An individual who monitors this site - and to whom I am most grateful - has provided improved estimates for the rates at which flooding would have occurred aboard THRESHER had a pipe with a diameter between two and five inches actually ruptured at a depth of 1300-feet as concluded by the Court of Inquiry (COI).
For a two-inch diameter pipe: 1800 gallons per minute (GPM).
For a five-inch diameter pipe: 11,000 GPM.
One US gallon of water weighs 8.34 pounds.
In the four minutes that elapsed between loss of propulsion (the reactor scram) at 0909R - which the COI attributed to the rupture of a sea-connected pipe - and the 0913R time of the (quote) experiencing minor difficulties (end quote) UQC transmission by THRESHER, we have the following:
For a two-inch diameter pipe, flooding would have added 60,000 pounds (1800 X 4 X 8.34)
For a five-inch diameter pipe, flooding would have added 367,000 pounds (11,000 X 4 X 8.34)
What makes the COI pipe-rupture-flooding assessment equally untenable are the volumes associated with these flooding rates: for the two-inch pipe, a water volume of 965 cubic feet in four minutes; for the five-inch pipe, a water volume of 5,900 cubic feet in four minutes. Note: the volume of one US gallon is 0.134 cubic feet.
