PMS Check

Some years back, I wrote about the Planned Maintenance Subsystem, known as "PMS". I mentioned, briefly, about PMS spot checks, in which the officers were required to audit the conduct of PMS checks.

So there was this one ship where the XO got the idea to put some meat into the spot checks. He had a list of the various work centers. Each week, he would assign the spot checks for some work centers to other division officers: The Communications Officer would have to go do a spot check in the forward fireroom, the Boiler Officer would have to do one on deck, the First Lieutenant would have to do one in Repair 3 and so on. It was a way of making really sure that the checks were being done, since while the Gunnery Officer might have an interest in not making his men look too bad, the Auxiliaries Officer would have no such compulsion.

Now, this is no shit: I was in the Weapons Department. The XO told me that I had to do a spot check in the Operations Department, more specifically, a spot check in ET02, a work center crewed by the Electronics Technicians. Cool, I thought. Since my own division had its share of electronics, I figured that this would be a piece of cake: Watch some guy hook up a test set and check the calibration of something or other. I could sit there, cup of coffee in hand, and watch ET2 Twidget do his thing.

Ah, no.

The check that I drew was to check the TACAN antenna. The TACAN antenna was mounted at the top of the highest mast that the ship had.[1] A "man aloft" chit had to be run on both our ship and the neighboring ones to ensure that nobody turned on any radars or radios.[2] Once that was done, the two ETs doing the check carefully inventoried their gear, we donned climbing harnesses and then up the mast we went. Maybe 110 feet above the upper deck that we'd hit if we fell and 150 feet or so above the water.

Not that it mattered much, for if anyone fell, we weren't landing in the water or on the pier. We'd quite literally hit the deck. The end result from falling a hundred or so feet onto a solid metal deck would have had the same results as falling five times as far, at least to the person doing the falling.

This is probably where I should say that I don't like being on a ladder. At least any higher than the fourth rung. We were one hell of a lot higher.

I don't remember much about the check itself. But the view was pretty spectacular. I wished I had thought to bring my camera. But with my luck, I'd have dropped the damn lens cap on some poor squid.

I did see one person walking by the ship that I had beefed with from time to time. The things that you see when you don't have a wrench handy.

The ETs did their work, I observed and we all came down in good order.
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[1] There was one antenna that was higher up, but never you mind about that one.
[2] This PMS check could only be performed pierside.

Would Have Hated to Have Been in Charge of Valve Maintenance on That Boat

Photos from the interior of a Great War German Submarine.

Given the cramped conditions and small crews, it's a safe bet that most of the maintenance of the boats was done by sandcrabs between cruises.

(Sort of like what happens with the little crappy ships that the Navy is buying today.)

A/C Boundaries

Ships are divided up by air-conditioning boundaries, which in civilian life, are often called "heating zones." Each area had its own fanroom that supplied either cooled or heated air, depending on the season. The zones were divided by interior bulkheads and there were doorways with joiner doors on pneumatic closures to permit passage between the zones.

XOs were often pinging on the department heads to keep the joiner doors in their spaces in good working order. If the passageway on one side of the door was maintained by a different division than the passageway on the other side of the door, the door belonged to whichever division maintained the space into with the door opened.

Some of those joiner doors took a hell of a beating. The pneumatic door closers in the Navy supply system didn't seem to be up to the job. The closers got pulled off and fixed or replaced and then mounted back so many times that the base metal under them gave out from the strain.

If you wanted to see real hell on earth, try running a set of gas-welding lines through an a/c boundary when it was hot or cold out, especially if that open door was at the edge of Officer Country. The XO would want to know why those lazy-ass HTs couldn't be bothered to move the gas bottles closer to where they were working (or use a portable rig). When there was serious repair work going on where the doors had to be rigged open, if not removed, XOs often went into max-fret mode.

And if you wanted to see real fireworks, watch what happened when an XO began harping about air-conditioning boundaries on a Chief Engineer who was dealing with a boiler casualty or who had an OPPE coming up in three weeks.

Still, if you wanted to keep the ship either heated or cooled, air-conditioning boundaries had to be respected.

Sub Sunk + 50

USS Thresher (SSN-593) sank fifty years ago.

To say that there were significant changes to the construction, maintenance and operation of nuclear-powered submarines in the years following the accident would be like calling a plasma torch "warm".

All well before my time and it wasn't my community. But it was one of the reasons why the supply priorities were what they were.

CASREP

A "CASREP" was a "casualty report." CASREPs were not sent out for people being hurt, but for equipment damage/failure.[1] There were two categories: Combat systems readiness (C) and engineering (mobility) (M) readiness.

C1 and M1 meant that the ship could sail and fight. A 2 level meant that there were minor, but serious degradations. A 3 level meant that there were damn serious degradations. A 4 level meant, in common parlance, that the ship was broke-dick and wasn't going anywhere.

Actually, it wasn't that clear-cut. While a M4 CASREP meant "we ain't getting underway, or if at sea, "send the tugs", a ship might possibly sail with a C4 CASREP. The combat systems CASREPS were by warfare area, so for ASW, the ship might be completely dead, but it could still shoot its guns or fire missiles.[2] If part of the mission was armed diplomacy ("showing the Flag"), then it didn't matter if the Tartar launcher was broken.[3]

CASREPs were sent by teletype radio message. The effect could be like kicking over an anthill, often as the shore establishment scurried around to fix the things that they should have fixed anyway. A simple lack of repair parts could trigger a CASREP, which was really embarrassing to the supply pukes if that part was supposed to be in ship's stock.

CASREPs could also request technical support. This was common in serious leaks in the main steam piping, as repairs required highly certified welders and X-ray quality control examination of the welds. Usually the staff pukes confined their assistance to expediting parts and technicians and refrained from offering their idea of helpful (and unsolicited) advice, but not always.

If a part was needed and not available, the supply system would sometimes send the "next higher assembly". I once saw an entire antenna assembly delivered for a SPS-49 because the radar repair guys needed one part from it.[4]

The more twisted mess was when the supply system's records indicated that there was no part available. Sometimes the divisional supply petty officer would go over to the supply center and do a physical stock check. That could be embarrassing for the supply pukes if they really did have the parts.

This is no shit: There once was a minesweeper in drydock that needed a new dunce cap. The supply system said that there was not one available and that one would have to be manufactured. So one day, one of the more worthless division officers went to check out with the XO and go home (this was around 1300). The XO felt like screwing with that junior officer, so he told him that he could leave after he drove over to the supply center and got a new dunce cap.

This kid was dumb enough that he had no clue what the proper procedure was to go get parts from the supply center.[5] What he did do was to drive his car to the base supply center and drive around until he saw where those parts were kept. He asked the grizzled chief there if they had any dunce caps for that class of MSO. The chief said: "Yeah, I got them, how many you want, sir?" The kid signed where the chief told him to sign, the chief had a couple of guys put the dunce cap in the kid's car (they weren't that big) and the kid was soon back at the ship, showing the dunce cap to the stunned XO.

The supply system was also good at losing parts. I knew of one double-ended cruiser which had one of the motors in its aft launcher burn out. They CASREP'd the launcher and a new motor was sent. It disappeared en route. The supply system said that it had been delivered, the ship denied receiving it. Now this was no tiny motor, it was a big-ass 440 volt motor with a fair amount of horsepower. A second motor was sent and installed. Six months later, the first motor mysteriously appeared on the pier alongside the ship. There was no tracking paperwork, nobody knew who delivered it or where it came from. It was just there.

CASREPs could be (and often were) amended. A CASREP level might be reduced if the ship's force was able to jury-rig a partial repair. When the casualty was fixed, a CASCAN (casualty cancellation) was sent out.
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[1] I believe that the CO of an AO or AOR did once send out a CASREP for undermanning.
[2] And maybe the Soviets didn't know that the best ASW ship in WestPac had all of the ASW capability of the Staten Island Ferry.
[3] My recollection is that the USS Compte de Grasse was sent on a "show the Flag" cruise to France soon after she was commissioned, interrupting the ship's training at Gitmo.
[4] The techs just cannibalized the part from the antenna on the pier, took the broken part off the installed antenna, installed the new part and it worked. They then put the bad part into the antenna on the pier, marked the thing as "unserviceable" and sent it back. The supply pukes ashore were not amused and complained. The ship had, by then, cleared the CASREP and nobody gave a damn.
[5] Fill out a Form 1250, have the XO sign it, take it to the ship's supply department, where they would then type out a Form 1348 and take that to the Supply Center. Doing this when the ship was in-port could alleviate the need for a CASREP. If they would give you the part. Sometimes they wouldn't.

Lockout and Tagout

One of the jobs I had before I went into the Navy was cleaning machinery in a factory. Each one of us on the cleaning crew was issued a padlock and a lockout hasp.

The first person on the job turned off the power to the machine, inserted the lockout hasp on the power switch and then locked the hasp with a padlock. Every additional person on that job added their lock to the hasp. Only the individual worker had the key to his or her own lock. The machine could not be cleared to run without everyone removing their locks. It was a suspendable offense to leave the site without clearing one's lock. Working on a machine without locking it out was a termination offense.

That didn't work that way in the Navy. There were redundant sources of power to a lot of machinery. There could be several inputs of things that might hurt someone working on a piece of equipment.

What there was, instead, was a tagout system. Yellow was used for caution, red for danger. Most of the tags that one would see were red tags. Sometimes there were a shitload of red tags. Tagging out a boiler required tagging out everything that fed into the boiler, was operated to service the boiler or fed from that boiler. Tagging out a boiler required over sixty red tags.

To do a tagout right, a sailor had to bring all of the proposed tags and the piping/wiring diagrams to the EOOW or the Duty Engineer, as well as a tagout sheet, which listed each tag (now they are serialized) and its location. The Duty Engineer (since most tagouts were done in port) was supposed to go over the tagout sheet and the diagrams with the worker, then they would sign all of the tags and the tagout sheet. After the equipment (valves, switches) were all tagged, the tagout sheet was logged into the Tagout Log in DC Central.

Tags were supposed to be inspected daily by the workcenter supervisor, the LPO in charge of the relevant work center. A missing tag meant that the work had to stop until both the thing tagged out was checked and a new tag procured and hung.

To remove the tags, the worker brought the tagout sheet to the Duty Engineer, who signed to authorize removal. The worker then removed all of the tags and brought the tags and the sheet back to the Duty Engineer, who would inventory the tags. Both the worker and the Duty Engineer signed each tag for removal and signed the tagout sheet. Once that was done, the sheet and the removed tags were entered into the tagout log. Then, and only then, was whatever was tagged out cleared for operation.

Violating tagout was a big Bozo No-No. It was a damn near certain guarantee of getting maxed out at Captain's Mast (demotion, restriction to the ship and extra duty for 45 days and loss of half-pay for two months). The tagout system was at the heart of plant safety; I know of no Chief Engineer or Captain who had any sense of humor about tagout violations.

Repairs

Earlier, I discussed the Planned Maintenance Subsystem, which is how the crew of any ship knew what maintenance work needed to be done. Quite often, though, maintenance or repair work needed to be accomplished which was beyond the capabilities of the ship's force. That work had to be accomplished by an outside entity.

The process was started by submitting a request on a pale green machine-readable form, OPNAV Form 4790/2K, which was known throughout the Fleet as a "2-Kilo".

2-Kilos had to be signed by the entire chain of command. After that, what happened depended on where the ship was and what was going on. If your ship was going into a tender availability, the 2-Kilos went to the tender's repair officer for evaluation. If the repair officer passed on doing the work, then the 2-Kilo would be sent to the home port supervisor of shipbuilding and repair (Supships) for submission for the next overhaul or selected restricted availability (SRA). What was accomplished in an overhaul or SRA was determined by Navsea and the type commander (SurfLant or SurfPac), and the main criteria was how much it would cost and how much money the type commander had for repairs.

Back in the day, ships of the Atlantic Fleet had to be able to rig "friendship lights". Imagine a 25' long string of 3-wire outdoor extension cord, with a 60-watt work light every foot or so. They looked like giant Christmas tree lights. Ships needed enough strings to completely circle the main weather deck, to go down the length of the gangway and to run from the fantail, up to the top of the mast and then back down to the bow. That was a shitload of lights.

It looked something like this:

Night time:

Daylight:

They were called friendship lights because lighting up the ship like that implied no hostile intent (and it told everyone who looked out at the harbor that a foreign warship was there). Everyone in the Atlantic Fleet called them "Med lights", because they were normally only used when deployed. More to the point of things, they were not repair parts, they were consumable items.

This is no shit:

There was a steam-powered cruiser in Mayport that was getting ready to deploy. The cruiser had a new chief engineer. The CHENG asked the Electrical Officer if the Med lights were ready to go. The Electrical Officer replied in the affirmative. The CHENG said fine, the ship was going to be in port for three weeks, so he wanted to see them all strung up in place and tested. The Electrical Officer protested that would be a lot of work for his division. The CHENG was unswayed and changed his phraseology from "I would like to see the Med lights strung up" to "you goddamn will string up the fucking Med lights". That was not a normal thing to do, but this particular CHENG was kind of an unreasonable bastard who had been badly burned on a previous tour by a division officer who had fed him a load of shit. He was a real piece of work in a job which tended to encourage becoming one.

Well, it seemed there was a bit of a problem. That ship needed about 3,000 feet of Med lights to fully rig the ship. They had 100 feet. The CHENG had the E Division supply petty officer determine the cost of 2,900 feet of Med lights. At that point, the CHENG turned white, for the cost would have wiped out the consumable budget for Engineering for the rest of the fiscal year and then some.

The CHENG went straight to the CO and told him that the ship essentially had no Med lights. The CO was a wise one who knew that there were times for going ballistic and times when it would serve no purpose. He thanked the CHENG for telling him and told him to "carry on." The CO then called his good friend, the CO of the destroyer tender down the pier.

Nobody would talk about what deal was struck (if any), but the CHENG was told to bring a 2-Kilo to the CO, filled out with the name of the ship, the work center, initialed by the Electrical Officer and the CHENG and otherwise left blank. The CO took the 2-Kilo, signed it, and then instructed the CHENG to personally hand-carry it to the CO of the tender.

Which the CHENG did. The tender's CO took it, thanked the CHENG and told him that he could send a working party over in two hours to pick up the lights he needed. The CHENG sent the available electrician's mates and IC men to get the Med lights, all three thousand feet of them. The ship had its Med lights for the cruise (though they had to buy a shitload of bulbs).

A copy of the 2-Kilo later came back for the ship's work order file. The text of it read: "Fabricate and provide 3,000 feet of waterline security lighting, ship's force to install."

The 3M System and PMS

No, this had nothing to do with the scotch tape people. In the Navy, the 3M system was the "Maintenance and Material Management System". The 3 M system was made of various subsystems, which included supply management, maintenance management and maintenance tasks.

PMS was the Planned Maintenance Subsystem. The maintenance tasks were called "PMS checks". The scheduling is probably all done on computers now, but it was done by hand back in my day.

Each division on a ship was broken down into work centers, usually on the basis of spaces. Boiler Division on a frigate would have one work center, two on a destroyer or cruiser. A-gang may have two or three. AS Division could have two or as many as six work centers. R Division had the most, as each repair locker was a work center and each divisional DCPO was a separate work center. Each work center had a "leading petty officer" in charge, though the LPO could be a chief in a larger work center.

PMS checks were maintenance procedures for specific pieces of equipment ranging from the very small to the very large. PMS checks were done by reference to the PMS card for the check. Each card listed the number of sailors required to do the check, specific supervision, if required, the tools required, the consumables required and the estimated time to perform the check. The cards were like recipe cards; they set forth each step of the check.

PMS checks were designated in each work center by a letter and number. The letter designated how often the check was to be performed and the number was a series number within each work center. The letters were D (daily), W, M, Q, A, and R (other requirement). The first monthly check in work center WS01 was M-1, then M-2, M-3, and so on.

In each department office was the quarterly PMS scheduling board for the work centers, by week. This listed every PMS check for the quarter that had a less-than-weekly periodicity. This PMS schedule was kept on paper, in pencil. The schedule was signed by the division officer and approved by the department head. Each work center had a laminated weekly schedule that showed each day and what checks were scheduled. The weekly and daily checks were often printed on the schedule before lamination. The LPO would write in the monthly, etc. with a grease pencil. This schedule was signed by the LPO and approved by the division officer.

The LPO assigned sailors to do the PMS checks. If a PMS check was done on the day it was scheduled for, it was crossed out on the schedule. If not, it was circled and rescheduled, with an arrow connecting the original date and the rescheduled one. This was also done on the quarterly PMS schedule. At the end of each quarter, the quarterly PMS schedules were reviewed by the XO and the Captain. Any division that was found to be less than diligent about completing its PMS checks would receive extra scrutiny. So a wise division officer kept a sharp eye on the completion rate and a good department head did likewise.

PMS performance was also spot-checked. Each week, the division officers had to do spot-checks on PMS checks, though it was left to their discretion whether to watch a check being performed or to go back later and see if the check was done. The sailors doing the check had to show that they had the required tools and supplies. The procedures for the checks were verified and, if for some reason, a check should be performed differently than the way specified, a report was supposed to be submitted up the chair of command to the Naval Sea Systems Command for review of the procedure.

The results of the spot-check had to be submitted. Some commands were better than others in enforcing the spot checks. The department heads were supposed to do one spot check per division per week. The CO and the XO were supposed to do a weekly spot check as well.

PMS was easy to gun-deck (ie, fake) if the spot-checks were not done. Smart officers knew the value of PMS checks and made sure they were performed.

Bet You Didn't Know This

On every warship with a SQS-26 or -53 sonar, there were sailors who had to be medically qualified to be divers. They weren't divers, they had no training as divers, but they had to be medically qualified as though they were divers.

In an earlier post, there were pictures of one of those large sonars. The sonar domes had rubber windows on them, for tests had shown that a rubber window was a lot better at conducting acoustical signals than a steel dome was. "Better" means that you might track a target that you couldn't or detect a target that you might have missed. "Better" means that you kill a submarine, and that, Gentle Reader, is what it was all about.

What you had, therefore, was part of a very large rubber tire on the front and sides of the sonar dome. A cruiser or destroyer could push that very large sonar dome through the water at over thirty knots. To prevent the rubber window from being pushed in from that much force, the sonar dome was pressurized with water. Fresh water was used in order to prevent the corrosion that would have occurred from sea water. There were high and low alarm points on the pressurization system, the alarms rang in both Sonar Control and on the Bridge. The importance of keeping the sonar dome pressurized was such that the alarm box was placed right next to the Captain's chair on the Bridge.

In really heavy seas, the bow of the ship would come out of the water, sonar dome and all. When the bow came back down, that large sonar dome would slam into the sea; the entire ship would quiver from the force of the impact and then the bow would continue down until the ship started up the front of the next wave. Warships did best in heavy seas by sailing into the waves. (By 'heavy seas," I mean seas with wave heights of thirty feet or higher.) If you were on the Bridge while that was going on, you would hear the loud beeping of the alarm as the dome was slammed down into the sea, as that would briefly overpressurize the sonar dome.

It was sort of an informal gauge of how bad the seas were by the number of beeps you heard from the dome alarm each time the bow came back into the sea. It was not unheard-of for a ship to suffer enough damage to its sonar dome in really heavy seas that the ship would have to be drydocked for repairs. (I'll blog about that process another day.)

Back to the point: There were periodic checks that had to be done to the interior of the sonar dome. If a bad sonar transducer element was detected during a source level check, it might need to be replaced. The sonar was designed so that you could replace elements of the transducer without having to drydock the ship. But keep in mind that you have a large dome that is, at its base, over twenty feet under water. That is a lot of pressure on the rubber window. What was done was that the fresh water in the dome was pumped out and replaced with compressed air. There was an air lock in the access trunk to the sonar dome. (A "trunk" on a ship is a narrow vertical shaft that goes through one or more decks.) The sailors who would do the work inside the sonar dome had to have diver's physicals, since they would have to work in a pressurized area.

And that is why you had sailors who had to be medically qualified for diving duty on warships.