I recently toured the USS Lexington in Corpus Christi, Texas. In various places on lower decks, there were small, round hatches in the floor. The hatches were about 24" in diameter. A sign placed over one said that they were used for crew to escape if damage or flooding prevented their going up the ladders.
But all the scuttles were in the floor. So, they go down. How does help the hapless crewman escape? Seems that if I were trapped below decks during combat/accident, I would want to go UP to get out, not down. So what do these scuttles accomplish?
I know that to scuttle a ship is to intentionally sink her so that an enemy cannot capture it. Is that process related to the scuttles I describe above?
I’m not a seaman, but if they went down from where you were, there was obviously a lower deck, and they could be used to go up from there. You could also perhaps go down and avoid a flooded section?
Did you check the ceiling for hatches allowing movement up through the next deck?
One of the slightly spooky parts of the snipes’ domain (the engine room) is the escape trunk–this is a small door in the wall that looks like a phone booth or broom closet, and should there be a steam leak you push through the door and scurry up the ladder, climbing a few decks until you reach a hand wheel, spin it open, and pop open the emergency escape scuttle.
The swinging door at the base of the escape trunk had a seal on it so that it would block most of the steam and prevent you from being cooked alive as you climbed.
I don’t think any of us expected it to actually work.
Often these escape scuttles are embedded in the deck of some office space, flush. They are usually painted red and sailors are told not to stand on them, lest some poor guy be trying to open it from below while some dude is standing on it.
There are similar scuttles in the center of larger watertight hatches that are positioned over ladders. Usually the larger hatch will be open, to allow free passage throughout the ship, but when at battle stations most of those large hatches are sealed shut, so the little scuttle provides a way of passing through should the need arise.
ETA: Those emergency escape scuttles in the floor usually have a hole in the center, where a hand wheel would normally be. These are opened from above by using a T-handle, typically clipped to the nearby bulkhead.
Are the hatches configured such that it is possible to go down and out through the bottom of the hull? If you are trapped below deck in a sealed compartment, then water shouldn’t rush in when you open a hatch in the floor; you just create a moon pool of type “C” in this picture.
There was an 2013 incident in which a ship sunk off the coast of Africa. 3 days later a diver went down to recover bodies, and was slightly surprised when a sailor - who had been surviving in an air pocket for those three days - reached out and grabbed him when he surfaced into that air pocket. Point being that when an underwater compartment is open to the water at its bottom, the water doesn’t just rush in.
I’m not sure I’m following you…
If you are talking about some kind of hatch below the waterline, then I can assure you that no standard warship has hatches below the waterline. Such hull penetrations would weaken the hull for little gain.
When a warship goes down, many of the guys in the deeper parts of the ship die.
