Posted on 07/13/2020 2:26:03 PM PDT by NRx
More than 400 sailors are working to put out the massive fire that continues to rage aboard the USS Bonhomme Richard in San Diego and Navy officials are unclear how long the blaze might continue to burn.
The fire has brought down the amphibious assault ship's forward mast and caused other damage to the ship's superstructure that rises above its flight deck.
"There is a tremendous amount of heat underneath and that's where it's -- it's flashing up -- also forward, closer to the bow again there's a heat source and we're trying to get to that as well," Rear Adm. Philip Sobeck, the commander of Expeditionary Strike Group 3 said at a news conference Monday in San Diego.
More than 400 sailors are working to put out the massive fire that continues to rage aboard the USS Bonhomme Richard in San Diego and Navy officials are unclear how long the blaze might continue to burn.
The fire has brought down the amphibious assault ship's forward mast and caused other damage to the ship's superstructure that rises above its flight deck.
"There is a tremendous amount of heat underneath and that's where it's -- it's flashing up -- also forward, closer to the bow again there's a heat source and we're trying to get to that as well," Rear Adm. Philip Sobeck, the commander of Expeditionary Strike Group 3 said at a news conference Monday in San Diego.
(Excerpt) Read more at abcnews.go.com ...
You’d think, right? Maybe they figured he’d write the next Harry Potter series in prison and they could take his royalties.
}:-)4
The Royal Navy found out the hard way in the Falklands what happens to aluminum superstructures when they get hit by a missile. It wasn’t pretty and cost them a couple of destroyers or frigates.
}:-)4
Those ships didn’t have a a signifigant amount of aluminum in the structure. The Bonhomme Richard does.
CC
Is it Trump’s fault yet?
The last time it was a complete loss was when a submarine was deliberately set fire by an arsonist. https://www.wearethemighty.com/articles/submarine-fire-uss-miami
It has to be fought a compartment at a time. Very difficult. Every sailor has to go through shipboard firefighting training annually when attached to a ship or squadron.
Must have been a phosphate device. Maybe an accidental ignition.
I suppose many of our minds are thinking - sabotage by arson. However, there is nothing left for an arson investigator to begin the investigation.!
No, actually, they didnt. Of the four warships they lost, two were all steel construction. The two that had aluminum decks and superstructures were hit by armor piercing free-fall bombs that went in through the steel hull and exploded - one was a 1000lb bomb that immediately set off the magazines and the other was hit by multiple 500lb/250kg bombs in the rear engineering spaces that immediately ignited the fuel, destroyed the engines and rudder controls and opened huge rents in the hull below the water. In both the aluminum ships cases, the damage they took rendered the question of their superstructure materials irrelevant.
The two destroyers that ate Exocet missiles were all-steel.
At this point it probably involves burning solids and paint and possibly electrical and liquid fuel.
The ship was undergoing refit to be able to fly the F-35B. None of the aircraft was aboard and the flight deck was covered with equipment, gear and supplies being used in the deck conversion.
Saltwater would ruin everything electric on the ship. It would be a total loss.
Active Captain has the Navy slips at 32 to 37ft. Ship draws 29ft. Say the deck is 29 ft above water(just a guess), they would have to find 55+ feet of water to get it below water.
Usually the aircraft are not on the ship when in port.
At 5:41 p.m. EDT on 23 May 2012, fire crews were called with a report of a fire on Miami while being overhauled at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in Kittery, Maine. At the time the submarine was on a scheduled 20-month maintenance cycle,[4][5] indicating the submarine was undergoing an extensive overhaul called an "Engineering Overhaul".[6]On 23 July 2012 Casey J. Fury, a civilian painter and sandblaster working on the sub, was indicted on two counts of arson after confessing to starting the fire. 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]
The sub was officially decommissioned on 28 March 2014, to be disposed of via the nuclear Ship-Submarine Recycling Program.[24]
Modern anti-ship missiles render WW2 style armor useless or worse - a hit from a modern ship killer missile to heavy armor will go through the armor *and* convert the armor into secondary projectile fragments causing far more damage.
Put it to you this way - there are modern man-portable antitank missiles on the world market that can go through **880mm or 31 inches** of rolled homogenous steel armor plate. That is more armor than any WW2 combatant ever dreamed of mounting, and capital ship anti shipping missiles are the same thing only much larger and much worse news for their targets. Armor beyond the ability to shrug off small arms or light auto cannon fire is pretty much pointless these days.
Even Marines have to take firefighting when they are attached to a ship. At least air wing Marines do.
Where do they use lots of aluminum ?
***public domain image, from Wikipedia not the news source.***
This is going to sound super-stupid but I’ll ask anyway: I know every sailor is a fireman. But does the Navy have teams of damage control specialists that train as intensely as their SEAL teams do? Imagine every naval base having a body of sailors—depending on the size of the base and the kind of the ships that routinely call—whose speciality is to augment (and maybe direct) the extinguishing of fires and neutralizing of other hazards to ship in port? And like the SEALs they train up constantly until called for a mission.
Maybe everything that could be done was done for the BHR. But it seems like the Navy loses a lot ships to events that were either preventable or manageable.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.