How many laundry rooms does an aircraft carrier have? Is this the only one? I suspect it is toast and all of those machines will need to be replaced.
How many I'm not sure it sounds like they had one forward and aft. Supply Dept ran the Laundry but A-Div {engineering} maintained the equipment best I remember. I am also wondering if it was a chemical fire as they also have dry cleaning for officers and enlisted dress blues. My division did the upkeep I remember that much a shop called Hotel Services that maintained Galley, Laundry, ships heating, hot water, and fire pumps was all one shop. WE also had a Machine Shop, Hydraulics, O2N2 Plants, and ships air conditioning and refrigeration shop which I was in. There was also a lot of overlapping in responsibilities. For example E-Division did all the ships electrical work including ours.
I am guess the laundry dried clothes one of two ways electrical or Steam heat exchangers. Electrical would be my guess on the FORD. I'll have to ask one of my shipmates I know who worked Hotel Services how clothes were dried. To be honest most Snipes {Engineering} did not use ships laundry. Each shop pooled in $10 or so each and one of us went to but a household washing machine we shared. Generally we did this each deployment. That made laundry happy because our uniforms were usually filthy with oil grease etc.
From what I can read they are electric dryers. I also saw mention of also having a smaller laundry kind of hinting at self service on that one. Lint removal should have been at least a D-1 on the equipment's PMS requirement meaning daily.
The overlords in DC both in Congress and Pentagon need to pull their heads out of their butts. You can not put a ship to sea for nearly a year and not believe it won't harm ship nor crew. We are at a bare bones carrier fleet. The very fact of FORDS deployment's prove it. The reactor can run 50 years the crew and auxiliary machinery can't hold up to this type over abuse. This has been happening since the days of GHW Bush and it needs to end.
Put on hold the CVN builds and build four conventional CV's then resume CVN building. SWE can have three - four CV's active and on deployment schedule in the times Newport News is taking to build one CVN and a CV which is conventional steamer have the same maintenance downtime requirement as a CVN. The forever deployed CV capability is urban legend farce. It's not possible and it needs correction. We need to be back up to 15 active duty carriers. If left uncorrected the CVN build program and our carrier fleet will collapse to about 6.