Авария на подводной лодке USS Guitarro (SSN-665)

Submarine of the United States

USS Guitarro (SSN 665), a , was the second ship of the United States Navy to be named for the guitarro, a ray of the guitarfish family.

The contract to build Guitarro was awarded to Mare Island Naval Shipyard at Vallejo, California, on 18 December 1964 and her keel was laid down there on 9 December 1965. She was launched on 27 July 1968, sponsored by Mrs. John M. Taylor, wife of Vice Admiral John Taylor. On 15 March 1969 during a meeting with the shipyard managers, Cmdr. William G. Lange urged them to create centralized control and designate responsibility for all construction. The shipyard representatives dismissed his idea, saying "the shipyard had been building ships for a long time without the need for such a procedure and no one had been killed or equipments damaged yet."

On 15 May 1969, Guitarro was moored in the Napa River at Mare Island Naval Shipyard while construction was still underway. At about 16:00, a civilian nuclear construction group began to calibrate the aft ballast tanks, which required them to fill the tanks with approximately of water. Within 30 minutes, a different, non nuclear civilian construction group began an assignment to bring Guitarro within a half degree of trim; this entailed adding water to the forward ballast tanks to overcome a reported two degree up bow attitude. Until shortly before 20:00, both groups continued to add water, unaware of each other's activities. One of the factors contributing to the ship's sinking was the open manhole used to access the bow structure sonar dome containing the boat's sonar sphere. The manhole has a bolted cover which had been removed for maintenance purposes. The opening was protected by a cofferdam approximately 3 feet (1 m) high. The cofferdam was intended to prevent water from accidentally entering the dome and contacting the exposed electronic gear. To facilitate repair work, the cofferdam and the bolted manhole cover were removed in early March 1969 and neither the cofferdam nor the cover was ever replaced. When the construction crews added and then removed water from the ballast tanks, affecting the boat's trim, the manhole was exposed to waves caused by the wake of other vessels, causing the boat to sink at the bow, eventually filling the entire submarine. She was active at the time in the pre operational testing of the new Tomahawk cruise missile, launching several of the missiles on a test range off the coast of Southern California.

Guitarro was decommissioned on 29 May 1992 and stricken from the Naval Vessel Register the same day. Her scrapping via the Nuclear Powered Ship and Submarine Recycling Program at Puget Sound Naval Shipyard in Bremerton, Washington, was completed on 18 October 1994.