Tuesday - July 29, 2008
Forrestal Disaster Anniversary
Today marks the anniversary of the Forrestal disaster, the largest single loss of life the US Navy suffered during the Vietnam War as far as I know.
An electrical short occurred in one of the aircraft on the flight deck of the USS Forrestal, causing a small missile to fire off. The missile shot across the deck and struck another aircraft waiting to take off, igniting it’s fuel tanks. The aircraft that was hit was piloted by a Lt. Cmdr. John McCain, who managed to escape the damaged plane by leaping from the nose of the craft into the spreading fire. He tried to rescue another trapped pilot from the flames until an explosion tore up his leg and blew him yards away.
The fire spread across the flight deck, “cooking off” two elderly 1000lb bombs on another airplane. Those explosions caused other explosions and within a couple minutes an enormous fire had engulfed the aft half of the ship. The explosions ripped the deck open and burning fuel turned the below decks spaces into a charnel house. The deck fires were extinguished in a bit over an hour, but the below decks fires continued to burn for half a day. In the end 134 sailors were dead, many more injured, 23 airplanes had been destroyed and another 43 damaged. $73 million damaged had been done to the ship. Firefighting efforts pumped so much water at the flames that the ship was on the verge of rolling over. Only emergency efforts to pump fuel from one side of the hold to the other prevented the list from becoming a rollover, which would have drowned most of the crew of more than 5000.
A Naval Board of Inquiry found several root causes: the bombs that had gone off were leftovers from WWII made from less fire stable explosives, some safety procedures had not been properly followed, and not enough of the crew had been trained in fire fighting. Today’s carrier crews are given much better training, often at the Navy’s Farrier fire training center in Virginia, named in honor of the Forrestal’s fire chief who died fighting the flames. The USS Forrestal was decommissioned in 1995 after serving 38 years.
There are quite a number of videos on this disaster at YouTube. Please don’t bother to read the comments; since John McCain was on the ship when this happened, and though he may have behaved as heroically as the rest of crew, the left has taken over the comments and said the usual horrible things. Scumbags.
Posted by Drew458
on 07/29/2008 at 11:30 AM
Filed Under: • Military •
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