Has anyone seen any coverage of this on mainstream news channels?
I was kind of surprised that the only place ive seen this on is Reddit. Not necessarily that reedit got it first off the reuters feed, but rather that none of the mainstream channels seem to have covered this much at all.
Reddit thread:
http://www.reddit.com/r/w...fire_in_northern_russia/
The info I caught stated that the sub burned for a full day before being contained. (The Early Show, CBS)
EDIT: ...and the reactor was off-line and shut down. The munitions were removed before going into drydock.
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DEATH is Certain. The hour, Uncertain...
Pretty much SOP for any warship going into the docks, nuclear or otherwise. You guys should have seen the cluster-fuck that is disarming and rearming an Arleigh Burke before she enters the drydock and after she leaves. If you got a competent handling crew, then MAYBE it can all happen in one day.
As for the fire itself, I'm honestly not surprised that it got as bad as it did. With the ship in drydock, they probably have assloads of paint, solvents, and lubricants... and all of it of the most flammable variety. The cause will probably be because some dumbass was sneaking a smoke break - pretty much the same thing that happened to the USS George Washington (CVN-73) on its way to Yokosuka. Someone took a smoke break during an underway replenishment evolution... and they did so in a fan room that had a bunch of improperly stowed HAZMAT. And that being a fan room, the fire quickly spread to every compartment it serviced. Ouch.
Indeed. Even without being in Drydock there is a bunch of flamable materials on any ship, let alone a submarine. Almost sounds like what happened was an improperly placed firewatch; which is where you place someone on the other side of a weld / piece of hull being cut to watch out that the sparks DONT touch something off. If that happened, by the time someone noticed the fire could well have been so well entrenched that there wasnt a good way to fight it and the fire crews had to content themselves with containment until all the flamables in the affected area burned themselves out.
Not the person to ask, as I ususally dont follow the news shows so I couldnt tell you how much coverage it got here.
Hear that thunder rolling till it seems to split the sky?
That's every ship in Grayson's Navy taking up the cry-
NO QUARTER!!!
-- "No Quarter", by
Echo's Children
...here's the weird thing: They stated on the news that it was the rubber muffling material that burned.
(I'll give you this much: That stuff doesn't matter.)
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DEATH is Certain. The hour, Uncertain...
Hrm.... Probably petroleum based rubber then. That shit burns like boiling oil, only without having to be brought to 'boiling' first.