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FULL TITLE: ‘Multiple failures’ by sailors standing watch contributed to deadly Navy collisions, investigation finds
Although the pace of Pacific US naval operations has been exhausting, procedural/maneuvering mistakes such as these are both inexcusable and deadly.
By Dan Lamothe
November 1, 2017
The damaged guided missile destroyer USS Fitzgerald is berthed in Yokosuka, Japan,
in June after a deadly collision killed seven sailors.
The Navy has found that two ship collisions that combined to kill 17 sailors at sea were preventable and caused in part by “multiple failures” by service members who were standing watch the nights of the incidents, the service said Wednesday. The USS Fitzgerald and the USS John S. McCain, both guided-missile destroyers, suffered catastrophic collisions June 17 and Aug. 21, respectively. The Fitzgerald accident killed seven sailors off the southern coast of Japan, while the McCain collision killed 10 sailors near Singapore. Adm. John Richardson, the chief of naval operations, said Wednesday in a statement upon releasing the investigation results that the service must do better. “We are a Navy that learns from mistakes and the Navy is firmly committed to doing everything possible to prevent an accident like this from happening again,” Richardson said. “We must never allow an accident like this to take the lives of such magnificent young Sailors and inflict such painful grief on their families and the nation.”
The Fitzgerald collision was attributed to its watch teams disregarding established ways of contacting other ships and required safety precautions that were in place. The investigation found that at about 11 p.m. on June 16, the ship’s top two officers — Cmdr. Bryce Benson, the ship’s captain, and Cmdr. Sean Babbitt, the ship’s executive officer, left the ship’s bridge for the evening. The investigation faulted the officer of the deck, who was not named in the documents, for failing to maneuver as needed, sound the danger alarm on the ship, contact the MV ACX Crystal (a Philippine-flagged container ship) or call his own captain, as required. In the McCain collision, the ship’s captain, Cmdr. Alfredo J. Sanchez, and executive officer, Cmdr. Jessie L. Sanchez, were on the bridge, but confusion about how the ship’s steering work caused chaos. The investigation found that the McCain collision “resulted primarily from complacency, overconfidence and lack of procedural compliance.” It added that “with regard to procedures, no one on the Bridge watch team, to include the commanding officer and executive officer, were properly trained on how to correctly operate the ship control console during a steering casualty.” The two senior officers were removed from their positions last month.
Although the pace of Pacific US naval operations has been exhausting, procedural/maneuvering mistakes such as these are both inexcusable and deadly.
