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Hormuz collision has sub, amphib out of action

An attack submarine and an amphib are out of action following a collision Friday during a nighttime transit through the narrow Strait of Hormuz.

The attack submarine Hartford and the amphibious transport dock New Orleans collided at 1 a.m. local time while moving into the Persian Gulf through the narrow passage between Iran and Oman.

Fifteen Hartford sailors were injured in the collision but were able to return to duty. No injuries were reported aboard New Orleans.

Details of the incident remain unclear. Hartford was “submerged but near the surface” at the time of the collision, according to Navy officials.

Both made their way to a local undisclosed port in the aftermath, said Cmdr. Jane Campbell, spokeswoman at 5th Fleet in Bahrain.

“They’re both underway on their own power and both are in the [Persian] Gulf at this point,” she said. “Hartford is on the surface and will remain on the surface until she’s in port.”

Damage to the wounded ships was evaluated at sea and will be more thoroughly examined in port.

Campbell said initial assessments showed two ballast tanks on New Orleans were ruptured, resulting in seawater flooding that required the ship to be stabilized. A fuel tank was also ruptured, causing an estimated 25,000 gallons of marine diesel fuel to spill into the gulf.

“She had flooding in three distinct compartments,” Campbell said. “The flooding is secure, and the ship is making way on her own power.”

P-3 Orion aircraft flew over the area looking for a sheen of spilled oil, but “there’s no indication of that,” she said.

Hartford suffered “visible” damage to the sail and to a bow plane. Campbell could not say if components of the sail such as masts and periscopes are damaged.

“It’s important to point out that Hartford’s [nuclear] power plant was not affected in this at all,” she said. “We’ll be doing a full incident investigation report as well as a [Judge Advocate General’s Manual] investigation.”

This is third recent collision involving a U.S. submarine in the Strait of Hormuz or the Persian Gulf.

The attack submarine Newport News and the Japanese oil tanker Mogamigawa collided Jan. 8, 2007, in the Strait of Hormuz, a busy strategic chokepoint that runs between Iran and Oman. In that incident both ships were headed out of the gulf at night when the submerged submarine was overtaken by the faster-moving tanker sailing the same route.

The movement of the large tanker caused the smaller submarine to be drawn into the ship’s surface wake by the intermingling pressure areas created by their hull washes — a phenomenon known in physics as the Venturi effect.

In a previous incident the night of Sept. 25, 2005, the attack submarine Philadelphia, while traveling on the surface, collided with a Turkish cargo ship off the coast of Bahrain. No one was injured in the collision.

Both Philadelphia and Newport News underwent repairs in Bahrain before returning to their homeports.

Hartford and New Orleans are members of the Boxer Expeditionary Strike Group. Another ship from the group, the dock landing ship Comstock, was in the area at the time of the collision. Boxer remains in the Gulf of Aden on counterpiracy patrol. It and most of the other strike group departed San Diego on Jan. 8.

New Orleans is the second ship of its class to have a rough first deployment. The first ship, San Antonio, spent a month laid up in Bahrain following major leaking in its oil lubrication system that took nearly a month and cost about $1.4 million to repair.