NYT reports that one of the US aircraft carriers has to withdraw to port due to a laundry room fire. About 600 sailors lost access to their bunks.
The fire, according to two officials, began in the vent of a dryer in the ship’s laundry facilities and quickly spread. Sailors battled the blaze for more than 30 hours, officials and sailors said.
The Navy did not respond to a request for comment. Central Command said in its statement that the fire caused “no damage to the ship’s propulsion plant, and the aircraft carrier remains fully operational.”
It’s a meme that the weakness of the Death Star is a tiny overlooked vent for a reason. The big things are carefully considered. The tiny things, like a dryer vent, are often overlooked.
I found online a Navy manual from the '70s which prescribed laundry operations in excruciating detail, running over a hundred pages. It required cleaning the dryer lint traps every 2 hours, and monthly cleaning of the ducts. The Navy even has ratings specifically for laundry workers, Ship’s Serviceman (Laundry).
It just blows mind that this isn’t a solved problem, since it was solved 50 years ago!
That doesn’t mean the procedure was actually followed though.
Right, that’s all good. Now you have to get a couple of low-ranking servicemen to carry out every step of that hundred page manual to the letter on each of their several dozen machines, daily, after they’ve been deployed for an ongoing 10 months because their superiors are morons, and are further scheduled to become the longest running carrier deployment of all time at over a year of deploy time, because their superiors are morons.
I’d believe that some corners were cut in these servicemen’s duty, and it just happened to be one too many corners one too many times. The men are fatigued, they want to get off the ship. It’s possible these corners were even cut on purpose with exactly this result in mind in an attempt to get them off the ship.
If by “cutting corners” you mean “actively packing dryer lint into a place where it could conceivably be a mistake” I’d agree.