Needless, tragic military death.

The BBQ Pit
1

http://home.hamptonroads.com/stories/story.cfm?story=70747&ran=177237

Some ground rules for the discussion, please. This has nothing to do at all with Bush, Iraq or Afghanistan. Which is why, obviously, nobody has heard anything about it.

So try to keep the Bush bashing to a minimum. DOD, Navy, and Pentagon bashing are, of course, fair game. I may be a conservative Republican, but I’m also a Navy veteran with a distaste for bureaucratic bullshit.

My last ship in the Navy was the USS Monterey, a guided missile cruiser. Back in January, a twenty year old seaman apprentice named George Schultz was walking back to the ship when he was told to avoid walking on the main pier area, which was covered with ice and snow. Too dangerous, you know.

He, along with other Monterey sailors, instead proceeded along a narrow walkway where steam lines were laid. Norfolk sailors remember well that steam lines on base were nasty things, and leaked all the time. These lines were no exception.

Seaman Apprentice Schultz walked through a fog of steam, which instantly fogged his glasses and prevented him from seeing the unfenced area near him. Stumbling through that dropped him into a trench filled with steam condensate heated to 200 degrees F.

The poor guy was scalded badly. He couldn’t feel anything below his belly when they fished him out of the water where he was being, literally, boiled alive. The burns covered over 80 percent of his body.

Seaman Apprentice Schultz, of Round Hill, VA, died two days later with his parents at his side.

Here it is, several months later, and Public Works on base has erected hand rails and fencing on that particular pier. Those particular steam leaks have, I guess, been fixed too. But it’s too late to save George Schultz, and it’s all a sign of a system on the Norfolk base, and other bases, that’s been broken for a long long time.

I can’t even be outraged anymore, because I’ve seen stuff like this for way too long. All I can muster is exasperation.

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I saw a lot of things like that, too, like the seaman apprentice who crawled into a airtight compartment to sneak a nap. His timing couldn’t be worse, since that small compartment was sealed for maintanance and he suffocated. Or the storekeeper who had no business on the flight deck even though he had a special interest in the cargo that was being vert-repped. Obvioulsly he was unqualified, since he committed the big no-no of turning his back on the aircraft and had a rotor blade go through his head.

After you see a few instances like this, your automatic response is “well, somebody must have fucked up,” since very few things are done in the Navy that haven’t been done thousands of times before by thousands of other guys, but without death or injury.

My first reaction to the story you cited was “so why didn’t they have the pier sweepers spread sand on the ice?” I guess it would have had to wait for flag rank or above to slip and fall on his ass before that would happen. Frankly, most everyone I remember went through life with such big chips on their shoulders because they weren’t allowed to get enough sleep, or because some zero couldn’t make a decision without jeking his entire division all over the place, or because they were still pissed off at being yelled at during boot camp, that all such common-sense initiative was drained from them.

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This kind of tragedy is not limited to the military, unfortunately. There’s an intersection near our house that has limited visibility, and seems to everyone in the neighborhood to be very risky. One direction, traffic is at 45 mph, and the stop sign on the other street needs to be changed to a stop light. We got together a neighborhood petition that we took to City Hall, and we were told that they wouldn’t put up a stop light because there’s not been any fatality there.

So, it’s the same situation as your sad example. They won’t put up handrails, or a stop light, or a warning sign, until someone is killed.

Bureaucrats, gotta love 'em.

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The death of Seaman Apprentice Schultz is a horrible, needless tragedy. It’s ironic that a contributing cause of his death was prohibiting sailors from walking on the upper deck of the pier due to ice, ostensibly to prevent an accident. God forbid that they would simply clear the pier of ice and snow.

Unfortunately, zeroes [officers] are never rewarded for making a decision or taking initiative in today’s Navy. They are only rewarded for not screwing up. In fact, though it is surely not intentional, officers are strongly encouraged not to take initiative, because it is impossible to take initiative without occasionally making a mistake. And in today’s zero-defect military, mistakes are simply not allowed. Each and every mistake is a potential career-killer, you see.

(Also, it doesn’t help that officers are chronically short on sleep, too, in my experience.)

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Thank god for that at least.

Another anecdotal contribution–I live very near the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. Minor accidents in and around the waste storage tanks are not uncommon. Soon, someone will die horribly, or there will be a radiologic spill, and a whole bunch of people will be crying “oh, why didn’t we do something?”

The wheels of bureaucracy grind slow, but exceeding indifferent to individuals.

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I am saddened by the story, Mr. Moto, and my heart goes out to his family.

C K Dexter Haven, back in the beginning of the year, a friend of mine was struck and killed outside her home in a stretch of road that has become notorious. A woman had been killed last year, and another has been killed since. There is nothing particularly treacherous about this road, other than people tend to drive too fast, and the crosswalks could be better marked. The city, however, remains unmoved, and will not put any new lights, stop signs or make any other changes.

Flow of traffic and all, you know.

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I started this thread ranting against typical Navy bureaucratic BS that cost a sailor his life.

Clearly, not isolated solely to the Navy.

Hentor please accept my belated condolences for your loss.

People often rant about whether it’ll actually take someone getting killed for the government to address a situation. Clearly, this is often the case.

Damned if I can figure out how to fix it, though.

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Thoughtless shit happens in and outside the government.

My in-laws had steps leading down from the deck outside their house. They were wooden, and the wood aged and turned mossy over time. Mossy wood gets slippery, and one day, after a rain, I left their house to run an errand when I slipped and fell right on my ass. I had a deep purple bruise for weeks.

When they announced that they were taking these steps down and building a new flight, I asked if they were going to put sandpaper strips on them to keep people from falling. My mother-in-law poo-poo’d me, saying she didn’t think it was necessary.

I wonder how she’s going to feel when one of her elderly parents slips and falls and gets badly injured. Or her grandson. Or her, for that matter. The result is going to be the same. Someone is going to get hurt, and the preventive cost a few dollars at Lowe’s.

That said, my sympathies go to the family of SA Schultz.

Robin