This is a long detailed read into the horror story that our Navy in becoming, IMO due to it’s “One F.U. And Your Career is Over”. On one wanted to take command. It is a Navy horror story writ large.
Sorry, but not only is there no link, the failures actually mean little to nothing. First of all, the ship was at the time unmanned and going through a "Dockside Maintenance Availability". That is the deepest level of maintenance and refit that a ship undergoes short of pulling it into a drydock. In fact, the term stands for all maintenance that can be done at a "dockside", short of actually pulling it out of the water. In fact, it is so deep that a lot of "services" (water, HVAC, power, sewer, etc) are cut off to large areas of the ship so services can be done on them. So the things listed in this as "broken" are not really correct, as they would have been purposefully disconnected so for example pipes could be replaced or rerouted. That is simply how things are done. And it is even worse if this had happened if it was in drydock as then there quite literally would have been few if any services available on the ship. The very purpose of the ship undergoing such maintenance was that it was over 20 years old, and such things are often done. During moderate refits, new lines for power, communications, and water are often run in a temporary manner, only intended to be in place for a few years until her next refit. And as far as I have been able to determine, this was the largest refit that the ship had undergone since it entered service in 1998. And "missing fire hoses"? Once again, were the fire mains even active? Most times in a refit like this they are only minimally active. And on a ship most hoses are replaced every 6 years or so. When such a ship is on "active service" and prepared to go to sea at any time, of course they would all be in place. But when undergoing maintenance? What better time to replace them? Almost nobody is on board, so go ahead and knock it out. That is over 2 decades of such things that had to be addressed.
Yard periods always worried me. Many of the ship's damage control infrastructure was decommissioned, if not disassembled for repairs or upgrades. Jury-rigged firefight system were installed to make up the difference, but, of course the crew, damage control parties in particular are rarely trained on that gear to the level they are on shipboard systems. As I write this the local news is covering today's testimony. Apparently, NCIS had another suspect seen running from the Lower V shortage area just before the fire was reported.
When I was at the Mare Island Shipyard in the early 1990s, I saw this all the time. We Marines often did training for shipboard security on the ships and subs either in drydock or undergoing dockside maintenance. And a lot of the briefing before we started was that most of the systems on the ship were disabled. There might be one head to use if we were lucky, or else we would have to leave the ship to use a portajohn on the dock or bottom of the drydock. That if there was a fire or other emergency to not even try to use the firefighting equipment, and to just exit the ship as quickly as possible. And most of the "damage control parties" were not even on board. During such maintenance they actually leave the ship and are in barracks for the duration. And I did finally get to read the article. And having spent a lot of time aboard ship myself, it reads like it comes from somebody with little to no time aboard ship. Like the fire stations being inoperable due to neglect. And once again listing that, sprinklers and other things as being "broken", when in fact most times when a ship is undergoing that kind of maintenance they are not "broken" but outright turned off for maintenance. After all, you can not do maintenance, upgrades, repairs, or replacements with the system charged on such a vessel. And if one went by the headline and not read the article closely, they would have missed that. So they were not broken as they tried to imply, they were turned off. Most likely as part of the dockside refit it was undergoing. And her engines were off, and I bet she barely had enough power and water run to her for basic operation. And nowhere near enough connected to the ship to actually fight a fire with. There was a fire once on one of the destroyers they were doing final maintenance before it was sent off to be scrapped I remember at Mare Island. And none of the firefighting equipment at all on the ship was operational. It was entirely fought with trucks they pulled onto the dock, and portable pumps were then brought in to pump out the water as the ones on the ship had not operated in years. And putting the fire out on what was a WWII era destroyer was a most 110 meters and a few simple decks above the waterline is a piece of cake compared to a much more massive modern LPH.
I spent some time at Mare Island, a decade or two before your tour. It's civilized now; a lot of the old buildings have been repurposed.
My takeaway from Mushroom, is “everyone knows the hazards, but somehow we go forth blindly with a faulty plan”. Maybe the Navy is suffering from “Institutional amnesia” caused by lack of retention due to being poached by the private sector. BUT. Enough with the excuses. We have to do better. Or die. It takes too damn long to build replacements for perfectly good ships.
So, I will freely admit that I find propublica to be a super biased source, but from the existing record here, there seems to be two amazingly large holes in the prosecution theory, motive has not been established, and method has not been established. I would suggest that the actual court marshal will likely focus on these two factors, and likely the sailor will be found not guilty? It concerns me that the leadership believe that a case of arson can be proved. Likely, this is more failure in leadership in this part of the Navy which seems to be under staffed with competent folks willing to actually do the necessary work to keep these vessels safe and operational. It sounds like a lot of senior leaders simply pencil whipped their jobs.
Oh nonsense, I lived in Vallejo just a few years ago. The place is disgusting. Huge areas of the base that were once barracks, offices, and warehouses are now just empty fields. The homeless set up camps in them and burned them to the ground. Or vandalized them to the point where they had to be demolished. And most of what is left is just rotting away. I saw what the base was like 30 years ago, and it still depresses me so see what it is like. And that is mostly the fault of Vallejo, they have screwed up every aspect of how they handled it since they got the base. And I know it did not have to be that way, because I also spent a lot of time at McClellan in Sacramento. There they did it right, and almost all of the base has a high level of occupancy. And the old enlisted housing still looks great, as they maintain it and take care of it even though it is low income housing. Where as Vallejo literally bulldozed hundreds of units at Mare Island, and it is still a vacant field. And many others are now suffering from decades of neglect. And the base is still a mecca for homeless that break into whatever they can, either to live in it or to tear it apart for anything they can salvage from it.
Then what is your solution? You have a massive ship that is going through a lot of work, especially on things like the plumbing and electrical. You talk about "institutional amnesia", fine. Tell us the solution then. And no, this is not any kind of "retention" thing, as the actual shipworkers are actually civilians. The "sailors" actually to damn near none of that kind of work. So come on now, you are complaining, so what is your plan?
The plan is for the Navy and the civilian contractors they hire to get their bleep together and not destroy ships in for refit. If you read the entire article it was a poster child of incompetent management. You can not accept this as a “bleep-happens” loss.
There are around a dozen closed bases in the Bay Area, and none are anywhere close to as bad as Mare Island is. I used to literally sail past it every day, and it always made me sad. So much of it was simply destroyed, for no real reason. The old Pass and ID office outside the gate, destroyed. The PX complex, it sits in shambles. The gas station and 24 hour store is the same. All of the enlisted housing is gone, really nice duplexes that had all been remodeled in the early 1990s. The Marine Barracks has been allowed to rot, and many of us are worried if it can even be saved anymore after 30 years of neglect. And ironically, the "Substandard Housing" that used to sit outside the gate was sold off, and is now high priced condos. The same with the Chief CPO and Officer quarters. In the original transition plan the enlisted housing was to be low income housing, but all those that wanted to live in the Officer Housing on an island complained that they did not want to buy such near a housing project, which is why it was destroyed. And for 30 years there have been an endless string of proposals for grants and money to rebuild the enlisted housing, which always fell apart due to mismanagement. The latest I heard when I left was that they wanted to build a new ferry terminal on the island. Which is a great example of how that city thinks. There is no bus line on the island, no facilities at all. And over the last few decades they have spent millions on remodeling the ferry terminal on the edge of downtown. A parking structure, large parking lots, so why move it across the river at the cost of millions? It is literally across the street from the central terminal for all of the city busses (once again built at a lot of expense). So, are they going to move it all? Why, it is not like what is there now is not enough to support the ferries. And it is not a surprise, as one can drive around Vallejo and see burned buildings everywhere. Occupancy levels are super low, and businesses like WalMart are leaving or left. That is where the first WalMart in California was. They wanted to expand their building 20 years ago, the city told them no. So they bought a large building that had 2 department stores in it and were going to move to that, the city said no again. So they simply packed up, and moved to American Canyon 15 miles away. And their original store and the one they bought to move to still sit abandoned 20 years later. Hell, I worked at the range complex, and it was the best one in Northern California when Fort Ord closed. We hosted law enforcement from over 100 miles in all directions, and they loved that they could use our range for free. We had a 600 yard rifle range, an indoor shooting house, 15 ranges for pistols and shotguns that even had moving targets and buildings to shoot from. And a repelling tower. When I moved back I found out that multiple departments wanted to take it over and run it as a facility for all law enforcement. Once again, the city said no. So it still sits abandoned, and all of the agencies have to pay civilian ranges to do their qualifications and practice. Of course, the first boneheaded decision was they had multiple offers from companies wanting to take over the shipyard. They were all turned down, they had some crazy fantasy they could become the "Silicon Valley of the North". The problem is, no high tech companies wanted to move there. The buildings were largely historical and 60-100 years old. Completely unsuited for the tech industry, and the infrastructure was so old that it would not really support them. And by the time they decided to let ship maintenance companies come in, much of what was there had rotted to the point it no longer worked, and nobody was left that knew how to use the 100 year old drydocks.
Back when I was serving in Iraq I knew a reservist guy who was a police officer in Vallejo at the time. I sometimes have wondered what he would say now about the piss poor conditions in that city.
It was bad even back then. In the early 1990's when I was stationed there, they were well known for harassing us and giving us BS tickets. At one point I was getting one a month for having out of state plates on my car. And I was not the only one, as in traffic court it was not unusual to see several Sailors and Marines in uniform that are there for the same thing. Out of state plates, out of state drivers licenses, expired licenses form out of state, things like that. Got to the point in 1992 that one of the judges told the VPD he would hold the department in contempt if they did not stop giving bullshit tickets like that.
