Friday, November 21, 2014
PORTLAND, Maine (AP) — Firefighters at Portsmouth Naval Shipyard train regularly for industrial blazes, but mandates after a huge submarine fire call for an annual drill that’s more extensive than anything done before.
An investigation that followed the USS Miami blaze in May 2012 found that federal firefighters didn’t practice for complex and lengthy fires requiring assistance from community firefighters, according to documents obtained by The Associated Press under a Freedom of Information Act request.
That’s no longer the case at Navy shipyards.
The first of the new annual drills at Portsmouth Naval Shipyard was held in January. It involved a complicated scenario that tested the ability of sailors, shipyard firefighters and firefighters from four municipal departments to communicate during a simulation for a long fire aboard a submarine, said Lt. Tim Hawkins, a Navy spokesman at the Pentagon.
The Navy wasn’t surprised to learn that the shipyard in Kittery, Maine, was capable of bringing together multiple departments successfully to battle a large fire, Hawkins said.
“We were happy that the shipyard demonstrated the ability to handle a major shipyard fire,” he said. “But they already demonstrated this with the USS Miami. Their actions were pretty heroic.”
It took 12 hours and help from firefighters from as far away as Connecticut to save the Miami after a worker who wanted to go home set a small fire that quickly spread while the submarine was in dry dock for a 20-month overhaul. Seven people were hurt.
The fire severely damaged living quarters, the command and control center and a torpedo room but did not reach the nuclear propulsion components at the other end of the 362-foot-long submarine.
The worker who started the fire with a lighter and a box of rags is serving a 17-year sentence in federal prison. Ultimately, the Navy decided to scrap the submarine when the repair bill grew to $700 million.