The Hartford Courant March 15, 2007
Briefly, Gone Missing
After Navy Loses Contact With Sub, Emergency Actions Begin
By Jesse Hamilton
GROTON -- News that a submarine is missing can shatter the calm of this town like nothing else, even when the report turns out to be an unprecedented false alarm.
The Groton-based USS San Juan was out of radio contact for a short time during an exercise off the Florida coast, the Navy said. It was long enough to initiate a search-and-rescue operation and to activate the phone tree for family members in and around Groton, notifying them that something may have gone wrong.
Before Angela Smith's phone rang at 8:30 Wednesday morning, she had always thought of her husband's Navy duty as so much safer than that of a soldier in Baghdad.
"You think that because he's in a submarine and not on the streets of Iraq, he's relatively safe," she said. Then somebody calls and says the San Juan, with her husband, Chief Petty Officer Brent Smith, aboard, was considered missing overnight.
"You realize what could happen. This is my first brush with that kind of thing. It's not something I want to go through again."
A Wednesday statement from the office of the U.S. submarine force command said the San Juan was one of three subs on an exercise with the USS Enterprise's carrier strike group. The group lost contact with the Los Angeles-class submarine Tuesday evening and reportedly sighted a red flare - a possible distress signal.
That was enough, the statement said, to start a search-and-rescue operation and to alert the International Submarine Escape and Rescue Liaison Office, or ISMERLO - a group in Virginia that organizes submarine rescues.
Starting at about 4 a.m., the families of the 140 people on board the San Juan began receiving phone calls. A phone tree was designed to spread information quickly, but before all the families could be called, word came before 6 a.m. that the 360-foot sub turned up safe.
Angela Smith was among those who didn't get the call until after the San Juan had been located. She didn't have to agonize like some of the other families, and she was glad for that.
Those who did were hysterical with worry, Smith said, having talked with others at a 9 a.m. family briefing at the sub base.
"It's been a long and emotional day for everyone," said Lt. Mark Jones, a Navy spokesman at the Groton base.
The San Juan, part of the Groton sub base's Squadron 12, has been away from Connecticut for about a month. The boat is carrying a regular crew of 127, plus some observers, Jones said. The Navy said the Enterprise strike group is on pre-deployment training.
The San Juan was first launched more than 20 years ago from Electric Boat and began its career winning a number of unit citations for its highly secretive work. With a sub's lifespan typically lasting just more than 30 years, it has about a decade before its work will be taken over by one of the newer Virginia-class subs. The only time the San Juan has been prominent in the headlines was after a minor collision with a missile submarine, the USS Kentucky, during maneuvers off Long Island in 1998.
On a deployment in the Mediterranean before the start of the Iraq war in 2003, it was called to the Red Sea to launch Tomahawk missiles in the early days of the war, according to defense information service, GlobalSecurity.org.
American submarines like the San Juan are nuclear-powered, used to traveling long distances without surfacing. Their covert work means extended silences. But in a training operation like the one off Florida, a submarine would typically maintain a schedule of radio contacts when it would ascend to a shallow enough depth to allow its communication systems to reach the surface.
"We're trying to investigate how this happened and where the mistakes were made," Jones said. "This investigation will look into what that time window was."
The wild card, though, was the apparent red flare. Without that international distress signal in the area, the submarine would probably have been given at least 12 hours to turn up, said Sean Sullivan, a former submarine commander who recently retired as commander of the Groton base.
In his 27-year submarine career, he doesn't recall another incident in which a sub was considered genuinely missing. "This is very unusual."
The last time a U.S. submarine was lost was in 1968, when the USS Scorpion sank in the Atlantic Ocean. The only other U.S. nuclear submarine to sink was the USS Thresher in 1963. In both cases, the crews were lost.
The international rescue group for sub incidents, ISMERLO, was started in 2004, in the wake of the loss of the Russian nuclear submarine Kursk and its crew in 2000. Its basic mission is to quickly dispatch the nearest available help to a scene, because time can be crucial to a powerless sub that might be low on oxygen. In 2005, an international effort rescued a crew of seven Russians when the small submarine was caught in discarded fishing nets.
International cooperation aside, submarine forces are famously secretive, and some countries are less willing to call for help.
Eric Wertheim, editor of Combat Fleets of the World, saw the Navy's reaction and its willingness to announce the emergency publicly as a good sign. "The American people should have some degree of faith that if something does happen, it will not be covered up."
Angela Smith was heartened at the rapid response she saw from the Navy. "Although it was a scare, the Navy did do what it's supposed to do."
Though the response may have been admirable, Sullivan said, "Somebody screwed up."
"When you have to wake the president up and tell him we may have lost a submarine ... somebody's in trouble," Sullivan said. But he added that the San Juan definitely proved its stealth by inadvertently staying hidden from the search. "Chalk that one up as a win."
Angela and Brent Smith have been married almost two years. They live in Navy housing in Groton with 8-month-old daughter Madison.
Brent has been on submarines for most of his adult life, but it's new for Angela. Wednesday's news was "unsettling," she said, especially considering they are preparing for a full-scale deployment soon.
"It makes me a little more leery about him being away," she said. "It doesn't help things."
© Copyright 2007, The Hartford Courant
