First chief engineer returns to N.S. Savannah in Baltimore
National Maritime Day ceremony took place on the ship’s deck at Canton Marine Terminal
The N.S. Savannah pitched and rolled through a hurricane on the return from its maiden voyage across the Atlantic Ocean in 1964.
Then its nuclear-powered engines abruptly shut down.
The storm had somehow triggered the ship’s safety systems, which turned off its reactor and left it floating without power in a storm hundreds of miles off the coast of Ireland.
Capt. Stanley D. Wheatley, the chief engineer, had only one option to save the world’s first nuclear-powered cargo liner: shutting off the very systems designed to prevent a disaster in the reactor, so he could turn the engines back on.
“We had to get it started up in a hurry,” said Wheatley, 92, sitting in his old quarters aboard the ship Sunday. “There was some concern about having shut down the safety systems, because that’s against the rules in the nuclear business. But there was no choice.”
It worked. Wheatley had to explain his actions before members of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission upon his return to Washington. But Rear Adm. Mark H. Buzby, head of the U.S. Maritime Administration, who spoke at a National Maritime Day ceremony on the ship’s deck at Canton Marine Terminal on Sunday, addressed the nonagenarian deferentially.
“It’s actually not my ship,” the admiral said. “It’s Chief Stan Wheatley’s ship. This is your ship, Chief.”
Named after the S.S. Savannah, the first engine-powered ship to cross an ocean, the vessel is set to be decommissioned and have the remaining nuclear systems removed in the coming years. Its intercontinental voyage was “a monumental achievement” that displayed a peaceful use for nuclear energy, as its predecessor had pointed to the end of sail-powered ships, Buzby said.
“Two centuries later, we’re moving toward a fourth industrial age — one in which journeys like the Savannah’s might be achieved without human hands touching the wheel up in the bridge or tending the engines down in the engine room,” Buzby said. “That new age isn’t quite fully here yet, but it is coming and we need to be prepared for it.”
Cannons, patriotic music and flags flapping in the wind punctuated the annual celebration.
Lottie and Howie Hirsch of Reisterstown toured the Savannah with their friends Pam and Dick Prodey of Eldersburg. The group was particularly impressed by the technological systems of the ship, built in 1959.
“It’s amazing what they were able to accomplish without the assistance of computers,” Lottie Hirsch said.
“The thing to me is the complexity of it, for something that old,” Dick Prodey added.
The S.S. John W. Brown and the Pride of Baltimore II, which were also open to the public for Maritime Day on Sunday, could be seen through a porthole from the chief engineer’s quarters of the Savannah.
A copy of “The Elements of Nuclear Reactor Theory” and a few iterations of the ship’s Reactor Plant Operating Manual lay on display on the table in the otherwise-empty engineer’s cabin.
Wheatley remembers the room being far messier. It was right here, he recalled, that he and the ship’s captain made the decision to venture into the hurricane in the first place.
“He said, ‘We’re going into some heavy weather,’ ” Wheatley said. “‘I could go south, or I could go north.’”
Their minds dwelt on more than their own well-being and that of the ship’s crew and 80 or 90 passengers. The N.S. Savannah was part of President Dwight Eisenhower’s “Atoms for Peace” project. Neither wanted to make the newspapers for sinking it. But its mission was, in part, to prove the nuclear-powered ship’s seaworthiness.
“I said, ‘Whichwaywouldyougoif it were a commercial ship?’ ” Wheatley said. “He said, ‘We’d go north.’ So we went north.”
Wheatley still remembers by heart the maritime rule he cited to regulators to explain his decision to shut off the nuclear reactor’s safety systems.
“In obeying and construing the above rules, meaning the rules of the road,” he said, “due regard shall be had for all circumstances, which may render a departure from the above rules in order to avoid immediate danger.”