There was chaos aboard the USS Gerald R. Ford after a major onboard fire knocked out a big swathe of living quarters, leaving hundreds of US sailors without beds in the middle of a live war deployment, in what marks a much bigger incident than what the Pentagon previously disclosed
The fire occurred last week, raising immediate questions of whether it was hit by an Iranian drone or missile attack, as Tehran has claimed, amid Pentagon insistence that it was none of these - but just an accidental fire.
Already the crew and ship are strained to their limits, given the carrier is on its way to achieving a record deployment, entering ten months. The crew has reportedly been informed that they will be deployed into May, which would make an entire year at sea, after the prior Caribbean deployment focused on the Venezuela anti-Maduro operation.
The NY Times says this marks twice the length of a normal carrier deployment - one wrought with extreme difficulties and a major emergency, as the report details:
It took more than 30 hours for sailors to put out the fire aboard the aircraft carrier Gerald R. Ford last week, sailors and military officials said, as the beleaguered ship continued its monthslong slog through President Trump’s military operations.
The fire started in the ship’s main laundry area last Thursday. By the time it was over, more than 600 sailors and crew members had lost their beds and have since been bunking down on floors and tables, officials said.
The U.S. military’s Central Command said two sailors received treatment for “non-life-threatening injuries.” People on the ship reported that dozens of service members suffered smoke inhalation.
CENTCOM has said that the fire caused "no damage to the ship’s propulsion plant, and the aircraft carrier remains fully operational."
The nuclear-powered vessel has indeed been running around the clock fighter jet operations connected to Operation Epic Fury, amid ongoing heavy aerial bombardment of Iranian cities.
Biden's former national security spokesman, Rear Adm. John F. Kirby, has been cited as saying "Ships get tired too, and they get beat up over the course of long deployments." And ultimately, he explained: "You can’t run a ship that long and that hard and expect her and her crew to perform at peak capacity."
Skeptics have raised eyebrows at the abundance of major incidents listed as 'accidents' by the Pentagon:
There are some 4,500 crew on board, and as is standard during sensitive deployments and at wartime there's a communications block-out in effect, at a moment some media correspondents have tried to get quotes and information.
Currently Washington has two carrier strikes groups forming the core of its Iran operations, the USS Abraham Lincoln and USS Gerald R. Ford - and they operate with at least a dozen other supporting warships, including Arleigh Burke-class destroyers.