12 février 2024 | International, Aérospatial
28 juillet 2020 | International, Naval
After the US Navy’s Bonhomme Richard catastrophe, a far-reaching crackdown on fire safety
By: David B. Larter
WASHINGTON – U.S. Navy brass is telling sailors and contractors to put fire safety at the center of their work in the shipyards and on the waterfront in the wake of a catastrophic fire aboard the amphibious assault ship Bonhomme Richard.
As Naval Sea Systems Command continues its formal assessment of the damage to Bonhomme Richard, the Navy has both sailors across the organization and contractors working on the ships reviewing their procedures and ensuring they are doing everything possible to prevent a second tragedy.
Adm. Michael Gilday, the chief of naval operations, said the enterprise-wide effort was to prevent a similar event from taking place, a lesson he drew from the Navy's response to a string of accidents in 7th Fleet in 2017.
“Could there be another Bonhomme Richard waiting to happen? If you go back to 2017, who would have predicted we'd have had two collisions of that magnitude within a month?” Gilday said in a July 16 interview with Defense News. “So, I'm not waiting for ‘No. 2' to decide we have a trend here. In a situation like this, one incident is enough for me to determine that there could be a trend and I'm not going to leave it to chance that there might be.”
In the wake of the fire, he ordered fleet commanders to send a lengthy list of requirements to the waterfront, including a mandate to do fire safety inspections of every space on every ship. So-called “zone inspections” of each space on a ship are generally spread out over months, rather than packed into a week.
The orders also included reviewing maintenance records on all damage control equipment – such as fire hoses and fire main connections, fire extinguishers, fixed fire suppression systems and firefighting gear – and ensure it is 100 percent accounted for. Additionally, each in-port duty section (a rotating group of sailors from the crew designated to stay on board the ship for 24 hours) was required to undergo a formal assessment as to their proficiency in firefighting and validate that they were properly manned to be effective.
Contractors and shipbuilders have also been warned by the Navy to take fire safety seriously. In the days following the Bonhomme Richard fire, two minor fires – one on board the amphibious assault ship Kearsarge at General Dynamics NASSCO shipyard and another on the Navy's future carrier John F. Kennedy at Newport News shipbuilding – have curtailed work and prompted a doubling down on safety.
In a Friday letter, Navy's top acquisitions official James Geurts told shipbuilders and contractors to take Bohnomme Richard as a lesson.
"Anyone who steps aboard our ships must be ever vigilant about ensuring fire safety," Geurts wrote. "I urge you to use [the recent fire] to ensure that our work spaces are clean, that unnecessary clutter is removed, that all fire safety measures are being followed and that there is unrestricted access to firefighting and damage control equipment."
‘Gutted'
The safety crackdown follows the Navy's worst in-port disaster since the 2012 fire on board the attack submarine Miami, which suffered a major conflagration while in deep maintenance at Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in Maine. That incident was later determined to be arson.
The Bonhomme Richard fire, which experts fear may have damaged the “big deck” amphib beyond repair, raised troubling questions about how prepared sailors are to combat one of their most fearsome enemies: a shipboard fire, a threat they are trained to deal with from their earliest days in Boot Camp.
In a letter this week from Gilday to all Navy flag officers and top enlisted leaders, he detailed how a series of explosions and a 1,200-degree inferno caused “extensive damage” to 11 of Bonhomme Richard's 14 decks.
“There is fire and water damage, to varying degrees, on 11 of 14 decks,” Gilday wrote. “With the flight deck as a reference, I walked sections of the ship 5 levels below and had the opportunity to examine the superstructure.
“The island is nearly gutted, as are sections of some of the decks below; some perhaps, nearly encompassing the 844 ft length and 106 ft beam of the ship ([Naval Sea System Command's] detailed assessment is ongoing). Sections of the flight deck are warped/bulging.”
The fire on the Bonhomme Richard broke out the morning of July 12 while it was pierside in San Diego, California, undergoing maintenance. The blaze was aided by wind and explosions, Gilday wrote.
“While response from the crew and federal firefighters was rapid, preliminary reports indicate there were two main factors that contributed to the intensity, scope, and speed of the fire,” Gilday wrote. “First was wind that fueled the fire as the vehicle storage area leads to the well deck, which opens to the air at the stern gate. The second were the explosions, one in particular, reportedly heard about 13 miles away.
“The explosions, some were intense, and the uncertainty of their location and timing, led to a situation, that might have been under control late Sunday night, but expanded into a mass conflagration, spreading quickly up elevator shafts, engine exhaust stacks, and through berthing and other compartments where combustible material was present.”
The Navy has launched dual investigations into the fire: A safety investigation, which are generally not released to the public so that witnesses can feel free to speak openly, and a more formal administrative investigation, which generally comes with disciplinary recommendations and are releasable to the public.
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22 août 2018 | International, C4ISR
What reduced size, weight and power mean on the battlefield
Computers on the battlefield take a beating. Beyond the everyday wear and tear, they also must endure extreme temperatures and often violent vibrations. To help ensure its systems give soldiers and commanders the information they need, the Army relies on its Mounted Family of Computer Systems program. Known as MfoCS, pronounced em-fox, the program covers detachable tablets to fully-loaded, vehicle-mounted workstations. C4ISRNET spoke recently with Bill Guyan, vice president of business development for Leonardo DRS, about advances in battlefield computing. C4ISRNET: We hear a lot about a new emphasis on the hardening of security of contractors. And not just contractors, but primes, and then their contractors. Obviously this has become a point of concern for DOD leadership. Bill Guyan: One of the big areas of emphasis for the Army in the procurement of the [Mounted Family of Computer Systems] (MFoCS) and particularly MFoC2 II, were areas related to security, both from a cyber security standpoint and the ability to assure that the system was free from malware or any external threat. So there's a very comprehensive supply chain risk management strategy put in place and for this program we believe that this is the most secure edge computing system that the Army's ever purchased. It's absolutely critical that it be so, since ultimately there will be somewhere between a 100,000 and 125,000 of these systems fielded across the Army and Marine Corps, at the edge of the battlefield with each one of these systems serving as potential on ramp to the network and in an area of situational awareness that is absolutely mission critical. There was a time when we derived quick benefit from having an advantage and a capability that our opponents didn't. And over time the capability has evolved from a nice to have capability to a mission critical capability that we'd be hard pressed to fight without. C4ISRNET: The Army has put a lot of emphasis on size, weight and power. Can you explain how that manifests itself on the battlefield? Guyan: We optimize size, weight and power in two ways. At the hardware level we optimize by staying at the leading edge of available technologies, available commercial technologies and rapidly adapting and adopting them for employment in this mission critical extreme environment. The computers and displays are the soldiers' path to the network. It has to work at -40 centigrade and it has to work at 80 degrees centigrade. It has to work in extreme vibration and it has to work in contested EMI environments. It has to work all the time. For example, we led the charge in the adoption and fielding of solid state hard drives versus rotating media, which allowed us to not only improve the resiliency of the system, but also to reduce size, because we no longer have to isolate the rotating hard drive from the shock and vibration. We also migrated from the old backlight technology to an LED backlight, which is much more reliable, particularly in shock vibration at temperature extremes. But it also requires far less power. The other thing that we've been able to do is rapidly adapt the latest processor technologies when they're available. Of course, processors continue to get faster, smaller, and use less power. We're able to make sure that every generation of system can deliver more computing capability for less power, and less power means less heat. Full article: https://www.c4isrnet.com/show-reporter/technet-augusta/2018/08/21/what-reduced-size-weight-and-power-mean-on-the-battlefield/
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4 décembre 2019 | International, Naval
US Navy awards largest-ever shipbuilding contract to Electric Boat for new attack submarines
By: David B. Larter orrection: An earlier version of this story misstated the number of boats awarded to General Dynamics Electric Boat. WASHINGTON — The U.S. Navy on Monday awarded its largest-ever shipbuilding contract to General Dynamics Electric Boat for construction of nine Virginia-class attack submarines, eight of which will have an 84-foot section that boosts the boat's strike missile capacity. The contract for the Block V Virginia-class subs, worth $22.2 billion, could grow by another $2 billion if the Navy exercises an option for a 10th boat. The contract is for two fewer boats than the 11 proposed by the fleet in this year's budget submission. “A lot of hard work across the whole team to structure the contract in such a way as to balance risk between the government and the shipbuilder,” James Geurts, the Navy's top acquisition official, said during a roundtable with members of the media to announce the contract signing. “If the shipbuilder delivers on target, the multiyear savings will be 16.5 percent, or $4.4 billion in savings. So it's a pretty important day for us.” Guerts, the assistant secretary of the Navy for research, acquisition and development, said that when you add government-furnished equipment into the contract, the total value of the program swells to about $35 billion. The first boat in Block V, SSN 802, is currently under construction but does not have the Virginia Payload Module, or VPM. The next boat, 803, will have VPM. All of the boats will have an upgraded acoustics suite. In the briefing, Navy officials said that if the service opts for all 10 boats, six of the boats would be constructed at Electric Boat's partner yard, Huntington Ingalls Newport News, and four would be built at Electric Boat. The move to put most of the work in Newport News was done to balance the increased workload at Electric Boat with the start of the Columbia class, the next generation of ballistic missile submarines slated to begin construction this year. In a statement, Electric Boat President Kevin Graney said the contract provides stability for his shipyard. “This contract allows for our shipbuilding team, our suppliers and our employees to plan ahead so that we can continue to deliver submarines of unmatched quality, stealth and lethality,” Graney said. Dave Bolcar, Newport News' vice president of submarine construction, likewise hailed the contract as a means of stability in the submarine industrial base. "Today's contract maintains the Virginia-class build rate that provides continued stability to our workforce and to the 5,000 suppliers that will support submarines for the next decade,” he said. "This contract also continues the two per year construction cadence essential to sustaining production efficiencies, while ensuring our national security and the Navy's continued undersea superiority.” https://www.defensenews.com/naval/2019/12/02/navy-awards-largest-ever-shipbuilding-contract-to-electric-boat-for-new-attack-submarines/