10 votes

The US Navy’s terrible accident record is now hidden from public view

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  1. elfox
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    I was in the Navy. And part of my job was to paint the size of the ship. The Navy does things in a very sketchy way. It's all about appearances. They care about how they look the outside world,...

    I was in the Navy. And part of my job was to paint the size of the ship. The Navy does things in a very sketchy way. It's all about appearances. They care about how they look the outside world, but they don't care about their people. I say that but honestly it's the command that thinks that the Navy as a whole is actually great to its people. And that's something I always say. My command was a piece of crap but the Navy was great to me.

    We had people who would just take 5 gallon cans of paint and just throw it in the water because they didn't want to paint and they wanted to say they were out of paint. And no one would bat an eye at that.

    One day I was on the Portside and they weren't supposed to be discharging waste while we were out there. And they discharged waste and shit water went into a paint tray. And it was time to clean up and end the day and I dumped that shit water into the ocean. Instead of the 5-gallon paint can. Because it would have ruined the paint. And I got all kinds of crap because people kept saying there's someone on the port side dumping paint in the water and no one cared that it was shit water or that people were siphoning shit water over the side while we were out there they just cared that it appeared like we were dumping paint when we weren't.

    When we went to dry dock I was on this team that was responsible for doing preventive maintenance on the anchor and anchor chain. So what we did was we lower the anchor down onto a barge and we laid out so many shots of chain and then we disconnected it. Then we took those barges over to an area off to the side in the shipyard where no one really win and our job was to chip the paint off and repaint the anchor and anchor chain and do repairs to the chain.

    We weren't supposed to get paint chips in the water because of the environmental reasons. So what they did was they took these metal poles and made the square frames and then they wrapped this thick plastic wrap around it making these plastic hot boxes. And the frames have wheels on them. So as we work we would just roll that box across. We had two of these.

    These things were death traps. It cost us to inhale way more paint chips because our respirators were not the greatest. They were extremely hot, you couldn't see anything going on, and you had six people crammed into it with pneumatic tools all trying to work around each other.

    3 votes