USS Sperry AS-12 collides with a highway in 1967

Since 09-28-04

From Don Baer:

I was assigned to tempory duty on the USS Sperry AS-12 while awaiting tranfer to Nuke school, (as were many of the ships company) in 1967 when the USS "Roadrunner" ran aground on the Columbia river.

 I was the bell recorder in the forward engine room when the ship lost after steering and as such had on a set of sound powered phones and was in contact to the Bridge. Because of this I was privy to all of the gorry details up to, during and after the collision with the highway just outside of Longview, Washington. while the brief account by one of my former shipmates was accurate it did lack a few of the details.

In order to understand the sequence of events that happened that day in June it is necessary to understand the makeup of the Sperry's Propulsion system. The Sperry was a diesel electric drive system and had eight -16 cylinder engines with AC generators in both the forward and after enginrooms.

These diesel generators powered two synchrounous AC motors which were a direct drive to the main shafts and in turn drove the screws. When we lost after steering, they ordered to switch to the alternate steering system. It Failed also. The order from the bridge was a back emergency bell.

As I recal the throttleman responded so quickly and the inertia of the ship was so great that the main propulsion motors, (25,000 HP synchrounous motors) turned into generators and and the generators turned into motors which cause the diesels to overspeed. We lost all of our engines on overspeed in the forward engine room and the after engine room lost 7 out of 8.

The next order was to drop the stern anchor and we also heard the collision alarm that time. I vividly recall hearing the stern watch say that it was not working and when he said that they say red links on the anchor chain I guess everyone who was aft ran for cover. The chain came out of the chain locker locker and the free end slamed into the stern leaving a nice dent in the stern.

The force of the collision threw everyone around in engineroom. Once the engines were restarted and we were able to back off of the shore we were sent to Port Angeles. As was previously reported the divers went over the side and due to the damage we went on to Bremerton for repairs. The collision put a 4 foot whole in the peak tank and buckled 13 or 14 frames.

Although we never made it to Vancover BC we did get liberty in Seatle and we were able to go on to Hawaii for some R&R. The sperry went back to her tenders duties, I left her shortly after that to go to Nuke School and then on to Sub School and finished out my enlistment on board the USS Nathan Hale SSBN 623.

Don Baer EM2(N)SS