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."
------
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.
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."
------
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.
Last edited: