Navy News

[mrsmackpaul]

I wonder the same thing, I just cant understand how it got this out of hand,surely the area were the fire is could of been sealed off with water tight doors shut and then that area flooded

To my untrained brain even if it was oil floating on water and it prevented flooding the use of foam or powder of some type could of been used to fill the compartment  or compartments

 

Gunna be one hell of a bill for this mess

 

Paul 

[41chevy]

On 7/19/2019 at 9:53 PM, HeavyGunner said:

Has there ever been a ship besides this one sunk by enemies just off of our shore?  Very interesting read to say the least. 

USS San Diego Heavy Cruiser was sunk in WWI on December 11 1918 only  8 miles of Fire Island L.I.N.Y by  German  Uboat U156 who laid mines along the south shore of .L.I.

The Eagle 56 was the last U.S. warship sunk in the war with Germany,  the same Uboat sunk a freighter off Cape Cod the next day. The subs captain was disobeying his orders given by Admiral Dornitz to surrender his boat  6 days prior. His Uboat was sunk off Block Island after it was depth charged for 22 hours by ships and dirigibles

The 60  Eagle class boats were build by Ford in 1918 on an assembly line.

https://www.thehenryford.org/collections-and-research/digital-collections/expert-sets/101745#mod=exhibit-view

http://www.sunnycv.com/steve/WW2Timeline/eagleboat.html

 

 

[carlotpilot]

great history lesson  paul   never knew we had ford battleships ` learn something new every day

[Quickfarms]

Seems to be some pretty piss poor damage control on that ship. Ship is in port so it should not be loaded with equipment. That doesn't leave much else to burn. How in the hell did they not get watertight doors closed to prevent/slow the spread of that fire so they could get a handle on it?

The ship is in the yard for work.

The crew was significantly reduced from 1,000 to just over a hundred.

The skeleton crew was probably occupied with rescuing the rest of there small crew and evacuation.

The fire suppression system was not operational due to maintenance.

Why there was not a significant fire watch on board during the maintenance of the fire suppression system is the real question or was that the duty of the crew that was onboard.

[Quickfarms]

Lots of questions

Fire suppression system was halon

Maybe this is SOP for a ship that is in the yard

Was it just bad timing with yard work and weekend liberty

[mrsmackpaul]

3 hours ago, Quickfarms said:

 

The ship is in the yard for work.

The crew was significantly reduced from 1,000 to just over a hundred.

The skeleton crew was probably occupied with rescuing the rest of there small crew and evacuation.

The fire suppression system was not operational due to maintenance.

Why there was not a significant fire watch on board during the maintenance of the fire suppression system is the real question or was that the duty of the crew that was onboard.
 

 

I was working at one of the major power stations in Victoria Australia when a signal fuse to Melbourne a 100 mile away was pulled in the switch yard

The snow ball effect from one tiny fuse was instant and irreversible 

The emergency power batteries were out of action for maintenance at the time 

This caused a unbelievable chain of events 

Coal fired power stations need lots and lots of water to get going and to shut down

They also need lots of oil pumped to the turbine bearings 

No power at all and the second biggest power station in the state dead, complete black out, all steam released nothing at all and no hope of getting it back on line within 12 hours 

The reason I mention this is, from one tiny thing wrong or missed this could and does happen and may well of been whats happened here 

Like watching those air crash investigation shows, every time its a whole series of small things at a certain time that cause things to go horribly wrong

I believe its called the Swiss cheese effect 

You can have plenty of holes in a block of cheese just as long as they dont all line up at once

 

Paul

[kscarbel2]

12 hours ago, 41chevy said:

USS San Diego Heavy Cruiser was sunk in WWI on December 11 1918 only  8 miles of Fire Island L.I.N.Y by  German  Uboat U156 who laid mines along the south shore of .L.I.

The Eagle 56 was the last U.S. warship sunk in the war with Germany,  the same Uboat sunk a freighter off Cape Cod the next day. The subs captain was disobeying his orders given by Admiral Dornitz to surrender his boat  6 days prior. His Uboat was sunk off Block Island after it was depth charged for 22 hours by ships and dirigibles

The 60  Eagle class boats were build by Ford in 1918 on an assembly line.

https://www.thehenryford.org/collections-and-research/digital-collections/expert-sets/101745#mod=exhibit-view

http://www.sunnycv.com/steve/WW2Timeline/eagleboat.html

https://www.bigmacktrucks.com/topic/51714-navy-news/?tab=comments#comment-428294

 

[kscarbel2]

The event reminds me of the horrible Forrestal Fire.

The US Navy, in the midst of a massive bombing campaign, was running low on munitions. A decision was made to use munitions of WW2 vintage that had been stored for years in Quonset huts in the Philippines. Unstable from the incorrect storage conditions, they caused the Forrestal fire,

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[Quickfarms]

The ship will have some spaces with halon, but it's not shipwide system. They have regular fire mains and foam for burning liquids.
Too shorthanded for an emergency is NEVER sop on a naval vessel.
See above.
Heads should roll over this.

This may be the reason the fire spread

“After about 90 minutes, authorities decided to remove all firefighters from the vessel for safety reasons and battle the blaze by remote means, including water dropped from helicopters and sprayed onto the ship via firefighting boats surrounding it on the bay.”

This is not the navy way to leave the ship

I would think a combined effort involving navy, federal, local firefighters and the ships crew would be the best way to attack the fire.

The ships crew would know the ship and its systems that would be vital to keep the fire from spreading and how to attack it

Unfortunately In my experience the paid firefighters do not take help from outside there community. Actually they fight it!

[kscarbel2]

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[41chevy]

https://www.military.com/daily-news/2020/07/13/two-decks-separate-bonhomme-richard-fire-1m-gallons-of-fuel-admiral-s

Edited July 14, 2020 by 41chevy

[mrsmackpaul]

1 hour ago, Quickfarms said:

Unfortunately In my experience the paid firefighters do not take help from outside there community. Actually they fight it!

 

I have this to be the same in my experience as well 

Paul 

[kscarbel2]

10 minutes ago, Ditchdiggerjcf said:

Complete and utter horsesh*t put forth by someone who doesn't know sh*t, or has an agenda.

The zuni rocket, the rocket the caused the forrestal fire, didn't enter production until the mid 50's. They were not leftover from WW2. That is a lie. 

The long and the short of that is that was an equipment malfunction.

Um, first of all, are you capable of having a conversation without using vulgar language like sh*t ?

Second, what I wrote is what I was told by a Navy fire training instructor from Pensacola. I didn't have any reason not to believe him, nor did I get the impression that he had "an agenda". I don't have an agenda either.

That all said, I do recall the news reported a Zuni missile, a type alleged to be problematic, malfunctioned.

[Quickfarms]

Complete and utter horsesh*t put forth by someone who doesn't know sh*t, or has an agenda.
The zuni rocket, the rocket the caused the forrestal fire, didn't enter production until the mid 50's. They were not leftover from WW2. That is a lie. 
The long and the short of that is that was an equipment malfunction.

Actually the Forrestal Fire has been attributed to EMI, electromagnetic interference.

Do you remember when microwaves first came out and they would cause static on the television when the microwave was in use. That was EMI

[kscarbel2]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1967_USS_Forrestal_fire

On 29 July 1967, a fire broke out on board the aircraft carrier USS Forrestal after an electrical anomaly caused a Zuni rocket on a F-4B Phantom to fire, striking an external fuel tank of an A-4 Skyhawk. The flammable jet fuel spilled across the flight deck, ignited, and triggered a chain-reaction of explosions that killed 134 sailors and injured 161. The disaster prompted the Navy to revise its fire fighting practices. It also modified its weapon handling procedures and installed a deck wash down system on all carriers. The newly established Farrier Fire Fighting School Learning Site in Norfolk, Virginia was named after Chief Gerald W. Farrier, the commander of Damage Control Team 8, who was among the first to die in the fire and explosions.

Unstable ordnance received

On 28 July, the day before the accident, Forrestal was resupplied with ordnance by the ammunition ship USS Diamond Head. The load included sixteen 1,000 lb AN/M65A1 "fat boy" bombs (so nicknamed because of their short, rotund shape), which Diamond Head had picked up from Subic Bay Naval Base and were intended for the next day's second bombing sortie. Some of the batch of AN-M65A1s Forrestal received were more than a decade old, having spent a portion of that exposed to the heat and humidity of Okinawa or Guam,^[10] eventually being improperly stored in open-air Quonset huts at a disused ammunition dump on the periphery of Subic Bay Naval Base. Unlike the thick-cased Mark 83 bombs filled with Composition H6, the AN/M65A1 bombs were thin-skinned and filled with Composition B, an older explosive with greater shock and heat sensitivity.

Unstable bombs stored on deck

With orders to conduct strike missions over North Vietnam the next day, and with no replacement bombs available, Captain Beling reluctantly concluded that he had no choice but to accept the AN-M65A1 bombs in their current condition.^[8][14][15] In one concession to the demands of the ordnance handlers, Beling agreed to store all 16 bombs alone on deck in the "bomb farm" area between the starboard rail and the carrier's island until they were loaded for the next day's missions. Standard procedure was to store them in the ship's magazine with the rest of the air wing's ordnance; had they been stored as standard, an accidental detonation could easily have destroyed the ship.

Incorrect NASA report

A 1995 report, NASA Reference Publication 1374, incorrectly described the Forrestal fire as a result of electromagnetic interference. It states, "a Navy jet landing on the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Forrestal experienced the uncommanded release of munitions that struck a fully armed and fueled fighter on deck... This accident was caused by the landing aircraft being illuminated by carrier based radar, and the resulting EMI sent an unwanted signal to the weapons system."^[

 

[41chevy]

Happened on mission take off. The missile accidentally was launched from an A4 on the take off line when the arm/launch switch was accidentally bumped. The video is made by the U.S.N. from on scene footage from multiple cameras used to review prep, take off and landings for training and such. Approximately 3 minutes in you see the missile launch from the aircraft in the take off line Seems that after the pilot became a Senator from Arizona  the story got "amended" a tad.

https://youtu.be/wJKSVj8ZvNQ

Edited July 14, 2020 by 41chevy

[kscarbel2]

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[mrsmackpaul]

21 hours ago, 41chevy said:

Happened on mission take off. The missile accidentally was launched from an A4 on the take off line when the arm/launch switch was accidentally bumped. The video is made by the U.S.N. from on scene footage from multiple cameras used to review prep, take off and landings for training and such. Approximately 3 minutes in you see the missile launch from the aircraft in the take off line Seems that after the pilot became a Senator from Arizona  the story got "amended" a tad.

https://youtu.be/wJKSVj8ZvNQ

Thats amazing footage, how lucky the rest of us to have that footage 

That may appear to be a strange comment, the footage shows just how quick things can change and how even when people think they are trying to help they can be making it a lot worse 

The ole Swiss Cheese effect right in front of our eye's 

Most of us (me included) cant fully see at times how quick things can get out of hand and how much our own actions can make a bad situation worse 

Paul

[41chevy]

6 hours ago, mrsmackpaul said:

Thats amazing footage, how lucky the rest of us to have that footage 

That may appear to be a strange comment, the footage shows just how quick things can change and how even when people think they are trying to help they can be making it a lot worse 

The ole Swiss Cheese effect right in front of our eye's 

Most of us (me included) cant fully see at times how quick things can get out of hand and how much our own actions can make a bad situation worse 

Paul

That was used after the fire as a training aide. In 1964/ 65 the Navy started filming carrier ops to show crews what was an issue and what was a good thing. What interesting was the pilot whose Zuni launched that started the destruction, well his father was Commander of the Pacific Theatre from 1966 to about 1977.

[Quickfarms]

This article is interesting

https://www.defensenews.com/naval/2020/07/16/the-us-navys-top-officer-wants-answers-on-the-bonhomme-richard-fire/

Especially this part

“Among the foremost questions in Gilday’s mind is whether the Navy fully absorbed the lessons learned from the fire aboard the Miami in 2012.

“Since Sunday, when this fire broke out, I’ve been on the phone constantly about that fire,” Gilday said. “But one of things I did on Sunday was I read the report of the Miami fire back in 2012. There were a number of recommendations coming out of that incident.

“One of the questions I have is: Did we fully and adequately implement those recommendations? Because that fire was probably the most recent similar mass-conflagration we’ve had. We learned from that. When we completed the investigation, did we just leave it in the rear-view mirror or did we, no kidding, take it seriously?”

That investigation found that over time the Navy had gradually and unintentionally accepted higher and higher risk for fire in the industrial environment at the shipyard, when key fixed firefighting systems are deactivated and compartments designed into the ship to create fire boundaries are compromised by hoses, cables and ventilation ducts running through open hatches. The investigation also found that Federal firefighters at the shipyard weren’t adequately trained for shipboard firefighting.

Further exacerbating the issues with Federal firefighters being inadequately trained was that command and control for fires that required assistance from off-board firefighters, which was the case on both Miami and Bonhomme Richard, was unclear and resulted in disjointed firefighting efforts.

And the investigation found that there was no single organization in the Navy tasked with incorporating damage control lessons learned into fleet training and procedures.”

[Red Horse]

4 minutes ago, Quickfarms said:

This article is interesting

https://www.defensenews.com/naval/2020/07/16/the-us-navys-top-officer-wants-answers-on-the-bonhomme-richard-fire/

Especially this part

“Among the foremost questions in Gilday’s mind is whether the Navy fully absorbed the lessons learned from the fire aboard the Miami in 2012.

“Since Sunday, when this fire broke out, I’ve been on the phone constantly about that fire,” Gilday said. “But one of things I did on Sunday was I read the report of the Miami fire back in 2012. There were a number of recommendations coming out of that incident.

“One of the questions I have is: Did we fully and adequately implement those recommendations? Because that fire was probably the most recent similar mass-conflagration we’ve had. We learned from that. When we completed the investigation, did we just leave it in the rear-view mirror or did we, no kidding, take it seriously?”

That investigation found that over time the Navy had gradually and unintentionally accepted higher and higher risk for fire in the industrial environment at the shipyard, when key fixed firefighting systems are deactivated and compartments designed into the ship to create fire boundaries are compromised by hoses, cables and ventilation ducts running through open hatches. The investigation also found that Federal firefighters at the shipyard weren’t adequately trained for shipboard firefighting.

Further exacerbating the issues with Federal firefighters being inadequately trained was that command and control for fires that required assistance from off-board firefighters, which was the case on both Miami and Bonhomme Richard, was unclear and resulted in disjointed firefighting efforts.

And the investigation found that there was no single organization in the Navy tasked with incorporating damage control lessons learned into fleet training and procedures.”

Makes me wonder what Adm. Gilday's rank was in 2012 and did he see that report?  My  guess is he was a Commander or maybe a  Captain back  then?

Add this to some of the recent accidents  involving ships that were underway and makes  me think if perhaps the Navy has lost "focus" to use a worn out term.

I know the bumper sticker.."shit happens" is  true but.......????

[Quickfarms]

Makes me wonder what Adm. Gilday's rank was in 2012 and did he see that report?  My  guess is he was a Commander or maybe a  Captain back  then?
Add this to some of the recent accidents  involving ships that were underway and makes  me think if perhaps the Navy has lost "focus" to use a worn out term.
I know the bumper sticker.."shit happens" is  true but.......????

On a general note I find the section staffing comment very interesting.

The navy has done some interesting cost cutting in recent years and it sounds like this cutting has affected staffing and they are now wondering if they went too far.

The marines have been pulling F18’s out of the boneyard to have flyable aircraft

This is the pendulum affect does impact my business and is caused by the bean counters.

[Red Horse]

Coincidence. On "Opinion" page of today's WSJ.."The Navy's Cultural Ship is Listing"

Then Bonhomme Richard incident was  the basis for the article but the writer then brings  up the collisions at sea as well as the incident involving the Roosevelt and Captain Crozier's decision to go public with his plight.

A key paragraph...."High profile mishaps and unwanted publicity point to an overarching problem:   for several years the Navy has been forced to do too much with too little,  a debate that deserves wider attention.  The Navy also seems to be suffering from a cultural dysfunction in the chain of command.  To repair it, the Navy will need to reinvent  its process for refining leaders and even the the services broader mission."

It went on to say..."Also implicated was the Navy's "can do" culture-the propensity of naval officers to try to get the job done no matter the cost."  And in so many words a failure to say "no" to a mission regardless of the consequences.

 

[kscarbel2]

Bob, the once great WSJ has lost all my respect. Though more subtle than CNN, the WSJ is clearly trying to steer people’s opinions with biased press rather than merely reporting the news. 

[Red Horse]

2 hours ago, kscarbel2 said:

Bob, the once great WSJ has lost all my respect. Though more subtle than CNN, the WSJ is clearly trying to steer people’s opinions with biased press rather than merely reporting the news. 

I'm not sure Kevin what prompted your comment but I think the key difference is what they offer on "opinion" pages are just that-and IMO they offer a platform for both sides of an issue. As for the article on the Navy, while it was on the "opinion" page it was in fact written by an "editorial page writer" and was identifed as such.  And I have to say, when those ship collisions occurred my first thought was .".WTF- we are talking about basic seamanship-rules of the road-what is going on?".  The current issue- I have no clue about what is good Navy procedure-I think there are some posters who do- but having spent my life in a haz mat industry I have some knowledge of what should be done when systems are taken out of service for maintenance/modification/new construction.  And I'm that old that I started long before "big brother" was taking care of us with OSHA and all the other agencies that spawned procedures such as...lock out/tag out, confined space entry etc.  In my early days we had a ton of in house procedures that were constantly reviewed and updated- plus the rookies if they  had any brains would stay close to the veterans to benefit from the stories of their mistakes.  Like I  said.."shit happens".  Perhaps the investigation will reveal that  there were truly unforseen circumstances that led to this disaster.  My bet though is  this is  just plain inattention-what can go wrong will go wrong.

As for the WSJ I think if you want to read a newspaper, it is as independent as can be.  Example, rarely  do you ever read an editorial piece where they provide some sort of positive position on Trumps actions, without recognizing the negative side of his position. 

As for news, while I don't hesitate to quote  the WSJ on a story, I have often said, when you have specific knowledge about an industry or subject, and some WSJ writer covers that industry/subject, I have frequently found myself saying.."that is BS-the guy didn't dig deep enough".

Now if you want to see bias, pick  up a copy of the Boston Globe. And the NYT?  Forget it!