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Report: Training revamped after 2005 collision

NORFOLK, Va. — For the crew of the submarine San Francisco, it was lucky their top corpsman wasn’t one of the wounded when the sub crashed into an undersea mountain.

When the San Francisco collided with a submerged mountain at high speed in the Pacific on Jan. 8, 2005, 90 percent of the 138 crew members were wounded, some seriously. One sailor, Machinist’s Mate 2nd Class Joseph Allen Ashley, died from his injuries.

The independent duty corpsman, now-Chief Hospital Corpsman (SS) James Akin, was one of the few not injured in the violent collision and was able to tend to his shipmates.

And according to a recent article in the journal Military Medicine, the submarine force has responded to that mass casualty event with increased training and crew knowledge.

Among the responses noted in the August article are a “dedicated educational element” at the Naval Undersea Medical Institute in Groton, Conn., that focuses not on medical care but “secure satellite communications, secure Internet chat groups, and other mechanisms that were used during this event.”

The other result was the compilation of a Submarine Command Center Medical Guidebook, updated yearly.

For undersea corpsmen, the medical care of the crew — every day and in an emergency — is paramount because of the restricted nature of a submarine.

“We have to keep a worst-case scenario in the back of our minds at all times,” said Master Chief Hospital Corpsman (SS/SW/FMF) Larry Howard, from Naval Submarine Forces. “You are constantly assessing the status of everyone.”

Cmdr. Mark Michaud, submarine force surgeon, said a submarine’s geographic location and physical characteristics make it especially difficult to evacuate wounded. In extreme cases, a sailor can be lifted into a helicopter from the sail of a submarine, but that’s not an easy decision.

“That is not the place for a critically injured guy to be [evacuated]. That’s just a tough call,” he said.

That turned out to be true in the case of the San Francisco crew, who had to rig and hoist Ashley to a helicopter in “extremely heavy weather conditions.”

Dodging disaster

The report, written by Medical Corps Cmdr. John Jankosky, points out that the uninjured were likely either in the head or a rack. They were just lucky.

Of the most significantly injured, 23 were cut, two had dislocated shoulders, nine suffered concussions and nine had broken bones. Ashley lost consciousness “from a massive cerebral injury associated with a basilar skull fracture.”

Also noted in the report are a “relatively large number of psychiatric casualties following the collision” but possibly due to “the strict psychiatric criteria for submariners.”

The report compares the psychiatric injuries aboard the San Francisco to those aboard the guided-missile cruiser Belknap after its mishap at sea in 1975 that killed seven and injured 50.

While the circumstances were different — Belknap collided with the aircraft carrier John F. Kennedy and the ship’s superstructure burned off — the report concludes that “psychiatric diagnoses will continue to be common following future mass casualty events at sea.”

Within three months of the accident, 85 percent of the San Francisco crew was “healthy and had no significant residual problems.”

In addition to Akin not being injured in the collision, the report noted it was also fortuitous that two crewmen had enough medical training on their own to treat shipmates.