Bonhomme Richard fire

[SlickAg]

We would run out of ships very quickly. We've already been running our ships too hard and shortening or cancelling maintenance availabilities already. Reducing the amount of ships and upping the OPTEMPO will only make things worse. We need more, cheaper ships such as PCs and OHP-class FFGs that can bring an oversized sensor and strike capability to the fight.

This isn’t a new problem. This has been reality for a long time and the solution will continue to be innovative practices and ideas that look good on paper and turn the right boxes in the readiness tracker or whatever green.

Manpower is a fixed cost. So are ships. But remember, the “355 ship Navy” isn’t happening until the 2050s. The money for that fleet has to come from somewhere.

This kills two birds with one stone. Save the fixed operating cost of x amount of ships for y amount of years (good stewards of the taxpayers’ dollars), more personnel means more people to do upkeep and maintenance, and the increased duty section lessens covid exposure out in town while increasing your DC capability onboard (good stewards of the taxpayers’ assets).

I think I’m going to put myself in for a comm.

 

[exNavyOffRec]

Your two options are either increasing manning onboard ships or reducing the number of duty sections. One costs money and the other risks personnel never being able to spend any time with their families while in port. The latter is exactly what happened with the minimal manning and all-contractor-performed maintenance on the LCS. While in port on an operational ship, the duty section was stretched so thin between force protection watches, engineering watches, and having to babysit contractors that the crew almost never went home. The only time they spent long periods at home was during the training phase (this was with a three crew rotation) of their crew cycle. During the workups and deployment phases, they essentially lived on the ship. This was one of the leading causes that no one wanted to get assigned to an LCS crew.

The only other option is that we do long maintenance periods (SRA and drydock periods) the way the USCG does them. This would mean we need more EDOs as the crew literally debarks the cutter and it gets handed over to a Coastie EDO analogue who manages the cutter and the crew rotates in TDY duty cycles to assist contractors with assembly/disassembly/configuration of the cutter. This would mean that the Navy would have to accept the risk of essentially handing a ship over to a contractor entirely.

Reading your response made me realize I was thinking solely from the direction of being on a CVN, myself the best duty section I was ever in was 5 section duty but more often 4 section, the CVN's I was on were anywhere from 8-10 section duty. My feeling is that you can have a decent quality of life in 5 section duty.

 

[antonkr]

BLUF:

“...the events onboard the Bonhomme Richard will raise questions in the minds of our Navy’s sailors, our allies, and our competitors as to whether the U.S. Navy is still fit to fight a war if a major capital vessel can catch fire and gut itself while tied to a pier at a major naval base in one of the nation’s largest modern cities. The Navy appears broken in ways that the nation’s leaders are only now beginning to understand.”

Yes he’s “controversial”, but is this a bad take?

Burning USS Bonhomme Richard Signals More Trouble for Navy | National Review

The latest incident in a long line of recent trouble suggests continued internal weakness.

www.nationalreview.com

It's a really bad take. A ship undergoing maintenance at 20% staffing operating outside of zebra conditions and flammable materials is of course going to be more vulnerable to a fire. Of course lessons need to be learned from this incident, as with anything else, but this article is a bit... silly.

 

[Spekkio]

Your two options are either increasing manning onboard ships or reducing the number of duty sections.

You don't have to do any of that.

Lessons identified but not learned from Miami:

1) Train civilians to expend a full CO2 extinguisher before evacuating. Even if that doesn't put out the fire, it buys valuable time.

2) Fork over the thousands of dollars it takes to rig a temp inert gas suppression system to save the potential loss of billions and a national asset.

3) You need some kind of rapid portable breathing system to substitute for taking down EABs.

Anyone who thinks this problem can be saved by 'moar watchstanders' hasn't been on a ship lately. The amount of people you're going to need to pass the 95% CI, let alone 99%, of finding and putting out the fire before the space gets smoked out (2 min) is infeasible. Plus most if not all of the ship's DC gear is inoperable. We need better mitigations for that (1 and 2 above), not throwing sailors at the problem.

 

[SlickAg]

It's a really bad take. A ship undergoing maintenance at 20% staffing operating outside of zebra conditions and flammable materials is of course going to be more vulnerable to a fire. Of course lessons need to be learned from this incident, as with anything else, but this article is a bit... silly.

Interesting opinion. I understand that accidents happen. However, I would tend to argue that having a ship burn up while sitting pierside, in its home port, is something that shouldn’t happen at all in the world’s most powerful Navy. Would I expect this to happen in Murmansk or Zhanjiang? More so than here.

So perhaps we as an institution should understand what steps we must take to prevent this from happening again. And understand what steps we took down the path to allow this to happen in the first place.

Indulge me for a moment. For context, I’m curious what your background is. I agree that he was a tad melodramatic, but in the bigger picture, do you not understand the strategic implications of a capital ship being taken out of action for years, if not forever, because a fire happened on a weekend instead of a weekday?

 

[HAL Pilot]

Guess he will forever hold the distinction of last jet to operate from her.

But...but...helps are jets. Just look under the engine c?

Reading your response made me realize I was thinking solely from the direction of being on a CVN, myself the best duty section I was ever in was 5 section duty but more often 4 section, the CVN's I was on were anywhere from 8-10 section duty. My feeling is that you can have a decent quality of life in 5 section duty.

When I was on TR in the early 90s, it was 3 0r 4 section duty and almost all the carriers in Norfolk were the same. One carrier was experimenting with 5 section and everyone thought they were nuts from the fire fighting / damage control perspective.

 

[Spekkio]

Interesting opinion. I understand that accidents happen. However, I would tend to argue that having a ship burn up while sitting pierside, in its home port, is something that shouldn’t happen at all in the world’s most powerful Navy. Would I expect this to happen in Murmansk or Zhanjiang? More so than here.

So perhaps we as an institution should understand what steps we must take to prevent this from happening again. And understand what steps we took down the path to allow this to happen in the first place.

Indulge me for a moment. For context, I’m curious what your background is. I agree that he was a tad melodramatic, but in the bigger picture, do you not understand the strategic implications of a capital ship being taken out of action for years, if not forever, because a fire happened on a weekend instead of a weekday?

His take isn't bad because of the impact to losing the ship. His take is bad because he is attributing the cause to poor warfare readiness when no facts have been released about the cause of the fire. For all we know it could be another case of arson. It could be someone doing hotwork carelessly. It could be something otherwise only imaginable.

This wasn't a full crew operating at sea taking fire while battlestations was manned. This was a Sunday duty section during a maintenance upkeep. The decision to tag out all the DC gear simultaneously was most likely made outside the hull by people more interested in meeting the upkeep deadlines than safety of ship. The CO could have tried to bark (and maybe he did), but would have been told to shut up and color, 'this is what we do'... Because it is what they do all the time.

 

[Swanee]

Is she still on fire?

 

[antonkr]

Interesting opinion. I understand that accidents happen. However, I would tend to argue that having a ship burn up while sitting pierside, in its home port, is something that shouldn’t happen at all in the world’s most powerful Navy. Would I expect this to happen in Murmansk or Zhanjiang? More so than here.

So perhaps we as an institution should understand what steps we must take to prevent this from happening again. And understand what steps we took down the path to allow this to happen in the first place.

Indulge me for a moment. For context, I’m curious what your background is. I agree that he was a tad melodramatic, but in the bigger picture, do you not understand the strategic implications of a capital ship being taken out of action for years, if not forever, because a fire happened on a weekend instead of a weekday?

My background to be fully frank is an uneducated civilian who doesn't know shit outside of reading questionable opinions on the internet.
Strategically, I get it. This shouldn't happen, and it looks... bad.

Just from observation I have seen a lot of people question the combat and damage control performance of these ships in combat. I've seen more than a few people make the claim that if a fire like this can happen in port, the ship would either incur a huge amount of casualties if it was embarked, or that if the fire happened due to enemy actions, the ship would similarly be unable to recover. I question these claims because the ship was not in the same condition and manning during maintenance as it would be during deployment. IE smaller manning, tagged out fire equipment, open compartments. For me personally, reading the Fitz and McCain were far more damning, but that very well could just be me.

 

[HAL Pilot]

@Spekkio

I just asked my FFD Battalion Captain friend at Pearl Harbor.

Any in port sub fire at Pearl (and any US base per published SOP) will get a FFD response. They drill weekly on an port sub with the sub’s crew. The sub CO can not allow the FFD on board but he is then breaking standard procedures and will probably be explaining to a lot of people for a long time why he made that decision.

He doesn’t know if this was SOP during the USS Miami fire as he wasn’t at Pearl then but at Schofield Barracks FFD station.

 

[SlickAg]

His take isn't bad because of the impact to losing the ship. His take is bad because he is attributing the cause to poor warfare readiness when no facts have been released about the cause of the fire. For all we know it could be another case of arson. It could be someone doing hotwork carelessly. It could be something otherwise only imaginable.

This wasn't a full crew operating at sea taking fire while battlestations was manned. This was a Sunday duty section during a maintenance upkeep. The decision to tag out all the DC gear simultaneously was most likely made outside the hull by people more interested in meeting the upkeep deadlines than safety of ship. The CO could have tried to bark (and maybe he did), but would have been told to shut up and color, 'this is what we do'... Because it is what they do all the time.

Yeah he definitely took out his jump to conclusions mat.

However, let me list the problems with the stuff I bolded.

1. A fire doesn’t care which day of the week it is.
2. A fire doesn’t care which stage of its FRP or O-FRP or whatever it’s called cycle is.
3. Tagging out ALL DC systems simultaneously is asinine and is further exacerbated by allowing it to happen on a weekend or with just the normal duty section and not more DC personnel.
4. Even if the CO did bark like you said, WHO told him to shut up and color (and thus, who else shares some of the blame)?

This obviously isn’t all-encompassing. But those first three factors can’t be overlooked. And if an enthusiast on the internet can see the issues, imagine what sort of conclusions a bunch of really smart people can draw.

 

[Pags]

His take isn't bad because of the impact to losing the ship. His take is bad because he is attributing the cause to poor warfare readiness when no facts have been released about the cause of the fire. For all we know it could be another case of arson. It could be someone doing hotwork carelessly. It could be something otherwise only imaginable.

This wasn't a full crew operating at sea taking fire while battlestations was manned. This was a Sunday duty section during a maintenance upkeep. The decision to tag out all the DC gear simultaneously was most likely made outside the hull by people more interested in meeting the upkeep deadlines than safety of ship. The CO could have tried to bark (and maybe he did), but would have been told to shut up and color, 'this is what we do'... Because it is what they do all the time.

Concur on all of what you've been saying.

For the rest of the group who hasn't spent time as ship's company the other thing to keep in mind is what weekend duty section entails. I think you may have at best one flying squad worth of DC response and any fire response will be ad hoc. It's not like you're underway and at HQ with DCC and lockers manned and ready. I don't ever recall anyone doing a fire drill with an inport section. Also, the 200 or so folks on board aren't all hanging around a central area they're hanging around various workspaces keeping an eye on all the other gear that's on, working off jobs in their spaces, or frankly just gaffing off somewhere until their relief shows up.

As I said before I never spent any time in the yards or avail but I'd bet that a crew that has spent the past 2yrs in the yards isn't thinking about fire and DC the same way a crew just off of an ATG inspection is. I'd imagine they've "normalized" a lot of bad behaviors wrt what would be considered normal ops.

I'd also wonder if the there's a method to measure the risk buildup of all the work that's going on. Does anyone ever stack up all the various minor deviations to capture a full picture of how much risk is extant?

 

[RedFive]

Is she still on fire?

Maybe?

 

[nittany03]

His take isn't bad because of the impact to losing the ship. His take is bad because he is attributing the cause to poor warfare readiness when no facts have been released about the cause of the fire.

Well this is basically a guy whose whole shtick is "I'm a retired O-6 and I'm going to write Very Serious Thinkpieces on why the Navy is fucking it away. CVNs are bad, mmkay?"

 

[SlickAg]

Well this is basically a guy whose whole shtick is "I'm a retired O-6 and I'm going to write Very Serious Thinkpieces on why the Navy is fucking it away. CVNs are bad, mmkay?"

Do you still have the pictures of referees calling out various forms of internet debate fouls? What do you call the one where you attack the person making the argument instead of the argument itself?