quote:

Originally posted by Sig2340:
Give me an "I"!

Give me an "O"!

Give me an "W"!

Give me an "A"!

Doesn't the Navy learn?

Halsy, Michener, Nimitz, and Spruance are spinning in their graves so fast if we added an armature we could power San Diego.

quote:

On the morning of July 12, 2020, the first orange flickers of destruction took hold in the bowels of the hulking USS Bonhomme Richard as it sat moored at a San Diego naval base.

Unimpeded, the fire gathered force, surging upward, conquering one level of the 844-foot ship and then the next, while the crew — the ship’s critical firefighting force — fled to the pier. There, the captain and his sailors stood by as the Bonhomme Richard burned, in cruel irony of its motto “I have not yet begun to fight.”

Not until the San Diego fire department went aboard did anyone spray water on the fire — nearly two hours after it had started. By then it was too late. Gas cylinders were exploding and shooting through the air, and firefighters didn’t have a map or even a sailor to guide them through the smoky maze of the ship. A firefighter’s warning that a compartment was “about to blast” forced firefighters off the Bonhomme Richard just minutes before an explosion so powerful it was heard 13 miles away and hurled debris onto a nearby destroyer.

....

The service immediately launched two parallel investigations into what went wrong and why.

The command investigation, led by a three-star admiral, sent a team of investigators on a prodigious and methodical examination of the fire. As the months passed, the investigators uncovered in exhaustive detail an astonishing array of failures — broken or missing fire hoses, poorly trained sailors, improperly stored hazardous material — that had primed the ship for a calamitous fire.

A separate investigation by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, for its part, focused on whether anyone was criminally responsible. As the months passed, NCIS investigators appeared to operate in isolation, discounting the damning findings of the command investigation to pursue a case of arson, despite scant evidence.

Six weeks into both inquiries, the Navy told the command investigation to accept at face value what NCIS and federal fire investigators judged to be the fire’s origin. Both investigations concluded in 2021.

The command investigation traced the problems back to when the Bonhomme Richard docked for maintenance and Navy leaders throughout the ranks abandoned responsibility for the ship’s safety. Risks mounted, and nobody paid attention. All told, investigators determined that the actions of 17 sailors and officers directly led to the loss of the ship, and those of 17 more, including five admirals, contributed. The long list was a staggering indictment of everyone from sailors to top admirals who had failed in their jobs.

The NCIS investigation, however, laid the blame at the feet of a single young sailor. The true culprit, the one who bore responsibility for the billion-dollar loss, the Navy said, was then-20-year-old Ryan Mays. And for that, he should face life in prison.

The Navy continued its pursuit of Mays, even as a military judge recommended against it, bluntly calling out the lack of evidence and citing the findings of the Navy’s own command investigation.

....

Shortly after 8 a.m., sailors first reported spotting smoke. Investigators were dumbfounded at the lack of urgency after that. Navy policy, they wrote in their report, dictates that sailors must douse flames with water as soon as possible but at most within 12 minutes. On the ship that day, more than 10 minutes elapsed before anyone even announced the fire over the ship’s loudspeaker. The slow response, they found, was typical for the Bonhomme Richard. For 14 drills in a row leading up to the fire, the crew failed to respond in time — a lack of proficiency that neither the ship’s leadership nor higher commands took steps to address.

That critical gap between the sign of smoke and the sounding of the alarm, investigators found, was the first in a cascading set of failures, by both the crew and leadership on the pier. Once the sailors realized many of the hoses nearest the fire weren’t operable, investigators learned, none of them moved to another important shipboard strategy to contain the fire: slamming shut the heavy steel hatches and watertight doors between compartments. And the sailors revealed that at first no one thought to use the ship’s sprinklers to distribute thick, white foam that can help extinguish the fire. Even if they had, they would have been unable to easily turn on the system: A maintenance report had been falsified in April, saying the system worked when it didn’t.

quote:

Originally posted by DanH:
Like I said in the Sub Brief video, it just goes to show that NICS is full of shit. Gibbs would never let this happen…

quote:

Originally posted by DanH:
...it just goes to show that NICS is full of shit.

quote:

Originally posted by Fenris:

Someone needs a Gibbs' slap.

quote:

Originally posted by Fenris:

quote:

Originally posted by DanH:
Like I said in the Sub Brief video, it just goes to show that NICS is full of shit. Gibbs would never let this happen…

Someone needs a Gibbs' slap.