The investigation is complete concerning the fire on the USS GEORGE WASHINGTON.
The CO and XO have been relieved of duty due to shipboard practices that may have led to the extensive fire.
The Navy officials said investigators believe the fire was started when a cigarette ignited material stored in an engineering room.
Investigators found flammable liquids stored in an engineering area of the ship, which is strictly prohibited. Investigators also found that sailors were allowed to smoke in the same engineering areas, considered another violation.
An article in the Navy Times has a few more details:
The investigation found that the likely cause of the fire, which caused $70 million in damage, “was unauthorized smoking that ignited flammable liquids and other combustible material improperly stored in an adjacent space,” officials said in the statement. “The fire and the subsequent magnitude of the fire were the result of a series of human acts that could have been prevented. Specifically, the storage of 90 gallons of refrigerant compressor oil in an unauthorized space contributed to the intensity of the fire.”
The (heavily) redacted report should be released in a few weeks. It should be an interesting read to see what other actions took place on the ship and what other heads are rolling from this. I say that only because, while the CO and XO are certainly responsible for the entire ship, I guarantee that it wasn’t the CO who chose the Engineroom to store unauthorized materials. And he certainly didn’t tell people to smoke next to the containers of compressed refrigerant. On a ship the size of a carrier, it’s simply unrealistic for him to know every. single. thing. going. on.
I’ve always been somewhat confused by the stories coming from Iraq, specifically (and obviously) the media’s selective coverage of what happens there.
I think that anyone who’s done anything resembling serious academic study would agree that history is best written through the view of time. You simply have to distance yourself from the events before you can effectively judge them without bias. Of course, in this day and age of high-speed internet, we want our history now and correct. This is obviously a tall order, but in a country where a majority will absorb whatever they are spoon fed without protest or question the wrong version of history is what is promulgated and accepted as truth by the YouTube generation.
From Greyhawk and the fine folks working with him, here’s a little bit of truth.
Anbar rising, part two
and in the words of Paul Harvey, now you know the rest of the story.
People have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I’d like to think that inherent in these is the right to do whatever harm to your body you want.
Wanna smoke twelve packs a day? Go right ahead. Just don’t do it while I’m sipping my environmentally friendly bottle of Ethos water and ordering a chicken and cranberry almond salad from the drive-thru while sitting in my Prius.
Not to stand in the way of the natural thinning of the herd, the Los Angeles City Council has now ended the right of people to super-size their lives to their heart’s content, at least for a year.
The Los Angeles city council has imposed a ban on new fast-food outlets in a low-income neighbourhood with a high incidence of obesity and diabetes.
The aim of the one-year moratorium is to attract restaurants that offer healthier food choices, officials say.
Nearly half of the restaurants in the South Los Angeles area, inhabited mainly by Latinos and African-Americans, are fast-food outlets.
Call me crazy, but I don’t think it’s an ethnic problem. It’s not even an economic problem. It’s a crazy problem.
Some people just aren’t crazy enough to spend $8.00 on a bowl of lettuce with sunflower seeds on it.
I tend to agree with them. But if they want to live by eating 60 chicken nuggets a day, who am I to stop them?
CWO5 David Cooper flew for the Night Stalkers. For those keeping score at home, those are the members of the Special Operations Aviation Regiment (spoken: The Black Helicopters that fly bad men in to do bad things to badder people).
CWO5 Cooper has been awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, the highest award ever given to a Night Stalker. The write up of his story is the stuff of legend.
After 12 to 15 minutes, Cooper was running low on ammunition, and landed back beside the crashed aircraft. He and his co-pilot stared at each other wide-eyed.
“Neither of us really expected to get out of this fight alive,” Cooper said.
He paid tribute to the four MH-6 pilots on the ground, who all later received Bronze Stars with “V” devices. “Those guys were off-loading unstable rockets off of the downed aircraft and loading them into my aircraft when I landed,” he said. “That’s not a recommended procedure in the book, [and] they were doing that all the time under fire and in plain view of the enemy.”
After no more than five minutes, Cooper and his copilot took off again. “We weren’t ordered to go back up,” he said. “I’m a gun pilot, and my duty is to support the ground forces.”
After another 15 minutes of fighting against a hail of insurgent fire, Cooper was running out of fuel and ammo and had to put down again. “I was going through ammunition at a fairly rapid clip,” he said.
The MH-6 pilots used a Leatherman tool to remove the crashed Little Bird’s auxiliary fuel tank and use it to refuel Cooper’s aircraft.
Then Cooper took off yet again, this time spending half an hour in the air. He got as close as 800 meters from the gun trucks and 200 from the house. “I was flying as erratically as I could to throw off the aim of the gunners,” he said.
I’ll buy that man a beer any day of the week.
and twice on sundays.
update: there’s a copy of the Army Times article in this forum.
The USS SCORPION. Every submariner knows about it. No one really knows why she was lost at sea.
Molten Eagle has a very good discourse going on at his site here and here. Definitely worth a read if you’re interested in more of the theories of how she was lost at sea.
Myself, I know that every time we submerge it’s a battle to make sure we come up again. I’m not saying that what we do is similar to a gunfight, but the enemy is always out there. It’s the ocean… and it wants inside the boat.
Can we sink? Sure. We’re a ship designed to sink on purpose. We come back up most of the time. Sometimes we don’t.
I try not to think about it.
It’s like the old submarine joke.
“How deep can submarines go?”
“She’ll go all the way to the bottom if we let her.”
The investigation is complete concerning the fire on the USS GEORGE WASHINGTON. 
