Last time I checked, the fire was controlled to be away from munitions and fuel. The stuff burning is pretty much anything that isn't metal scattered around the ship.
I'm obviously ignorant on this, but I would have expected anything short of munitions or fuel would not have caused this much damage on something as advanced as an aircraft carrier. The article mentioned that having fewer crew members made it harder to handle, but having 160 crew on board with fire and smoke detectors doesn't seem like it should have resulted in this. I hope to one day read the report on how this happened, I clearly have a lot to learn.
Apparently the fire suppression systems were locked out to facilitate the work and the doors/hatches had temporary cabling/hoses/vents running through them which prevented the crew from quickly locking down areas and control the spread.
Have you ever been on a massive ship? 844 feet long and only 160 crew. How many rooms do you think the boat has? The ship is almost of the size of a Manhattan city block. Imagine a small skyscraper incased in a steel hull.
If the fire was in control it wouldn’t still be burning. This isn’t a forest fire where controlled burns can keep smoldering for days. If the fire was in control it wouldn’t still be burning.
edit: Downvote all you want but if the fire was in control it wouldn’t still be burning.
> McGrath described military shipyards in general as places “where an almost insane devotion to safety, good housekeeping and procedural compliance is required. It’s hard to imagine one or more of those things not being involved in the cause or spread of the fire.”
It seems like the culture of safety and competence of the US Pacific Fleet is not what it was. Another example is the USS John McCain colliding with a freighter[0]. Then there was the whole Fat Leonard corruption scandal[1]. Maybe these are just anecdata and a side effect of greater attention.
Multiple news sources have called the ship "old" at 23 years, and more succeptable to fires because of its age. I mean, we knew about fire back in 1995 when the thing was designed (I was alive back then, and I knew about fire).
I don't know anything about shipbuilding, but isn't the US Navy full of much older ships that aren't considered fire hazards? Is there something special about this one? It had a halon system (that didn't work).
I understand that, but why is a 23-year old ship considered old? USS Nimitz is nearing 50 years old. Wikipedia [1] lists a bunch of ships built in the 70s and 80s. USS Bonhomme Richard appears to be newer than half the ships there.
It’s not. Commenters on HN know jack shit about this topic but love commenting like they have any idea. It’s the thing HN is most known-for: non-experts speaking out of their ass with top-tier confidence.
Edit: it’s not even halfway through its projected lifecycle.
Well. Given that I've planned and rehearsed operations with this exact ship, I'll stand by my comment - this ship and its guts are hardly new. In colloquial terms - "old."
It’s not old. It’s not new. Wasp classes have a half-century lifespan. It’s one of the newest Wasp classes to be commissioned. You still have plankholders on active duty. By ship standards this is not an old ship.
Halon being tagged out wouldn't have influenced the outcome here. Lower V is not Halon protected. MMR1 below it is, but not V. The next closest Halon compartment would have been FWD EDG, which would have been beyond too late once the fire reached it. The AFFF system would have made short work of the fire, had it not been tagged out / in IEM -- definitely affected the fire attack.
I did two years on Iwo, and BZ to the Bonny crew. They did all they could have with those fire trees with plastic nozzles until help arrived.
BTW were you aboard the Iwo in 2005? I was a Marine deployed w/ SPMAGTF Katrina down there and we got “evacuated” on the Iwo Jima when another hurricane was bearing down on the area. It was a Marine battalion along with a lot of civilians. Don’t remember how long I was aboard but a few days certainly, before disembarking in norfolk or somewhere thereabouts.
It was laid down in 1995, that's not particularly old for a naval vessel in general. The Wasp class are still active, their replacements are just now entering service, and there was no plan to decommission it that I'm aware of.
Whether it gets repaired or not is more of a financial decision than anything else. Surely the hull has many decades left.
The fire has been raging for 2 days now and the forward mast has collapsed. I'd be absolutely shocked if that ship sailed again.
Steel really warps when you heat it up. Each compartment needs to be water tight. Just fixing the doorways alone would be a monumental task. Not to mention all the cabling and equipment that needs to be replaced. The amount of labor it will take to fix the steel will probably more than just laying down an entire new ship.
Yeah, not just costs, but also scheduling concerns. The amount of spaces in shipyards is not elastic. The amount of labor needed for the repairs is not elastic. How will deferring the maintenance of other ships that are operation impact ship availability and how much will deferring maintenance end up costing those other ships in additional repairs?
Unfortunately, the military is run by MBAs now. There's no excess funding available for emergencies. Every penny is allocated, and it's still not enough. I was on a smaller amphib class ship, we routinely ran out of budget for replacement parts. Every quarter was an exercise in prioritizing what was going to be fixed and what was going to not get fixed because we simply didn't have the budget for maintenance.
Another concern is the crew. You've now got 200 or so sailors with nothing to do. Are they supposed to just mill about and wait for the ship to be repaired for a couple years? The crew will need to be rotated to other assignments. Now, you have a ship with no crew, it's going to have to go basically through the entire commissioning process again, sea trials, etc.
age isn't the issue...metal structure and repair cost is
pretty much the entire structure seems to be destroyed. Undoing that damage and then rebuilding what was destroyed will be effectively (if not greater than) the cost of just buying a new one.
Even if you could repair it, you don't want to. A large amount of the metal has been heated to very high and unknown temperatures. Typically, the concern is three things [0]: dimensional changes (i.e., you warped your entire ship), increased corrosion (hot metal rust faster), and permanent reduction in strength (like, >50% permanent reduction in strength). Now add in that the fire has almost certainly burned or boiled the paint off the external surfaces that are contacting sea water. That paint is the the skin of the ship, any of that underlying steel would need to be expected, cleaned, and likely repaired.
Age isn't the issue, the damage is. It would be like trying to renovate a burned out house. At some point it's not a renovation its a teardown.
EDIT: adding the obvious 'this is my opinion based on observations and I have no first hand data on this ship' qualifciation
Do we know if this was possibly not an accident, but a hostile act by one of our adversaries? Taking one of the 8 USNavy’d mini-carriers without a fight is certainly something China dreams about...
No, that's a rather preposterous idea. What exactly would China gain from this that would be worth the possible blowback?
The CCP's #1 priority is stability to enable continued economic development. That's why they advance their more adversarial goals via sustained incremental efforts. They view democracies as vulnerable as they so often change leadership, whereas they can sustain very long term goals.
Life tends to be more banal than James Bond. The simple explanation here is that something went wrong and sparked a fire during maintenance work, likely welding, and because the ship was in dock with a bazillion service lines running through the hatches, the fire was able to spread to find fuel trivially. Based on a comment I read from one of the DC folks fighting the fire, they don't know the origin, but they do know it got into the fuel lines, which caused a minor explosion. The odds are pretty high they're just gonna have to let the fuel burn off.
Of course I know about the Cole. But this was not a bomb. There's a pretty clear difference in frequency of ships bombed in port vs ones that simply catch fire. The whole point of terrorism is to create a public spectacle and take credit for it.
And of course, now we've shifted the goal posts yet again from "It was China!" to "It was terrorist!" with none of this changes in belief motivated by new information or evidence.
anybody else having a hard time caring about this? we spend so much on the military and in the meantime threaten to defund schools that don't open.
in fact, if i'm honest, there's a part of me that enjoys seeing this burn. not that i want any humans to be hurt at all, don't get me wrong, but can't we change our priorities?
Military funding is just something we will have to live with, regardless of any kind of social movement. The military is one the few institutions that enjoys Bipartisan support, there is also ample evidence that military funding keeps the American economy humming. Accidents such as this will always happen, regardless of the best safeguards in place; it is the cost of maintaining a large naval force.
At the cost of defunding schools? Most certainly not. The US has enough to fund schools and the military; the lack of federal funding is purely political on the part of the current administration.
It is a cruel irony of Earth that our atmosphere is made up of such an odd mixture. It’s odd to think that air itself is outright dangerous.
Four fifths of the fluid in which we live and breath ranges from inert to noble. The remaining fifth is one of the most dangerous, angry, reactive, poisonous gasses we know: Oxygen.
It is crucial to life and yet at the same time is quite capable of partially or completely destroying everything we hold dear. Our tools, belongings, us, our homes, warships, forests, crops and savannahs. It needn’t even burn with a flame: most things will decay in its presence with or without spectacle.
If one encountered a planet where almost everything was made of gelatinous gasoline, whose principle inhabitants were a form of highly evolved sentient matchstick that kept striking boards as pets, one might think them a little risk averse. Then of course you’d realize that life and society on this planet have evolved in such a way because they are neither unfortunate or insane enough to live on a world that’s blanketed in O₂.
On a visit to this planet you explain to their ambassador about the atmosphere on your home world. She doesn’t know whether to laugh hysterically or faint in horror. The knowledge terrifies her and she takes deep methane breaths while stroking her phosphorous hands on tibbles-the-striking-board, trying to calm down. You decide it’s best not to further disturb her with stories of plate tectonics and the major cities, nuclear reactors, etc your people have built on fault lines, at sea level.
> One fifth is the most dangerous, angry, reactive, poisonous gas we know.
Obviously you're utilizing hyperbole here, but I'm assuming you're referring to oxygen's oxidative potential (really "standard reduction potential"), but other gases have significantly higher reduction potentials than oxygen. Fluorine and Chlorine cause bigger, hotter fires at conditions that would generally be considered "non-flammable" if oxygen were involved instead. They also corrode/rust things faster than oxygen does.
Charts like [0] are misleading because they list the standard reduction potential of the monoatomic forms, which isn't realistic when most of these form diatomic gases (e.g. Cl2, O2, etc).
Both fluorine and chlorine gases are more oxidative than oxygen. Chlorine has electron affinity of -2.4 eV and while O2 is -0.4 eV.
> the problem was its collection and containment. Fluorine chemically reacts with just about everything, usually very vigorously. He fashioned collection vials from platinum, palladium and gold. All were destroyed.
As to the GP:
> > the most dangerous, angry, reactive, poisonous gas we know
To continue the nitpicking, bear in mind that a gas is just one phase of matter for a particular chemical. What we're really after then is something from among the most reactive chemicals we know. I nominate dioxygen difluoride which will (for example) react with liquid methane at -180C. It's antics are summarized by Derek Lowe. (https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2010/02/23/th...)
Fires on a ship can spread scarily fast, which is one reason sailors devote so much time underway to cleaning--I've heard anecdotal stories of at least one lethal fire spreading through a ship's ventilation system due to the amount of combustible stuff it sucked up.
In port, a ship may be particularly vulnerable to this sort of thing, partially because fire boundaries that are normally closed while underway may be open to facilitate maintenance.
The fire here broke out in the lower V, close to one of the ship's magazines but pretty far from a lot of the bulk fuel (although there are a number of fuel pipes in and around the area in order to facilitate fueling assault craft and ground vehicles, which may be contributing to the fire with residual fuel).
Fortunately, even if there is a magazine in close proximity to the fire, it's likely well-protected, and unlikely to be full of ordnance. Furthermore, ordnance approved for shipboard operation has special thermal coating to reduce the likelihood of cook-off, which may be enough to protect it against the indirect heat of a fire on the other side of a bulkhead.
I've read some comments by someone that's been on scene since the start as one of the DC teams.
No ordinance is in the magazines. It's standard procedure to unloaded it at a pier specially designed for that task before extended port stays.
The fire has definitely reach the fuel lines you mention, and they're sustaining the fire. The team my commenter was a part of was one of the first to try to push inside. They made it about 25 feet in. The floor was so hot their team leaders boots melted. The writer said he had to stand on a pile of hose to avoid the same problem. The heat pushed them back out after less than half an hour. His opinion was that there was little choice but to just let the fuel burn off.
I think this would be the first U.S. capital ship lost since WWII.
It's also interesting that China, Russia, and now the U.S. have all lost carriers while undergoing construction / maintenaince in just the past few years:
One month ago, the French Navy lost the nuclear submarine "La Perle" meanwhile the ship was being maintained. The similarities with the "Bonhomme Richard" accident are striking.
According to Wikipedia, the Richard refers to"Poor Richard's almanac" a publication of Benjamin Franklin, who was US ambassador to France when John Paul Jones named the original Bonhomme Richard in his honour.
>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]
Wow, uh, that's a lot of money. Is this the poorest individual (by assets sans debts) in America? I can't imagine anyone being able to acquire personal debt on that scale by any other means.
52 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 122 ms ] threadedit: Downvote all you want but if the fire was in control it wouldn’t still be burning.
It seems like the culture of safety and competence of the US Pacific Fleet is not what it was. Another example is the USS John McCain colliding with a freighter[0]. Then there was the whole Fat Leonard corruption scandal[1]. Maybe these are just anecdata and a side effect of greater attention.
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_John_S._McCain_and_Alnic_M... 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fat_Leonard_scandal
Hypersonic missiles. Ballistic lasers. Cyber weapons. And other things that will make your skin crawl.
I don't know anything about shipbuilding, but isn't the US Navy full of much older ships that aren't considered fire hazards? Is there something special about this one? It had a halon system (that didn't work).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_current_ships_of_the_U...
Edit: it’s not even halfway through its projected lifecycle.
I did two years on Iwo, and BZ to the Bonny crew. They did all they could have with those fire trees with plastic nozzles until help arrived.
Whether it gets repaired or not is more of a financial decision than anything else. Surely the hull has many decades left.
Steel really warps when you heat it up. Each compartment needs to be water tight. Just fixing the doorways alone would be a monumental task. Not to mention all the cabling and equipment that needs to be replaced. The amount of labor it will take to fix the steel will probably more than just laying down an entire new ship.
It'll be an interesting decision.
Unfortunately, the military is run by MBAs now. There's no excess funding available for emergencies. Every penny is allocated, and it's still not enough. I was on a smaller amphib class ship, we routinely ran out of budget for replacement parts. Every quarter was an exercise in prioritizing what was going to be fixed and what was going to not get fixed because we simply didn't have the budget for maintenance.
Another concern is the crew. You've now got 200 or so sailors with nothing to do. Are they supposed to just mill about and wait for the ship to be repaired for a couple years? The crew will need to be rotated to other assignments. Now, you have a ship with no crew, it's going to have to go basically through the entire commissioning process again, sea trials, etc.
It's all a logistical nightmare.
pretty much the entire structure seems to be destroyed. Undoing that damage and then rebuilding what was destroyed will be effectively (if not greater than) the cost of just buying a new one.
Even if you could repair it, you don't want to. A large amount of the metal has been heated to very high and unknown temperatures. Typically, the concern is three things [0]: dimensional changes (i.e., you warped your entire ship), increased corrosion (hot metal rust faster), and permanent reduction in strength (like, >50% permanent reduction in strength). Now add in that the fire has almost certainly burned or boiled the paint off the external surfaces that are contacting sea water. That paint is the the skin of the ship, any of that underlying steel would need to be expected, cleaned, and likely repaired.
Age isn't the issue, the damage is. It would be like trying to renovate a burned out house. At some point it's not a renovation its a teardown.
EDIT: adding the obvious 'this is my opinion based on observations and I have no first hand data on this ship' qualifciation
[0] https://www.edtengineers.com/blog-post/fire-effects-steel
I assume that's some sort of contrived neutral nickname for the ship. It's the Bonny Dick to sailors and always will be.
The CCP's #1 priority is stability to enable continued economic development. That's why they advance their more adversarial goals via sustained incremental efforts. They view democracies as vulnerable as they so often change leadership, whereas they can sustain very long term goals.
Life tends to be more banal than James Bond. The simple explanation here is that something went wrong and sparked a fire during maintenance work, likely welding, and because the ship was in dock with a bazillion service lines running through the hatches, the fire was able to spread to find fuel trivially. Based on a comment I read from one of the DC folks fighting the fire, they don't know the origin, but they do know it got into the fuel lines, which caused a minor explosion. The odds are pretty high they're just gonna have to let the fuel burn off.
My real life includes attacks on US naval vessels that kill people and destroy equipment.
And of course, now we've shifted the goal posts yet again from "It was China!" to "It was terrorist!" with none of this changes in belief motivated by new information or evidence.
in fact, if i'm honest, there's a part of me that enjoys seeing this burn. not that i want any humans to be hurt at all, don't get me wrong, but can't we change our priorities?
At the cost of defunding schools? Most certainly not. The US has enough to fund schools and the military; the lack of federal funding is purely political on the part of the current administration.
Navy: oh, really?
...
Navy: Can we have funding for a replacement carrier?
Four fifths of the fluid in which we live and breath ranges from inert to noble. The remaining fifth is one of the most dangerous, angry, reactive, poisonous gasses we know: Oxygen.
It is crucial to life and yet at the same time is quite capable of partially or completely destroying everything we hold dear. Our tools, belongings, us, our homes, warships, forests, crops and savannahs. It needn’t even burn with a flame: most things will decay in its presence with or without spectacle.
If one encountered a planet where almost everything was made of gelatinous gasoline, whose principle inhabitants were a form of highly evolved sentient matchstick that kept striking boards as pets, one might think them a little risk averse. Then of course you’d realize that life and society on this planet have evolved in such a way because they are neither unfortunate or insane enough to live on a world that’s blanketed in O₂.
On a visit to this planet you explain to their ambassador about the atmosphere on your home world. She doesn’t know whether to laugh hysterically or faint in horror. The knowledge terrifies her and she takes deep methane breaths while stroking her phosphorous hands on tibbles-the-striking-board, trying to calm down. You decide it’s best not to further disturb her with stories of plate tectonics and the major cities, nuclear reactors, etc your people have built on fault lines, at sea level.
Obviously you're utilizing hyperbole here, but I'm assuming you're referring to oxygen's oxidative potential (really "standard reduction potential"), but other gases have significantly higher reduction potentials than oxygen. Fluorine and Chlorine cause bigger, hotter fires at conditions that would generally be considered "non-flammable" if oxygen were involved instead. They also corrode/rust things faster than oxygen does.
Charts like [0] are misleading because they list the standard reduction potential of the monoatomic forms, which isn't realistic when most of these form diatomic gases (e.g. Cl2, O2, etc).
Both fluorine and chlorine gases are more oxidative than oxygen. Chlorine has electron affinity of -2.4 eV and while O2 is -0.4 eV.
0: https://www.angelo.edu/faculty/kboudrea/periodic/trends_elec...
(Also, hyperbole clarified.)
"Generally considered non-flammable" doesn't even begin to describe it. From (http://www.lateralscience.co.uk/Fluorine/Fluorine.html):
> the problem was its collection and containment. Fluorine chemically reacts with just about everything, usually very vigorously. He fashioned collection vials from platinum, palladium and gold. All were destroyed.
As to the GP:
> > the most dangerous, angry, reactive, poisonous gas we know
To continue the nitpicking, bear in mind that a gas is just one phase of matter for a particular chemical. What we're really after then is something from among the most reactive chemicals we know. I nominate dioxygen difluoride which will (for example) react with liquid methane at -180C. It's antics are summarized by Derek Lowe. (https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2010/02/23/th...)
In port, a ship may be particularly vulnerable to this sort of thing, partially because fire boundaries that are normally closed while underway may be open to facilitate maintenance.
Here's a diagram showing a rough LHD cross-section near the bottom of the page: https://fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/ship/lhd-1.htm
The fire here broke out in the lower V, close to one of the ship's magazines but pretty far from a lot of the bulk fuel (although there are a number of fuel pipes in and around the area in order to facilitate fueling assault craft and ground vehicles, which may be contributing to the fire with residual fuel).
Fortunately, even if there is a magazine in close proximity to the fire, it's likely well-protected, and unlikely to be full of ordnance. Furthermore, ordnance approved for shipboard operation has special thermal coating to reduce the likelihood of cook-off, which may be enough to protect it against the indirect heat of a fire on the other side of a bulkhead.
No ordinance is in the magazines. It's standard procedure to unloaded it at a pier specially designed for that task before extended port stays.
The fire has definitely reach the fuel lines you mention, and they're sustaining the fire. The team my commenter was a part of was one of the first to try to push inside. They made it about 25 feet in. The floor was so hot their team leaders boots melted. The writer said he had to stand on a pile of hose to avoid the same problem. The heat pushed them back out after less than half an hour. His opinion was that there was little choice but to just let the fuel burn off.
It's also interesting that China, Russia, and now the U.S. have all lost carriers while undergoing construction / maintenaince in just the past few years:
https://www.cnn.com/2019/12/12/europe/russian-carrier-fire-i... https://www.forbes.com/sites/hisutton/2020/04/11/brand-new-c...
Something to bond over, I guess. Dangerous work, and I hope everybody stays safe, better a carrier burns in peacetime than a life lost.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Miami_(SSN-755)
Wow, uh, that's a lot of money. Is this the poorest individual (by assets sans debts) in America? I can't imagine anyone being able to acquire personal debt on that scale by any other means.