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Comment by dctoedt | Hacker News Reader

This tragically illustrates the wisdom of the saying in the U.S. Navy's nuclear propulsion program: You get what you INspect, not what you EXpect.

The Navy's SUBSAFE program [0] arose directly from the 1963 loss with all hands of the USS Thresher, which is generally thought to have resulted from a cascade of damage ultimately traced back to a shipyard's faulty silver brazing of a salt-water pipe [1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Thresher_(SSN-593)#SUBSAFE...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Thresher_(SSN-593)#Cause

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Years ago I was offered a job at Portsmouth Navy Yard, and due to the great difficulty they were having hiring they invited me out for a bit of a reverse interview - meetings with their leadership and the grand tour of the facility to try to sell me on taking the position. This was basically an entry level position so the experience was rather unusual.

There are a lot of very interesting things to see there, but one thing that stood out is how they took me and a couple of other prospective employees to see the memorial wall to the Thresher in one of their conference rooms. Even fifty years later it felt that the incident was still well known at Portsmouth and influential on their culture.

Later I would work at facilities handling much more dangerous weapons that seemed to lack anywhere near that level of personal connection to safety culture, despite a legacy that had claimed numerous lives and not only among the enemy.

Slightly off topic, today I learned there is a Naval Yard in Portsmouth, Maine. It did genuinely confuse me for a second because Portsmouth UK is also a historically important dockyard where BAE systems, who build the UK submarine fleet, still have an important presence.

It's an especially confusing situation because Portsmouth Navy Yard is kind-of sort-of in Kittery, Maine, not Portsmouth, which is in New Hampshire. It's an island in the river between the two and the only bridge connects it to Kittery, not Portsmouth. This was part of a border dispute between the states: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piscataqua_River_border_disput...

37 Pings : Death Throes of the USS Thresher

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HV5FGTxIU4Q

video is about:

The Navy released the ninth and tenth set of documents from a previously classified investigation into the April 10, 1963 loss of USS Thresher and its crew of 129 sailors off the coast of New England.

https://news.usni.org/2021/07/09/navy-releases-latest-round-...

maybe interesting

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