, from 0909 until 0911. This resulted from a change of up to four-tenths of a Hertz in the 60-cycle power supplying the fast-speed MCPs from the SSTGs.4 

Since SOSUS did not detect blade rate (screw rpm), the Thresher did not exceed 12 knots.

Rule’s analysis of LoFARGrams from SOSUS stations as remote as Argentia, Newfoundland, and Antigua, British West Indies, produced a time-difference fix on where the Thresher imploded. This time-difference fix resulted in a four-by-eight nautical-mile ellipse, with the major axis oriented 040 degrees to 220 degrees true.

[Fencer51]

That podcast was riddled with errors.  He got excited, and started making mistakes.  His not understanding that Seawolf was looking for a seamount, not a hovering Thresher at one point being a main one.  I been watching his Cold Waters vids for a while, he tells some tales and does seem to know sonar.  But I think he makes out to be more than he was, but anyone brave enough to be a submariner has enough repect from me.

The Drive, thedrive.com, has an article on this, and a response from Bruce Rule to the podcaster.