Normally for fires and smoke you have to set fire and smoke boundaries.
There were unable to do either one and due to confusion between the different fire agencies navy, fed fire, and SD fire over who was in charge (everyone thought someone else was in charge of the fire). ie who is flying the plane? the fire basically burned unabated for several hours before sometime took command. But the fire was fully developed by then.
Very painful read.
But now that I think back over my time in the Navy. The big assumption in all of the damage control drills I’ve ever run in the Navy is that you have a fully crewed damage control teams with full operational gear and command and control. I don’t recall ever doing damage control drills in a shipyard / major repair work going on or bug hole in the side engine room to allow engine room machinery to get craned on and off the ship.
Where the first thing we do for a fire in the engine room is secure ventilation to prevent air going in or out and then flood the space with halon. Hard to do when there’s a big hole in the side of the room. Though the Tripoli engine room fire showed us even when you don’t secure ventilation 2% halon is enough to suffocate a main engineering space fire with during maintence yard work going on.
This situation was a perfect storm of lack of personnel, lack of operable firefighting equipment, inability to seal spaces, and lack of command and control.
Once this fire got out of its incipient phase and began to grow, the ship spaces where fire was located essentially became furnaces within those spaces, with temperatures so high that they would be non-survivable for even fully outfitted fire crews.
Being in yard period, many of the ships DC repair lockers would likely be getting worked on, with missing equipment being replaced, etc. Fire mains getting worked on would have those out of service. Unlike using shore power, there’s no real immediate shore-supplied heavy firefighting resources available to attach to the ship such as high pressure water etc. There’s really only portable light-medium fire suppression systems that if they aren’t placed into operation quickly, any fire can spread beyond their capability to control them in short order.
The spaces and their heat inside, even with the ventilation of open hatches and such, would conduct heat to items in other spaces and ignite them. The ship would become a literal fun house of “what’s going to ignite next?” They are very lucky they didn’t have trapped fire crews in the maze of the ship while attempting to fight the fire with poor visibility and reach the seat-areas of the fires in the various spaces.
insofar as C&C, the ship’s DC officer or designee should have been the Incident Commander. This person has the intimate knowledge of the ships plans and design, and can best decide what needs to be done where and when. The Federal firefighters and the SD city firefighters are structural firefighters, not shipboard firefighters (unless some were prior USN and with the training), and they should’ve been utilized as backup to Damage Control-led teams of firefighting crews, not allowed to venture deep into the ship and it’s unfamiliar spaces and layout, on their own. The ship isn’t merely a “floating structure building”, it has challenges and gotcha’s all its own that make it very different from the standard structural firefighting that these shore-side crews are trained on. That could have been a recipe for disaster, and it was luck that it wasn’t. With all these problems and limitations, the fire crews as a whole couldn’t ever get ahead of the fire or cut it off at the pass, so to speak. And the fire took on a life of its own, early.