Goodbye, gravy-yard For Sanford, the Portsmouth closing is making that casino idea look pretty good BY RICK WORMWOOD

The Pentagon has slated the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard for closure — that’s hardly news. And I’m a Sanford boy, so it’s more than just front-page fodder. It’s personal. Since I’m the Captain Inappropriate-type, my first reaction to bad news is gallows humor (the blacker the better). So the BRAC report produced two ideas.

Here’s the first: For decades, New Hampshire has been throwing a hissy fit over the way Maine taxes the spouses of the Shipyard’s employees who live over the border in New Hampshire. You see, the Shipyard has Portsmouth in its name, but it’s actually across the state line, in Kittery. This eventually led New Hampshire to an absurd strategy of claiming ownership of the island where the Shipyard is located. New Hampshire’s various weak arguments have lost in the Supreme Court, but still they won’t give up. Well, if the base-closing handwriting is on the wall, why not finally give it to them? Maine could look really magnanimous while simultaneously rubbing it in New Hampshire’s crybaby face. We could remind New Hampshire state employees of Maine’s largesse every time we handed one of them a buck-50 to traverse their tiny stretch of road between Maine and Beantown.

The other, and to my mind superior, idea involved Portsmouth finally capitalizing on the second-most extraordinary thing about itself: being the birthplace of legendary rocker Ronnie James Dio. Can’t you easily imagine a Dio museum next to the Seacoast Repertory Theatre, or maybe in Strawberry Bank? It’s just what the town needs. The dragon from the Sacred Heart tour stage-show would be a great museum centerpiece, and I bet that Ronnie James would help out his beleaguered birthplace by donating it. He’s probably got it in storage somewhere.

But being a wisenheimer about the potential closing of the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard doesn’t feel right — and I believe that humor can be wrung from anything. Anything. The reason for this uncharacteristic reticence is that, to me, this possible closure (there’s always hope) represents a potential death in the family. My father, Clifford E. "the Kipper" Wormwood, worked there for 20 years, starting in 1966. I have a lot to thank that place for, which is why I’m both grateful its existence, and frightened about what might happen without it.

The Shipyard was the great industrial teat from which my family and I suckled. Because the Kipper worked there, the Wormwoods had food, a roof, and felt secure. The Shipyard straightened my and my sister’s teeth, and the crooked teeth of thousands of other kids in "Run Silent, Run Deep" T-shirts who knew as much about Admiral Hyman Rickover, the father of the Nuclear Navy, as they did of Evel Kinevil or Steve Grogan.

This projected closure hits my beloved hometown of Sanford particularly hard. Around 400 good-paying Shipyard jobs that might disappear in the next few years belong to people from Sanford, and that’s a tragedy. That’s why this isn’t funny. Unfortunately, terrible uncertainty and the potential for economic devastation are nothing new locally. Sanford folks still talk about when the Goodall family, whose mills built the town, moved their textile operation south in the early 1950s, plunging half of the populace into unemployment. Sanford eventually staged a dramatic enough recovery to warrant the making of a TV movie starring Darren McGavin called The Town That Refused to Die, but that was 40-plus years ago.

In the 1970s, when I grew up there, the two great foundations of gainful employment in Sanford, the Shipyard and Sprauge Electric, both seemed eternal and impervious. Shipyard jobs were so desirable and secure that some called it the Gravy-yard (although I never heard the Kipper say Gravy-yard; the term carried a slacker-infused pejorative taint), and if you had errands to run across town too close to a Sprauge Electric shift change, you waited 20 minutes because so many people were driving either to or from work that Main Street was temporarily clogged.

Trying to imagine Sanford without Sprauge Electric was as unnatural as it was ridiculous, like picturing the globe without a couple of continents, but Sprauge Electric is already long gone, so although the tune emanating from the Pentagon hurts, it’s one that Sanford has heard, from one source or another, many times. If Maine towns were figures from the Old Testament, Sanford would be Job. As in I need a job. Pun intended.

I’ve never been accused of being an optimist, quite the opposite, but even I don’t want to be a damn dirty defeatist. I don’t know if the Shipyard can prevail, but hell yes it’s worth every bit of fight that can be mustered. That’s one of the reasons we elect, pay, and tolerate politicians.

Looking for a better handle on the situation, I sought out a man I’ve known long enough that he still calls me Richie. This Sanford gentleman who didn’t wish to be named knows what he’s talking about regarding submarines. He not only served on them during a naval career, he also worked at the Shipyard, eventually retiring as a Senior Production Manager, which is high enough in the hierarchy that he was known, in Shipyard argot, as a White Hat.

White Hat explained the Shipyard’s mission to repair, refuel, and otherwise maintain the Navy’s Los Angeles-class nuclear submarines. A submarine hasn’t been completely built there since the Sandlance, in 1971, but for a long time now the focus has been a good and steady gig. The regular work required on the Navy’s 43 Los Angeles-class submarines — "43 For Freedom" was the Los Angeles-class slogan — often involved removing nuclear reactors and other procedures that could take a year or more, all of which was plenty enough to keep the gates open. The problem is that the Los Angeles-class submarines are yesterday’s news, and they are slowly being phased out in favor of superior technology, as represented by the mighty Ohio-class submarines, better known as the Tridents.

How incredible a weapon is the Trident? Its arsenal contains a missile warhead that packs a 475-kiloton nuclear wallop, or, using the 12.5 kiloton explosion unleashed upon Hiroshima at the end of WWII as a scale, an explosion equal to 38 Hiroshimas. The missiles that carry these warheads carry eight of them, so each individual missile potentially bears the 3800-kiloton equivalent of 304 Hiroshimas to the enemy. Trident submarines carry 24 of these missiles, giving each of those subs ordnance equal to 7296 Hiroshimas.

Think about that for a moment. Have you ever seen pictures of Hiroshima after we nuked it? A large city had become a cinder, with 140,000 Japanese dead. Now the Navy can deliver 7296 times that from one single boat, and America has 18 of these Trident subs.

To me, that’s just staggering.

The title of the nukewatch.com article that provided these figures, "Trident Submarines Are Killing Machines Unparalleled in Human History," wasn’t hyperbole.

Technology-wise, compared to Tridents, the Los Angeles-class boats aren’t quite as outdated as, say, Fred Flintstone’s car. They’re more like Adam West’s Batmobile, but that’s bad enough. When you have 18 vessels that can rain down 7296 Hiroshimas each, the "43 for Freedom," though technological marvels that provided ample Cold War deterrence in their own time, start to look a tad quaint.

With Tridents in the fleet, you’d have to wonder how many other nuclear attack subs you really need. And did I mention that the Tridents are propelled by nuclear reactors that don’t ever require refueling? Refueling accounts for a big chunk of the work that brings the Los Angeles-class boats to the Piscattaqua River.

None of that bodes well for the Shipyard. The Tridents, which are the future, don’t need the services the Shipyard offers. Perhaps the Shipyard could adapt to perform for the Tridents some large service, but that kind of thing should have been conceived and worked toward decades ago. Maybe all of those Maine and New Hampshire politicians, both local and Congressional, who are full of plans and angry rhetoric to fight the closure, should have instead long ago devised a plan to mitigate a potential future closure. It’s not like there wasn’t time.

Robert MacNamara wanted to close the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard when he was the Secretary of Defense in the 1960s. We can forgive our current politicos for not having a 40-year-old plan, but shouldn’t the fact that the Shipyard barely survived the last round of Pentagon base closings in the 1990s have been a heads up? After that nail-biter, how can every official act so shocked and outraged? Didn’t anyone see this coming?