My first job with MSC
(after I left the Navy) was
sailing on Taluga.
She had been "home
ported" in San Diego forever as the duty training
oiler for the San Diego fleet, so she sailed regularly on Monday morning for local ops, and returned to the
foot of
Broadway every Friday night. Traditionally the crew spent the
entire
weekend getting well lubricated in the sailor bars on Broadway, and
sailing
time on Monday was usually pretty grim.
In the late '70's there was a fatal accident (on a Monday morning, of course) when a fireman pulled
out a
burner without shutting off the fuel. The burner system was
pretty
primitive, there were no safety interlocks as found on more modern
boiler fronts,
and one needed
to remember to shut off the fuel prior to releasing the burner tube
from the
holder. In any event high pressure fuel oil sprayed all over the
fire
room, the fireman and the female third assistant engineer (a recent
Kings Point
graduate), killing them both. They both lived long enough to be
transported to Balboa via helicopter. Six hours after the
accident the
fireman still had a blood alcohol level of .24 as I recall. Bad
news.
By the time I got there some two years later there was still evidence
of the
fire. I was a happy camper because I love San Diego and have a lot of friends
and
relatives there so I figured that this would be a great place to spend
six months or so.
Unfortunately, two days after I
got aboard, they changed Taluga's home port to Pearl Harbor and that is
about
the last time I've been in San
Diego.
Taluga was built in 1943, and was an interesting study in WW II ship
building. Some things were pretty rough and had obviously been
built in a
hurry (but were still working 40 years later). The reduction
gears in the
SSTG's and the main engines were pretty loose, with lots of backlash
and
tremendous noise. The generators were so noisy that you could
hear them a
block down the street when she was pier-side. She sounded like a
coffee
grinder on steroids. But. . . there was a tremendous amount of redundancy
built into the engineering plant. The SSTG's could exhaust to
their own
condensers, the main engine condenser, the cargo condenser, or could
exhaust to
atmosphere (with a 50% power
rating
for up to one hour). There were five main feed pumps, at least
three fuel
oil service pumps, etc. etc., and about four ways to cross-connect or
bypass
virtually any system, valve or pump in the engine room. It
was
damned hard to go dead in the water on the Taluga. But we did it
once -
the dump valve for the de-airating feed tank (DFT) jammed in the full
open
position, and in about an hour the DA tank went dry and we needed to
shut down
the plant to save the boilers. The first assistant engineer was
really
ticked and said "There must be some way to have avoided this!"
Sure enough, after about six hours of searching and drawing schematics
he found
the right combination of valves that would have allowed this valve to
be
repaired without shutting down the system - it took a little research
but it
was possible. The 143 class oilers did not have anywhere near the redundancy that this old gal had.
Taluga was slow, however, about 14 knots wide open. Unreps were
another
story, however, particularly when we had two ships along side and lots
of pumps
and winches running. The boilers (even with the war emergency
sprayer
plates in) just could not keep up with the steam demand - theoretical
unrep
speed was 12 knots, but the old Taluga would gradually slow down during
a
lengthly carrier unrep until we were creeping along at about 9 knots
and the
receiving ships were having a lot of trouble keeping on station.
She put
up a good fight but it was well past time for her to go and she was put
out to
pasture in the mid-1980's.
The memories.
Best wishes, Lary
Harris