From The Hill:
Sailors didn’t know what to do in USS Bonhomme Richard fire, Navy probe finds
When a fire broke out aboard the amphibious assault ship USS Bonhomme Richard in July 2020, its sailors did not know how to react and its leaders didn’t take control, a Navy investigation found.
The 400-page report, officially released on Wednesday, found that 36 individuals, including the ship’s commander and five admirals, were responsible for numerous errors and breakdowns that followed after the vessel was purposely set on fire while it sat pier-side in San Diego.
“Although the fire was started by an act of arson, the ship was lost due to an inability to extinguish the fire,” the report said.
Once the blaze started, “the response effort was placed in the hands of inadequately trained and drilled personnel from a disparate set of uncoordinated organizations that had not fully exercised together and were unfamiliar with basic issues to include the roles and responsibilities of the various responding entities,” the document notes.
As I understand, a fire aboard ship is about the worst case scenario, on par with a breach in the hull, as something that can cause the total loss of a ship and hands at sea.
And this crew handled it in the worst way possible.
It is shockingly bad that a US Navy crew didn’t know how to handle a fire aboard ship.
But I bet that crew knew all about microagressions, white rage, and non-binary pronouns.
The ship may have been lost but at least nobody was offended.
Nobody was offended.
Well, except for the taxpayer. But who cares about that extremist?
I saw a video on youtube recently by Smarter Every Day where he visited a submarine and spent a couple days learning everything he could about life aboard a submarine. Fire is absolutely the worst thing that can happen aboard ship(especially underwater), thats why this particular crew drilled fire operations and leak operations once every watch. 3 times a days somewhere aboard that ship someone is drilled on how to extinguish a fire. Thats how it ought to be done.
I hate that son of a bitch. I don’t know which youtuber I hate more, Smarter Everyday or The Lockpicking Lawyer.
Sounds like that Skipper needs to be removed. /sarc.
Exactly! Sailors spent all their time learning about how to become the perfect woke military, knew how to don the Fauci mask perfectly, but never learned how to don a gas mask, and were led by a bunch of officers who wear gold only because they are of colors, women, trans, gays, etc. We are doomed!
NOT the place for these scams!
When I was in, we drilled every day while in Port, and several times a day while at sea. I can’t imagine a US Navy where that doesn’t happen.
Yeah, but that was back in the day. I had similar thoughts back in 2017 when the Navy had a series of groundings and (fatal) collisions at sea. At that time I had wondered “how could you get through SWOS (Surface Warfare Officer School) and not know day 1 stuff like maneuvering board?” Turns out some sharp beancounters did away with SWOS sometime in the last 10-15 years and said “they’ll just learn on the job”.
There don’t seem to be any fundamentals left that haven’t been destroyed, they’ve done away with basic seamanship and rules of the road, damage control, preservation and cleanliness… I hope the nuc (power) side has kept the bar up but that might be hoping foe too much.
I can’t imagine that the crews don’t still drill but things like this make it clear that the core skills and ability (like how fast can you get X number of hoses on the fire) have decayed. Back in the 80s-90s I remember those drills being a daily occurrence, and more than once the Captain made us do it over when it took too long to put the “fire” out.
USS Forrestal. (aka Forest fire). Look up the history on that.
CDR Salamander has a pretty good breakdown of the mess here as well: https://blog.usni.org/posts/2021/10/20/bonhomme-richard-fire-a-multi-billion-dollar-leadership-failure
It really, REALLY doesn’t speak well of our naval doctrines and training.
It’s a leadership failure only if you assume it wasn’t the intended outcome. Given decades of communist infestation of our educational system, the validity of that assumption is not at all obvious.
I am a navy brat. I know that sailors when my father was in trained constantly on fire drills. To hear that sailors didn’t know how to fight a fire is mind blowing.
I read an report on a fire that destroyed a navy boat house. The boat house was used to store utility boats.
The fire watch discovered a fire in the boat house and pulled the fire alarm. This automatically started the fire pumps and pressurizes the hydrants. The fire alarm is coded pulses so every sailor knew where the alarm was.
There were multiple sailor fighting the fire within just a few minutes. The off post fire department had just issued its call.
The sailor hooked up the fire hoses and opened the hydrant. No water. They tried opening the hydrant more. Still no water. They dropped the hose and tried to fight the fire with extinguishers.
One of the sailors dove into the water, climbed up the tail of the utility boats, pulled the ??? which allowed water to rush in. He untied the boat and they sank in place. He repeated this until all the boats were down.
While this act seems strange, it in fact saved all the boats. It was very easy to raise the boats, slush them down, do a quick engine over haul and they were back up and running. They had one of those utility boats back in operation within the month.
The root cause of the fire destroying the boat house was *lack of training*.
The fire marshal tested the pumps and alarms weekly. He tested a different alarm and hydrant every week. But NO sailors were involved.
On board ship it is no more than one full turn of the water valve for fire fighting to go from OFF to FULL.
Normal hydrants on the other hand take many turns. The first turns are closing a drain valve at the bottom of the stand pipe. Only when that is closed does turning the crank open the water valve and pressurize the hydrant. If the sailors had just continued to crank the handle on they hydrant another 15-25 times they would have had the water required to fight the fire.
They would have extinguished the fire before the fire department arrived. That lack of training cost the navy a boat house and all of its contents minus the boats it housed.
The problem lies right here.
“Adm. Samuel Paparo has yet to decide whether any other sailor will be relieved of command or face other punishment”
When your ship burns to a total loss and the entire leadership isn’t relieved the entire branch of service is at fault.
I was on a submarine in the late 60’s to early 70’s. To be qualified on the boat, you must demonstrate your abilities to operate/control/use EVERY system on that boat, all the valves/motors/pumps/their interconnections/electrical controls/on and on. Depending on the boat, it can take a year to get Qualified. If you transfer to another boat, you’re not in charge of crap until you get qualified on that boat. Literally the entire boat and the mens lives depend on each crew members ability to do what’s right, at the right time, as fast as humanly possible. If you’re a Chief/First Class, the qualified Second Class/Third Class is your boss on duty watch. Until 1971, then I watched the system get f-cked up. Then is when ability/qualifications were pushed out and how good you were at kissing the officers asses moved to the head of the class. When we had a fire underwater and lost electrical power, smoke filled the boat with one or two battle lanterns in each compartment, and the unqualified bitches started running around like their hair was on fire and their asses were catching, without the knowledge or ability to get the fire out, the boat surfaced, the smoke cleared by starting a main engine with only manual hands on control of the engine, the exhaust valves and related systems, I decided it was time to get out of the shitstorm the Navy was headed into.
In defense of the crew, it turns out that the arsonist, a wannabe washed-out Navy SEAL, disabled or wrecked multiple fire-fighting equipment before starting the blaze. He probably picked the exact time when he knew no one would be near enough to react quickly. When they did react, the hoses didn’t work, and many extinguishers had been sabotaged. The extra time it took to seriously start firefighting allowed the blaze to basically metastasize, adding to the confusion. Can you put yourself in the shoes of a sailor who has trained in firefighting, and the equipment doesn’t work? It would take precious time to sort this out. Feedback to commanders would be contradictory and confusing. They probably issued orders that could not be carried out.
So sad.
See what one malefactor can accomplish given method, motive, and opportunity?
If that’s the case, I won’t be too harsh on the lower enlisted ratings. But the senior NCOs and the lower ranked officers should have some very harshly worded reports stuck in their jackets. The officer(s) of the watch should be given court(s) martial…
…and the ship’s commanding officer (even if he wasn’t aboard at the time) should should slip quietly out the backdoor, go find a quiet place on base, and swallow his service pistol.
And how many times was that equipment checked for being operational? The demon did the damage that day, is one thing, but if things haven’t been checked in a long period? DD everyone above E5, punish the E5s, rip the grunts a new one about initiative. Onboard a ship, everyone’s life depends on everyone doing more than is defined in your responsibilities. Cover you and your shipmates ass, 24/7/365.
Mark, if a skilled arsonist sabotaging all the gear is the whole story, then there would not (or should not) be a report saying “…sailors did not know how to react and its leaders didn’t take control…”.
If the report is correct, that means there WAS a command problem, not just a skilled saboteur. And if that is so, several of the officers in the chain of command need to be tossed out of the service. That might include people ranking above the ship’s CO, if the training issues were due to policies set from above.
On that point, the link posted by Toastrider quotes this item from the investigative report:
To illustrate this point, the crew had failed to meet the time standard for applying firefighting agent on the seat of the fire on 14 consecutive occasions leading up to 12 July 2020.
That’s not sabotage by the arsonist. It may be sabotage by the CO, or CO incompetence, or it may be either of those things by higher authority.
This was in July 2020, before the coup.
Mark, as far as the military leadership is concerned, the coup happened a long time ago. They were punishing anyone who interfered with the rape of children in Afghanistan in the 00’s