“The penalty”
All of the posts so far have focused on the arson.
Do we wonder why an entire ship was burned to scrap because of a small initial blaze. Don’t ships have doors to close off areas of the ship? Don’t ships have fire control equipment?
Provocative questions posed on a morning talk show.
Someone called in and said the ship was undergoing major upgrades and the ship’s power was off, etc., so it wasn’t a fully protected warship at the time.
Yes. There were likely little (or absent) watches, very sparsely inhabited, no compartmental integrity, fire suppression deactivated, and so on.
As I said in a previous post, fire is almost always the greatest peril to a naval vessel, and sailors spend (or at least used to spend, when it wasn’t being cut into by diversity training and CRT training) a great deal of time learning how to prevent it and fight it.
I always felt that US Navy damage control teams were well enough trained and proficient enough to fight fires caused by battle damage, and suppress nearly any fire that started in a compartment.
I don’t feel that way anymore, but even now with training and proficiency apparently quite low, if that ship had been fully manned and at sea, I doubt the fire would have been more than a blip in a typical day, it would have been suppressed in no time.
Of course, with the Fitzgerald and McCain incidents, I even wonder about fire-fighting capabilities now.