Posted on 11/30/2020 2:13:44 PM PST by Lower Deck
The Navy will scrap the USS Bonhomme Richard after a fire burned aboard the amphibious assault ship for nearly five days in July and rendered it unsalvageable, the service announced Monday.
After “thorough consideration,” the Navy has decided to decommission the ship “due to the extensive damage” from the blaze, the service said in a statement.
“We did not come to this decision lightly,” Navy Secretary Kenneth Braithwaite said in the release. “Following an extensive material assessment in which various courses of action were considered and evaluated, we came to the conclusion that it is not fiscally responsible to restore her.”
The Navy estimated that repairing the ship could cost more than $3 billion and take between five and seven years, a price tag and timeline that service leaders did not find feasible.
(Excerpt) Read more at thehill.com ...
How many ships did we produce during WWII, and at what price tag for each class?
It probably is superstitious to some degree.
Let’s put it this way;
Would you like to go on a cruise aboard the
“new and improved” USS Titanic?
Ouch, that is a $4.4 billion hit!
These ships are not going to be very useful in a real war. One hit and they burn up.
That was 80 years ago. You know that, right?
China gets stronger, the U.S. gets weaker.
Honestly, I think it would be hard to justify spending that time and money to refurbish a 30 year old ship. Ships aren’t designed for an infinite lifespan, ocean water is hard on steel and those hulls get thin over decades of use. I am not an expert in LHDs but I’d have to guess this was approaching the end of it’s originally projected lifespan. Of course in the modern era the USN is forced to squeeze every drop of life out of vessels but if it becomes a burnt out husk it’s time to move on.
They were in the hands of the shipyard with most of the crew ashore and flammable crap everywhere. A whole lot different than combat conditions.
Lots. They didn't have computers, they didn't have radars, they didn't have missiles, they were mostly made to be disposable. But yeah, they made them cheap and fast.
“To decommission and scrap the ship will cost the Navy about $30 million and take between nine months and one year, Ver Hage noted”
Call the waste, fraud, and abuse hotline.
I’d do it in a month for $5 million. And I’d only charge that much because I could.
Did it have a light metal superstructure? High temperature light metal conflagrations can be impossible to extinguish in certain circumstances. Sit back and watch it burn until the fire runs out of fuel.
One has to ask....would the ship have survived at all if it was deployed and took a hit from a war shot?
Essex-class carriers had wooden flight decks.
One has to ask if the ship was designed for war with advanced fire suppression why did it burn up so easily?
What a loss. The Bonnie Dick was to be a “pocket carrier”, able to deploy with up to 15 F-35B’s, as opposed to the antique AV-8B Harriers she previously carried. We will not build another LHD to replace her, but we are building the America (LHA-6) class, which is also a pocket carrier.
Where was the fire suppresion system?
Where was the standing fire watch if the suppresion system was tagged out?
Where was the fire brigade?
This whole ship was a cluster waiting to happen. The captain should be court marshalled at a minimum!.
They have steel hulls and waves beating on them for 30 years wears on them. Eventually if you keep using them, the steel cracks and that’s that.
Gonna spend $30 million to scrap it.
When at dock for maintenance like this you don’t have a full crew aboard with every sailor a trained fire-fighter.
4 billion bucks into the dumper.
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