Bonhomme Richard, fate uncertain, would be one of largest ships Navy has lost
sandiegouniontribune.com
sandiegouniontribune.com
In port, a ship may be particularly vulnerable to this sort of thing, partially because fire boundaries that are normally closed while underway may be open to facilitate maintenance.
Here's a diagram showing a rough LHD cross-section near the bottom of the page: https://fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/ship/lhd-1.htm
The fire here broke out in the lower V, close to one of the ship's magazines but pretty far from a lot of the bulk fuel (although there are a number of fuel pipes in and around the area in order to facilitate fueling assault craft and ground vehicles, which may be contributing to the fire with residual fuel).
Fortunately, even if there is a magazine in close proximity to the fire, it's likely well-protected, and unlikely to be full of ordnance. Furthermore, ordnance approved for shipboard operation has special thermal coating to reduce the likelihood of cook-off, which may be enough to protect it against the indirect heat of a fire on the other side of a bulkhead.
No ordinance is in the magazines. It's standard procedure to unloaded it at a pier specially designed for that task before extended port stays.
The fire has definitely reach the fuel lines you mention, and they're sustaining the fire. The team my commenter was a part of was one of the first to try to push inside. They made it about 25 feet in. The floor was so hot their team leaders boots melted. The writer said he had to stand on a pile of hose to avoid the same problem. The heat pushed them back out after less than half an hour. His opinion was that there was little choice but to just let the fuel burn off.
It's also interesting that China, Russia, and now the U.S. have all lost carriers while undergoing construction / maintenaince in just the past few years:
https://www.cnn.com/2019/12/12/europe/russian-carrier-fire-i... https://www.forbes.com/sites/hisutton/2020/04/11/brand-new-c...
Something to bond over, I guess. Dangerous work, and I hope everybody stays safe, better a carrier burns in peacetime than a life lost.
It seems like the culture of safety and competence of the US Pacific Fleet is not what it was. Another example is the USS John McCain colliding with a freighter[0]. Then there was the whole Fat Leonard corruption scandal[1]. Maybe these are just anecdata and a side effect of greater attention.
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_John_S._McCain_and_Alnic_M... 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fat_Leonard_scandal
Wow, uh, that's a lot of money. Is this the poorest individual (by assets sans debts) in America? I can't imagine anyone being able to acquire personal debt on that scale by any other means.
Four fifths of the fluid in which we live and breath ranges from inert to noble. The remaining fifth is one of the most dangerous, angry, reactive, poisonous gasses we know: Oxygen.
It is crucial to life and yet at the same time is quite capable of partially or completely destroying everything we hold dear. Our tools, belongings, us, our homes, warships, forests, crops and savannahs. It needn’t even burn with a flame: most things will decay in its presence with or without spectacle.
If one encountered a planet where almost everything was made of gelatinous gasoline, whose principle inhabitants were a form of highly evolved sentient matchstick that kept striking boards as pets, one might think them a little risk averse. Then of course you’d realize that life and society on this planet have evolved in such a way because they are neither unfortunate or insane enough to live on a world that’s blanketed in O₂.
On a visit to this planet you explain to their ambassador about the atmosphere on your home world. She doesn’t know whether to laugh hysterically or faint in horror. The knowledge terrifies her and she takes deep methane breaths while stroking her phosphorous hands on tibbles-the-striking-board, trying to calm down. You decide it’s best not to further disturb her with stories of plate tectonics and the major cities, nuclear reactors, etc your people have built on fault lines, at sea level.
Obviously you're utilizing hyperbole here, but I'm assuming you're referring to oxygen's oxidative potential (really "standard reduction potential"), but other gases have significantly higher reduction potentials than oxygen. Fluorine and Chlorine cause bigger, hotter fires at conditions that would generally be considered "non-flammable" if oxygen were involved instead. They also corrode/rust things faster than oxygen does.
Charts like [0] are misleading because they list the standard reduction potential of the monoatomic forms, which isn't realistic when most of these form diatomic gases (e.g. Cl2, O2, etc).
Both fluorine and chlorine gases are more oxidative than oxygen. Chlorine has electron affinity of -2.4 eV and while O2 is -0.4 eV.
0: https://www.angelo.edu/faculty/kboudrea/periodic/trends_elec...
(Also, hyperbole clarified.)
"Generally considered non-flammable" doesn't even begin to describe it. From (http://www.lateralscience.co.uk/Fluorine/Fluorine.html):
> the problem was its collection and containment. Fluorine chemically reacts with just about everything, usually very vigorously. He fashioned collection vials from platinum, palladium and gold. All were destroyed.
As to the GP:
> > the most dangerous, angry, reactive, poisonous gas we know
To continue the nitpicking, bear in mind that a gas is just one phase of matter for a particular chemical. What we're really after then is something from among the most reactive chemicals we know. I nominate dioxygen difluoride which will (for example) react with liquid methane at -180C. It's antics are summarized by Derek Lowe. (https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2010/02/23/th...)
edit: Downvote all you want but if the fire was in control it wouldn’t still be burning.
I don't know anything about shipbuilding, but isn't the US Navy full of much older ships that aren't considered fire hazards? Is there something special about this one? It had a halon system (that didn't work).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_current_ships_of_the_U...
Edit: it’s not even halfway through its projected lifecycle.
I did two years on Iwo, and BZ to the Bonny crew. They did all they could have with those fire trees with plastic nozzles until help arrived.
Whether it gets repaired or not is more of a financial decision than anything else. Surely the hull has many decades left.
Steel really warps when you heat it up. Each compartment needs to be water tight. Just fixing the doorways alone would be a monumental task. Not to mention all the cabling and equipment that needs to be replaced. The amount of labor it will take to fix the steel will probably more than just laying down an entire new ship.
It'll be an interesting decision.
Unfortunately, the military is run by MBAs now. There's no excess funding available for emergencies. Every penny is allocated, and it's still not enough. I was on a smaller amphib class ship, we routinely ran out of budget for replacement parts. Every quarter was an exercise in prioritizing what was going to be fixed and what was going to not get fixed because we simply didn't have the budget for maintenance.
Another concern is the crew. You've now got 200 or so sailors with nothing to do. Are they supposed to just mill about and wait for the ship to be repaired for a couple years? The crew will need to be rotated to other assignments. Now, you have a ship with no crew, it's going to have to go basically through the entire commissioning process again, sea trials, etc.
It's all a logistical nightmare.
pretty much the entire structure seems to be destroyed. Undoing that damage and then rebuilding what was destroyed will be effectively (if not greater than) the cost of just buying a new one.
Even if you could repair it, you don't want to. A large amount of the metal has been heated to very high and unknown temperatures. Typically, the concern is three things [0]: dimensional changes (i.e., you warped your entire ship), increased corrosion (hot metal rust faster), and permanent reduction in strength (like, >50% permanent reduction in strength). Now add in that the fire has almost certainly burned or boiled the paint off the external surfaces that are contacting sea water. That paint is the the skin of the ship, any of that underlying steel would need to be expected, cleaned, and likely repaired.
Age isn't the issue, the damage is. It would be like trying to renovate a burned out house. At some point it's not a renovation its a teardown.
EDIT: adding the obvious 'this is my opinion based on observations and I have no first hand data on this ship' qualifciation
[0] https://www.edtengineers.com/blog-post/fire-effects-steel
I assume that's some sort of contrived neutral nickname for the ship. It's the Bonny Dick to sailors and always will be.
The CCP's #1 priority is stability to enable continued economic development. That's why they advance their more adversarial goals via sustained incremental efforts. They view democracies as vulnerable as they so often change leadership, whereas they can sustain very long term goals.
Life tends to be more banal than James Bond. The simple explanation here is that something went wrong and sparked a fire during maintenance work, likely welding, and because the ship was in dock with a bazillion service lines running through the hatches, the fire was able to spread to find fuel trivially. Based on a comment I read from one of the DC folks fighting the fire, they don't know the origin, but they do know it got into the fuel lines, which caused a minor explosion. The odds are pretty high they're just gonna have to let the fuel burn off.
My real life includes attacks on US naval vessels that kill people and destroy equipment.
And of course, now we've shifted the goal posts yet again from "It was China!" to "It was terrorist!" with none of this changes in belief motivated by new information or evidence.