Lot of aluminum on that boat and those like her....those fires hard, hard to put out.
Pardon me for asking, but isn’t the boat in a harbor, which is made of water, which puts out fires?
This is quite bad.
I hope she isn't a total loss, starting to look like it.
Just awful.
This almost has me suspecting fowl play....
A lot of men on or connected to that ship are seeing their career plans go up in a puff of smoke. Just saying you were a part of the crew on USS Bonhomme Richard may be less than a resume enhancer for a while. The Navy is big on affixing blame rather quickly. Maybe all branches of our military are that same way. They are, after all, a business concern.
Sometimes, an accident is simply that, an accident of circumstance. There will be mucho checking of records. Who was doing what when, and with whom? Don’t lose those records!
There was a submarine that some yard worker set on fire in New Hampshire I think. And there was a minesweeper ran around in the Philippines. They wrote both of those off.
Lousy DC team
I would guess a lot of us on FR have fought shipboard fires. I have - fun in training, indescribably miserable in real life. Once a fire has been burning for a full day, I cannot imagine getting it under control and repairing the ship. We need this ship, but I’m not sure that need matters at this point.
I have been on lots of burning flooding boats.
It never lasted a week in port.
All the electronics are probably cooked at this point.
I think the last one was the Los Angeles-class attack sub USS Miami. That one also happened in a shipyard, a shipyard worker intentionally set a fire that wound up causing so much damage that the Navy decided to decommission the sub instead of repairing it, since it was in for a major overhaul and nuclear refueling anyway. The USS San Francisco (another Los Angeles-class sub) was almost scrapped after colliding with a seamount, but they replaced the entire forward section with the one from the USS Honolulu, and scrapped the Honolulu instead. (San Francisco had just been overhauled and refueled so it had many years left, Honolulu was due in for its refuel soon.)
}:-)4
From the Wikipedia article on USS Miami (SSN-755):
At 5:41 p.m. EDT on 23 May 2012, fire crews were called with a report of a fire on Miami while being overhauled at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in Kittery, Maine. At the time the submarine was on a scheduled 20-month maintenance cycle,[4][5] indicating the submarine was undergoing an extensive overhaul called an “Engineering Overhaul”.[6] Injuries to seven firefighters had been reported by national media.[7] One crewmember suffered broken ribs when he fell through a hole left by removed deck plates during the fire.[8] It took firefighters 12 hours to extinguish the fire.[9]
Originally the U.S. Navy reported that the fire started when an industrial vacuum cleaner, used “to clean worksites on the sub after shipyard workers’ shifts,” sucked up a heat source that ignited debris inside the vacuum. On 23 July 2012 Casey J. Fury, a civilian painter and sandblaster working on the sub, was indicted on two counts of arson after confessing to starting the fire. Fury admitted to setting the 23 May fire by igniting some rags on the top bunk of a bunk room. He claimed to have started the fire to get out of work early.[10][11][12][13] On 15 March 2013 Fury was sentenced to over 17 years in federal prison and ordered to pay $400 million in restitution.[14]
The final repair bill was going to be between $450 million and $700 million so the Navy just scrapped it.
}:-)4
Not a good omen for surviving in a shooting war and taking hits.
To my understanding, every sailor is a firefighter. Wasn’t the USS Forrestal a wake-up call for the US Navy in regards to it’s firefighting abilities??? Or is the new female pregnant Navy not up to the task any longer. God help us if we go to war!( Just a burned out former Gyrene venting)
It is true. I have often thought of this odd dichotomy.
In war, there are many men who hate being on a given ship, but when that ship was sunk, many men felt tears in their eyes and an empty ache in their heart.
They refer to her as “She”. They lived, worked, and slept on her. They had gone on liberty, jubilantly and fun of vim and vigor running down the gangway in a cluster of uniforms, returning later that night in a happy, alcohol induced fatigue (if we were lucky) just wanting to get back to the rack and pull the curtain and close our eyes...those of us who had curtains.
I think I understand that a little. There were times I hated being where I was, but years later (just months ago, actually) I saw a drone video of the USS JFK in the mothball fleet awaiting disposition.
Her dry, lifeless, cracked and decrepit condition hurt me to see. There was something sad and feeble. She had once been full of men, working hard at jobs with a purpose, and now her sad, oxidized haze gray paint had the look of an elderly woman in a wheelchair.
No.
I think I have a feel for that.
And I think if you go down this thread and look for other men like you and I who spent time on a ship and asked them about this, you would likely find many who understand that feeling.
They lost the U.S.S. MIAMI in 2012 due to a saboteur.
The last time it was a complete loss was when a submarine was deliberately set fire by an arsonist. https://www.wearethemighty.com/articles/submarine-fire-uss-miami
Must have been a phosphate device. Maybe an accidental ignition.
I suppose many of our minds are thinking - sabotage by arson. However, there is nothing left for an arson investigator to begin the investigation.!
At 5:41 p.m. EDT on 23 May 2012, fire crews were called with a report of a fire on Miami while being overhauled at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in Kittery, Maine. At the time the submarine was on a scheduled 20-month maintenance cycle,[4][5] indicating the submarine was undergoing an extensive overhaul called an "Engineering Overhaul".[6]On 23 July 2012 Casey J. Fury, a civilian painter and sandblaster working on the sub, was indicted on two counts of arson after confessing to starting the fire. Fury admitted to setting the 23 May fire by igniting some rags on the top bunk of a bunk room. He claimed to have started the fire to get out of work early.[10][11][12][13] On 15 March 2013 Fury was sentenced to over 17 years in federal prison and ordered to pay $400 million in restitution.[14]
The sub was officially decommissioned on 28 March 2014, to be disposed of via the nuclear Ship-Submarine Recycling Program.[24]