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This may be a bit too new for "History Forum"
If so, please move to where appropriate

What my question is if there is any discussion that due to the ship having a partially female crew that either more lives were lost or that damage control was less efficient due to their average lower strength?

From what I’ve heard the USN shifted from the P-250 portable pump to a much less powerful P-100 pump in part because it had to cut the weight of the pump so that it could be moved by women. To make it worse, the P-100 was issued in the exact same numbers as the P-250.

P-100 proved too weak to get water from the flooded engine rooms on Cole to the main deck to discharge over the side, forcing seamen to uses torches to cut through the ships hull while standing waist deep in water covered with an oil slick. If a fire had started under that situation Cole would have probably been lost, certainly more men and women would have died. Since then the USN’s solution has been to give ships adaptors that let two P-100 pumps be slaved together on a single pipe to lift water the necessary height.

In terms of the actual conduct of women on Cole though, all accounts rate them and the performance of the crew in general as exemplary. Indeed Cole not only survived a bomb blast of a size that sank several larger, not to mention armored cruisers in WW2, she did so with a large portion of her crew missing. This was because we couldn’t trust the blood supply in Yemen, so we had to send something like 90 people to the hospital alongside the wounded to act as blood donors. This meant Cole was missing over 1/3rd her total crew for the first two days.

To be honest, I never liked hauling around the P-250 and when doing PMS on them we always uses a cart to move them around. They might have gotten enough male complaints about them as well.

Really? Huh. They were still using P-250s on my ship(of course, we were also using OBAs, so why the fuck not?). Even after we started gender integration they hadn't shifted....I wonder if they were waiting for the first post-gender-integration deployment yard period?

Sea Skimmer wrote:From what I’ve heard the USN shifted from the P-250 portable pump to a much less powerful P-100 pump in part because it had to cut the weight of the pump so that it could be moved by women..

ALso, P-250 was gasoline powered, P-100 was diesel, which caused a lot of horsepower to be lost, and still end up slightly lighter than P-250 - I beleive the weight disparity is like 25 lbs.