So if a ship is in port with just a duty section on watch if the going gets tough you evacuate?
As a young sailor we were taught that you fight to save the ship. Either that isn’t taught anymore or the rules are different if you are in port. I understand the fire started in the well deck. My old ship also had a well deck that ran nearly the length of the entire ship. We had a salt water wash down system that would drench the entire well deck. You could also ballast and flood the well deck. If it started in the turnaround which is a level up so vehicles could go up to the hangars we had sprinklers lining the walls. If the fire spread to the ship couldn’t they have isolated and re-evaluated? Whatever was needed to save the ship. The timeline as presented so far seems to have the crew evacuating really quick. So if this had happened at sea what would the command have done with no where to go but overboard? As an ex boiler tech who was on the fire response squad that would react to fires in any of our main spaces I have so many questions.
I tranferred from the Coral Sea to the America.
Difference was night and day. America had trash blowing down the hangar bay while in the yards The Coral Sea by comparison was spotless.
Reading about the recent Navy collisions, I would weigh heavily on poor training, poor leadership and willing to bet a poor damage control culture on the ship.
With that being said, the trend even when I was in was to have the shipyard to do as much work pierside as possible. So yardbirds probably still had stuff torn up. They did say equipment was hampering efforts. We’ll see.