In such an atmosphere, mishaps caused by fallible humans dealing with complex machinery were inevitable. One particularly embarrassing, and nearly tragic, incident was related by electrical shop foreman Mel Hooper. His men were completing electrical work on the new submarine _Lancefish_ (built at another yard) in 1945. “Some machinist went down,” he recalled, “and opened up the front gate on the torpedo tube and forgot to close it; then he went back in the ship and opened up the inside one and then it started to flood. And they had a hell of a job trying to close it, and they couldn’t close it, and everybody ran aboard the dock to get the hell out of there before they got drowned. And then the ship sank.”
The stepped-up safety program was almost certainly an improvement on the pre-war conditions, when, as remembered by plumber Lyman Carlow, “It seemed to me that everyone was supposed to look after himself.” But while the program called for more protections for workers from open machinery, hazardous fumes, and other dangerous conditions, a survey in 1944 noted that workers were rarely disciplined for safety violations, machines lacked guards, and most workers did not wear their hard hats, goggles, or ear protection. “You [went] down to the tanks with the chipping hammers and riveting guns going all around,” recalled Carlow, “and you wouldn’t be able to hear for a couple of hours afterward. But nobody did anything about it, or thought anything of it. You just got deaf, and that was it.”
A shipyard was a dangerous place to work even in peacetime; war multiplied the hazards. Charles Snell, an apprentice rigger at the yard, recalled 40 years later, “We had a lot of close escapes, because safety wasn’t really stressed then as much as it is today ... we lost a lot of riggers, strangely enough, and I can never account for this, being run over by the cranes ... the operator of the crane, when it was traveling, had very limited visibility close ahead. And we lost an inordinate number of riggers because they’d stumble and the crane would run over them.... We had quite a few falls into the dry dock, not riggers, but all trades.”
Snell left the yard in 1943 and served in Europe for the duration of the war. He recalled his impressions upon returning in 1946, comparing the yard to “a runner, which was running for an objective, and all of a sudden, the objective wasn’t there. The need for everything had suddenly evaporated. And it was a question of what do you finish and what don’t you finish, and what’s important.”