Never been on a ship myself.
As a civilian, it would seem to me that, on a military vessel, everything would have a designated place and that storing items appropriately would be an accepted fact of life.
I guess I could maybe understand some degree of chaos on an army base, but this is a warship - a mostly closed, constantly moving environment whose job is to go into battle. Its difficult to comprehend things just lying around. Not only is it inefficient, its dangerous. It would seem that seconds or minutes wasted either scrambling around things where they aren’t supposed to be, or not being able to find things because they aren’t where they are supposed to be, could mean the loss of the ship or life during a crisis.
I’m sorry for the loss of the officers’ careers, but we’re at war and this is an expensive and important piece of hardware, damaged by a small chain of preventable events.
Give me a break...the no-smoke nazis will have a fit....what about those majority of smokers on flat-tops during WWll, Korea, Vietnam...how ere they able to accomodate smokers? A bunch of posters here sound like the anti-gun, antiSuv nazis...what about finding a policy that allows smokers some designated place to smoke. It is legal and gets taxed to death, paying for a lot of the freight for the Navy and other Gov. spendthrift ideas!
Lots of stuff is in storage until you need it. So, it has to be stowed properly.
80 spaces!?! Poor leadership or bad luck, take your pick. And it took 12 hours? This, to me, is indicative of declining standards. There is a chain of command, but everyone on that ship is a warrior. This was beyond FUBAR to take 12 hours. Yeah, I got the part about the ventilation systems, but a whole lot of people were also panicing and being stupid that day, starting with the CO and XO. They had to go. One look at their faces - I’m glad.
There was a report a few months ago about how maintenance throughout the fleet has been rotting horribly in order to cut costs. Some inspectors asserted some ships on the line were not ready to fight. That should scare you.
This event looks like one of the results. Hopefully this is a wake up call to reinvigorate maintenance standards.
Also, Chrisser, it is not a given that you only do things on the ship a certain way in order to maintain top condition. People get lazy, forgetful, tired, including the officers responsible. So, you need a group of dedicated assholes to keep the pressure on everyone else. The CPOs were a mixed bunch, but the best ones were absolutely your go to guys.
There is not an entire ship in any navy anywhere in the world where absolutely everything is in its place, as per regulations, all the time. And, it's also a fact of life that the book is often wrong, out of date, or just plain stupid in places.
Captains have godlike authority to change things, XO has the captain's authority to look for things that work, close one eye when something that does work does not quite meet regulations, and otherwise keep the ship doing what it's supposed to do.
But here? Nope. This was a major screw up plain and simple. You can't tell me that the CPO and Division officer who had that oil stored there didn't know it wasn't supposed to be there — and WHY it wasn't supposed to be there.
That means the Division officer was not particularly worried about getting his ass handed to him by his Department head, which means the Department head was not sufficiently motivated by his XO who was not, for whatever reason, doing his job to support his CO.
The Navy runs its ships the way it does based on institutional knowledge and experience that goes all the way back to John Paul Jones, and further back to the Royal Navy if you want to look at it that way. There are good and solid reasons WHY the CO has such authority and there is also good and solid reasons why their nuts are on the line when they screw up.
This incident proves it. Like I said, they get no sympathy from me. Not only did their carelessness take a major chunk of US seapower off the table for several months at the cost of 77 odd million clams, the incident had major international repercussions in that made the George Washington look like a freaking frat house party boat at just the time when the US Government was trying to convince the Japanese that having a nuclear powered carrier homeported in Yokosuka was a good idea.
If I was the CNO, that Captain would spend whatever time he had left in uniform as the officer in charge of a yard tugboat in Adak on an unaccompanied tour.