Missing sub surfaces, but mystery remains
Navy to look into details of disappearance
By Andrew Scutro - Staff writer
As the undersea adversary in a pre-deployment training exercise with the Enterprise Carrier Strike Group, the attack submarine San Juan was supposed to remain undetected.
But after a series of events that began with the sighting of a red flare at about 8 p.m. March 13 and didn’t end until before dawn the next day, not only did the sub remain undetected, the Navy also thought the San Juan was a casualty.
Commanders were so worried that Defense Secretary Robert Gates was alerted in the early morning hours and Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Mike Mullen was at the Pentagon before dawn to monitor an all-night search-and-rescue operation. By early morning, the Navy began notifying family members that something might have gone wrong.
But after being incommunicado for nearly 10 hours, the San Juan made contact with the strike group at about 5:30 a.m. March 14.
“We had a false alarm,” said Lt. Cmdr. Chris Loundermon, public affairs officer at submarine force headquarters in Norfolk, Va. “We’re investigating the details.”
Although more information is expected in coming months, the Navy has provided a rough time line of what happened.
The San Juan was at sea in the Atlantic off the southeastern U.S. As part of Submarine Development Squadron 12 in Groton, Conn., the ship tests and develops undersea warfare tactics. The week beginning March 12, it was playing the opposition force against the strike group, which included the submarine Philadelphia and one other sub.
About 8 p.m. March 13, a ship in the strike group spotted a red flare in the sky. Submarines use several different flares in training exercises, according to force spokesman Phil McGuinn, but a red flare means only one thing.
“That indicates distress,” he said.
Later that night, about 10 p.m., the three submarines in the training exercise were expected to check in. Two made the communication. The San Juan did not.
“That started the additional effort to contact them, as well as the search,” he said.
Shore-based P-3 Orion aircraft, helicopters from the strike group and surface ships in the area all took up the search. In addition to an area search by ships and aircraft of the strike group, the Navy contacted its deep submergence units, as well as the International Submarine Escape and Rescue Liaison Office in Norfolk about the possibility of a lost submarine.
“The response to a missing sub is much like the response to any critical incident. It’s time-critical because you don’t know the condition of the materiel or the people,” McGuinn said. “You want to get there first with as much as you can.”
In addition to the missed communication and the red flare, commanders detected what one Navy Times source described as a “low-frequency broadband” sound.
McGuinn confirmed that “there were acoustic indicators, as well, that made us try to understand parts of the puzzle overnight,” he said. “That, added to the other events, led us to think there was distress with the San Juan.”
At least One mystery remains, McGuinn said: “We’re still looking for the source of the red flare.”
The overall lack of communications between the sub and the fleet was troubling to a former sub captain who went through a missing-sub procedure in the 1990s.
“What concerns me is we have ways of communicating with submarines when they are submerged. There are [training] exercise safety signals,” he said, referring to a classified communications device. “They definitely should have had that system.”
He also said he was surprised how quickly the Navy began notifying the crew’s families, possibly without even letting the ship reach its next check-in time.
Although the family notification chain was initiated while the search was ongoing, McGuinn said most of the families did not find out about the emergency until after the sub had been located.
Connie Burianek, wife of San Juan executive officer Lt. Cmr. Michael Burianek, said she was awakened at 4:30 a.m. with a call saying there might be a problem on the sub. She started contacting other wives but she was “still in the wait-and-see mode” when she got the all-clear call more than an hour later.
“The Navy did what they could,” she said. “They handled it very well.”
Burianek said she and the others in the calling process remained as “calm” and “tactful” as possible, but part of the experience remains hard to describe.
“It was surreal,” she said.