Mettallurgist Pleads Guilty To Fraudulent Tests On Submarine Steel

[ShadowArxxy]

This is a pretty obscure thing that I only heard about today because it was in my news feed, but it's deeply disturbing.

Ms. Elaine Thomas, the director of metallurgy at a steel foundry in Tacoma which supplies steel castings for submarine hulls, has pleaded guilty to falsifying strength and toughness tests on that steel for at least two hundred forty cases, totaling at least half the foundry's entire submarine-grade steel production for the past thirty-two years. Apparently, this metallurgist felt that the Navy's requirements for submarine hulls were "stupid", so she decided that she wasn't going to actually run the tests, just file fake passing results. And apparently, no one else ever checked the results, so the fraud wasn't found out until 2017, when a new metallurgist whom this person was training as her replacement noticed discrepancies in the records. The company fired her and disclosed the existence of the discrepancies to the Navy, but then falsely insisted that its own internal investigations had shown there was no fraud involved.

The company ultimately settled with the Navy last year, paying $11 million in fines and penalties. The metallurgist faces up to 10 years in prison and $1 million in personal fines, although with the guilty plea the prosecution is recommending a prison sentence on the low end of the scale.

In conjunction with the guilty plea, she filed a statement through her attorney, which was partially quoted in the couple of articles on my feed: "Ms. Thomas never intended to compromise the integrity of any material and is gratified that the government’s testing does not suggest that the structural integrity of any submarine was in fact compromised. This offense is unique in that it was neither motivated by greed nor any desire for personal enrichment. She regrets that she failed to follow her moral compass – admitting to false statements is hardly how she envisioned living out her retirement years."

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Honestly, that fucking statement makes me almost angrier than the original offense, because it's playing technicalities so hard that it verges on gaslighting. She didn't "intend" to compromise the integrity of the material -- because she merely falsely certified sub-standard materials as passing. No submarine suffered a loss of structural integrity -- because the hull inspections are done so carefully that sub-standard steel only caused excessive maintenance and refit costs. She wasn't motivated by personal enrichment -- she just incidentally enriched herself.

I feel like a suitably karmic punishment for her would be placing her in an submarine prison made of the steel she certified, which will then be dived down to its maximum rated depth and kept there for the duration of her sentence.

 

[Arch Dornan]

She's a cunt putting lives and expensive equipment at risk.

 

[bintananth]

From what I read one of the requirements the USN had was for strength tests to be done at -100°F ... which she thought was silly.

Can't really blame her for thinking that because John D. Clark (a rocket propellant chemist from way back when) had negative things to say about that temperature requirement for liquid rocket fuels in his memoir Ignition!.

I can blame her for not doing what she was supposed to do as part of her job.

EDIT: At 50,000ft above sea level it's almost -70°F so the Navy wasn't wrong when they required tests be done at -100°F.

 

[PsihoKekec]

That is if we take her confession at the face value. The option that this was done with knowledge of her superiors to save money is much more likely and she is the one taking the fall for later payout, like that engineer at the Boeing.

 

[ShadowArxxy]

Can't really blame her for thinking that because John D. Clark (a rocket propellant chemist from way back when) had negative things to say about that temperature requirement for liquid rocket fuels in his memoir Ignition!.

On the contrary, you absolutely should blame her for falsely claiming that she thought that, because as an actual metallurgist she would have known exactly why it's in fact entirely sensible the Navy wants those tests done at far colder than operational temperatures. It just proves how much of an unrepentant piece of shit she is that she's trying to use the ignorance of the general public to downplay her crime.

 

[bintananth]

On the contrary, you absolutely should blame her for falsely claiming that she thought that, because as an actual metallurgist she would have known exactly why it's in fact entirely sensible the Navy wants those tests done at far colder than operational temperatures. It just proves how much of an unrepentant piece of shit she is that she's trying to use the ignorance of the general public to downplay her crime.

Brine freezes at -6°F and the Oceans a sub might be in rarely get that cold. When the Ocean under an ice sheet does get that cold brinicles form. Strength testing steel meant for a submarine at -100°F is overkill.

 

[Wargamer08]

Brine freezes at -6°F and the Oceans a sub might be in rarely get that cold. When the Ocean under an ice sheet does get that cold brinicles form. Strength testing steel meant for a submarine at -100°F is overkill.

And yet steel to those tolerances is what the Navy was paying for. You don’t get to decide the standards of something you are part of selling are silly and so aren’t needed.

 

[bintananth]

And yet steel to those tolerances is what the Navy was paying for. You don’t get to decide the standards of something you are part of selling are silly and so aren’t needed.

Agreed, which is why she's in trouble.

 

[Typhonis]

Could the whistleblower ,who was fired before she sent the alert up, sue for wrongful termination?

 

[ShadowArxxy]

Could the whistleblower ,who was fired before she sent the alert up, sue for wrongful termination?

The company fired Thomas, not the whistleblower. However, "firing" her was an extremely empty gesture considering that she was retiring anyway and that the company subsequently obstructed the Navy investigation.

 

[Battlegrinder]

Brine freezes at -6°F and the Oceans a sub might be in rarely get that cold. When the Ocean under an ice sheet does get that cold brinicles form. Strength testing steel meant for a submarine at -100°F is overkill.

There's a reason why when people try to test and verify general relativity, it generally involves the most impractically precise clocks they can get thier hands on, strapped to the fastest vehicles they have, up to and including a space shuttle at full throttle. When you are trying to measure or detect tiny, tiny changes, sometimes thst requires going to considerable extremes to get them to be visable.

 

[TheRejectionist]

Is this me or it is sound like the US is following an analogous path of the USSR?

 

[Bacle]

Is this me or it is sound like the US is following an analogous path of the USSR?

Yep; some like to pretend we are Rome, but we aren't.

We are a lot closer to the USSR or CCP in how we operate and what our history is, compared to Rome.

But a lot of the US is not willing to admit that fact, because it hurts our national pride and self-image.

 

[Zachowon]

Yep; some like to pretend we are Rome, but we aren't.

We are a lot closer to the USSR or CCP in how we operate and what our history is, compared to Rome.

But a lot of the US is not willing to admit that fact, because it hurts our national pride and self-image.

Bacle, we are closer to Rome then a communist hell hole.

The idea of Rome some people have is less like actual Rome.

We are the next best thing since Rome, and u like the USSR or the CCP, we will be able to get the trash out of office. The USSR got lucky with thier trash getting tjem into Russia.

 

[Bacle]

Bacle, we are closer to Rome then a communist hell hole.

The idea of Rome some people have is less like actual Rome.

We are the next best thing since Rome, and u like the USSR or the CCP, we will be able to get the trash out of office. The USSR got lucky with thier trash getting tjem into Russia.

When you factor out the politics, and look at the geographics, demographics, and resources, we are a lot alike, and all of us have been expansionist powers in the past.

We are lucky enough to have a moat on both sides and friendly nations/vassals to our north, unlike them, so most of our 'border defense' is done by the Navy and Air Force, not ground units, and unlike them we do not have millennia old blood feuds simmering under the surface.

Politically...are we really that different anymore, really?

Look at what is happening with Rittenhouse, and the fact it has come this far...we have brownshirts on our streets who can burn shit at will, get away with it, and the people trying to stop the fires are the ones who get charged when they defend themselves. All while the Constitution is worth less and less all the time, because of the powers Bush and Cheney carved out post-9/11 and every POTUS and Congress since (except maybe Trump) has allowed to remain. Not to mention iffy at best election integrity, and the vax/virus stuff fucking up our ability to have a functional supply chain?

I also say we aren't that far off from how something like the USSR could start. I could see a non-commie Worker's Revolution, like a giant coal miner town going rogue writ-large because of the supply chain fucks up and lies over the virus, causing us to go USSR or Balkan's (and maybe take Canada/Mexico with us), pretty fast if things tip the wrong way.

Aspiring to be Rome is not a healthy mindset, and does not actually help things on the domestic side, no matter how proud it makes the military feel.

We are trying to be a Republic that does NOT become an Empire.

We can have a Constitution, or we can have an Empire, we cannot have both, and without the Constitution all the legitimacy DC has ever claimed goes up like steam in the Sahara and the American Experiment ends like so many of our puppet states have, while also proving most of our detractors correct.

The future of America, assuming they don't go full 1984, will be us telling of a time when we used to be a free country to whomever is left and willing/able to listen, if people keep trying to make the US into Rome.

THE ROMANS USED LEAD FOR SWEETNER, AND DROVE THEIR SOCIETY OFF A CLIFF IN LEAD-INDUCED STUPIDITY.

LET'S NOT BE ROME.

 

[Robovski]

It does kinda feel like how the CCCP crumbled.

 

[LindyAF]

Yep; some like to pretend we are Rome, but we aren't.

We are a lot closer to the USSR or CCP in how we operate and what our history is, compared to Rome.

Bacle, we are closer to Rome then a communist hell hole.

This is a bit off topic, but... who's we?

Why should the American Nation (e.g. it's people) be associated with the state or the empire run from washington dc? They aren't us, what they do has no real correlation with what we want, and the vast majority of us hate the lot of them. They at most vaguely lie every few years that they somehow "represent us."

 

[bintananth]

There's a reason why when people try to test and verify general relativity, it generally involves the most impractically precise clocks they can get thier hands on, strapped to the fastest vehicles they have, up to and including a space shuttle at full throttle. When you are trying to measure or detect tiny, tiny changes, sometimes thst requires going to considerable extremes to get them to be visable.

The Navy might want to know when the steel goes from ductile to brittle because subs sometimes surface through polar ice.

However, if the steel can handle that without breaking then -100°F is a non-issue.

Going to extremes when testing does make sense and I'm not defending her decision to falsify required test results.

Sometimes an extremely excessive requirement gets added to the generic master specification and stays there because no one ever lost their job by failing to say "we don't need this for this application" and removing it during the "delete what's not applicable" part of writing an application specific specification.

I've seen this with shop drawings that got rejected followed by a back-and-forth with the ones hired to build it saying that meeting the entire spec wasn't physically possible.

 

[TheRejectionist]

The US navy,assuming is not having PC problems as well, should worry who's commanding them.

 

[bintananth]

The US navy,assuming is not having PC problems as well, should worry who's commanding them.

The CO, XO, and COB of USS Connecticut were recently removed due to "lack of confidence" even though the reason for their removal was the USS Connecticut hitting an uncharted sea mount during what was probably a high-speed blind transit through shallow waters with little to no margin for error.