Accident happened in the South China Sea back on 2 October this year (2021). The sea mount was described as "uncharted". The Navy relieved the captain, the executive officer and the chief of the boat. Amount of damage is undetermined, at least by civilians like me. Must have been pretty bad, 11 crewmen were hurt (not seriously) and Connecticut traveled from the collision site to Guam on the surface. There is talk about returning her to Bremerton Washington for repairs that might take a year or more.
This is the first I heard of this. Chalk another one up for the MSM. I came across it websurfing at the US Naval Institute site. USNI has been around for 60 years that I know of, and probably a lot more, and I consider them highly reliable. They were the publishing house that published Tom Clancy's first best seller, Hunt for Red October, after all the regular publishers refused to touch Clancy's masterpiece. Sea Wolf was the last cold war nuclear sub design, so advanced that it was considered worth two or three ordinary nuclear attack subs. They are expensive, we only built three of them since the Cold War ended. They got named USS Sea Wolf, USS Jimmy Carter and USS Connecticut. Dunno how the Navy got the Jimmy Carter name thru Congress. Surely these Sea Wolf class nuclear attack subs would be VERY useful for stopping a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. Well we have one less of them now.
Just how Connecticut managed to clip that sea mount is unclear. How deep was the South China Sea at the point and how deep was Connecticut running? Was it me, I would allow a thousand feet or more between my sub and the bottom, at least for peace time exercises, and in a poorly charted place like the South China Sea.
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