Posted on 05/23/2012 5:32:52 PM PDT by moonshot925
KITTERY, Maine — Multiple firefighters were reportedly injured while battling a fire aboard the USS Miami nuclear-powered attack submarine tonight at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard, according to a shipyard official and emergency radio communications.
Firefighters were initially called to the Shipyard just before 6 p.m. for a report of a fire on a ship in dry dock. According to emergency scanner traffic, fire crews encountered heavy smoke and fire and two firefighters were taken from the scene with injuries. Two additional firefighters were later reported as requiring transport from the scene.
Shipyard public affairs specialist Gary Hildreth said the fire is located in the forward compartment of the ship and all nonessential personnel were ordered to evacuate.
As of 7:30 p.m., black smoke visible from Prescott Park in Portsmouth, N.H., continued to billow from the dry dock. A Portsmouth fire truck was on standby at Peirce Island.
Your overview of the firefighting procedure is very good, IF the ship is underway. In an overhaul environment, all bets are off. The crew is usually not berthed on the boat and the only crew members (forward that is, the nukes have their cold iron watches as well) may be the topside watch and the below decks watch. Ship’s ventilation may well be in various states of disassembly and ventilation is usually provided by shipyard supplied Red Devil blowers. Prayers for the crew and yardbirds involved.
In port, the crew will respond to the fire immediately, and as soon as the shipyard firefighters arrive, we turn it over to them.
Yes, prayers for the crew....
FRom reports I heard on FOX this morning it took considerable time to reach the fire and get it out. The sub is roughly 22 years old looking at Navy records. I’d say the detailers are going to be busy.
>>Art imitating life or Something like that....
I served on a 26 year old SSN (Skipjack class). Fires were a daily occurrence. This one seems really bad, but they are in drydock and welding fires are common, but they usually get put out by the fire watch. They probalby have the whole crew at diversity training right now so no one is doing fire watch.
Thanks for the ping! prayers for those injured.
We should have shut Portsmouth NSY down when we had the chance——Imitating the Russians is just dumbass regardless of the actual cause. And by the way-—there IS NO justifiable cause——way too many safety systems / equipments in place for something as stooopid as this to happen. Maybe the captain had an out of date map? The officers bunks are forward-—maybe two gay ones were having a friction party? The first video I saw showed fire hoses outside playing water on the outer hull where the bunks would be. I dunno but it’s disgusting that someone got on the wrong page.
Sounds like it may in fact have been hull insulation burning...there’s so much stuffed inside the hull that often it’s almost impossible to get water directly on what’s burning, and hull insulation is the most inaccessible flammable material on the boat.
Still have to wait for an investigation though.
Have you ever been a Navy shipboard fire fighter? If they were spraying the hull they were doing what they were supposed to do. Fire on a ship {any ship} has a fast heat transfer rate to adjoining compartments. Too minimize that transfer so the fire simply by that heat transfer doesn't cause more fire in other spaces you do compartmental cooling off all adjoin spaces you can reach. It is standard U.S. Navy fire fighting protocol.
Fires can start from many non negligent causes. One of the more common is electrical where you either get a loose connection which will not trip breakers or fuses but heat to extremes or frayed or damaged cable unseen to the eye.
A fire on a ship can be hard to detect and isolated to a small space for hours under the right conditions where oxygen is low like in the insulation as one guy talks about. Once it burns through enough where it reaches sufficent oxygen then it's Katey bar the door.
Nobody on a ship wants a fire in any venue in port or at sea. Fire is the most feared and serious event short of coming under direct attack.
I spent a total of nine months of my four years on ship assigned solely to the ships Fire Department doing nothing but fire fighting. One of the worse fires we fought started in the shipyard. It was a storeroom fire and the heat transfer within minutes had climbed two decks up too the crew barber shop. The deck in the barber shop was so hot the floor tiles were bubbling. We flooded the deck.
The most annoying fires happened the night after Field Day when swabs used for waxing floors had not been properly rinsed out and after being placed in a locker caught fire by spontaneous combustion. But a Class C {electrical} fire can very quickly become a class Alpha fire by igniting other objects.
The larger ships like carriers back in about 1980 went to a full time onboard fire department for both at sea and in port. It made much better sense to pool persons from each department of the ship and train them for fire fighters than the old protocol which was to let the Hull Techs do it all which could in a bad fire take most of them out.
My son is a ‘glow worm’ on an LA class sub, and I remember him saying he’s a Fireman.
There’s firemen {Fireman is a term meaning a person who works in Enginering also known as a Snipe} and there are fire fighters. If he is a fireman {red stripes on dress blues uniform} he could be a Machinist Mate, Electricians Mate, Engineman, Machinery Repairman, or a Hull Technician.
Most common fire when I was on a boat was a clothes dryer fire, cause by the combination of not cleaning out the lint, and the user not allowing the dryer to finish it’s cycle (the last 5 minutes of the cycle allows the dryer to cool down).
On a submarine, everybody trains as a firefighter.
Ah. He is an Electicians Mate. They seem to have quite a few of those, but I don’t recall any mention of there being an actual Electrician.
Yea so I heard. A friend I grew up with was an instructor in the mid 80's in Idaho. He was on an LA class boat before that.
He's an electrican and will have good training for when he gets out. I was a Machinist Mate.
He's an electrican and will have good training for when he gets out. I was a Machinist Mate.
Not sure how it all works, but he started out taking care of instrument calibrations on the boat he’s assigned to, and now he seems to be responsible seeing that it gets done on some of the others, too.
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