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San Diego Fire-Rescue responds to fire on USS Bonhomme Richard
By: Mary McKenzie , Zac SelfPosted at 10:51 AM, Jul 12, 2020

SAN DIEGO (KGTV) - San Diego Fire-Rescue is responding, along with multiple agencies to a military ship fire at Naval Base San Diego.

SDFD is assisting on this fire on board the USS Bonhomme Richard. According to a tweet from SDFD they are partnered with Federal Fire in unified command. Several sailors are being treated for a variety of injuries, according to SDFD. San Diego Fire-Rescue tweeted around 10:30 a.m. about the fire aboard the ship on the 3400 block of Senn Street.

It's unclear how the fire started. According to a witness, an explosion was heard coming from the ship shortly after the blaze started. Video posted by the department shows thick, black smoke rising into the air.

USS Bonhomme Richard's Bridge Engulfed In Flames As Fire Rages Into The Night (Updated)

The blaze appears to have migrated to the ship's superstructure that is packed full of sensors, communications gear, weapons, and much more.

The USS Bonhomme Richard (LHD-6) continued to burn after the sun had set in San Diego. It now appears that the fire has migrated to the ship's island superstructure with its bridge seen engulfed in flames, which is a very bad thing. Additional large booms were also heard as the blaze continued to rage aboard some 14 hours after it started.

As it sits now, 17 sailors and four civilians were taken to the hospital as a result of the fire, it is known that at least all the sailors were in stable condition as of around 6:30 pm local time in San Diego. During an evening press conference, Rear Admiral Philip E. Sobeck addressed reporters and stated that there are still 1,000,000 gallons of fuel onboard the vessel, but that is was located below where they thought the blaze emanating from. In addition, fireboats have been pouring water on the ship's hull in order to keep it cool in an attempt to maintain its integrity as the fire wore on. Two teams of firefighters were said to be fighting the fire on the ship, although now that its upper-most decks are engulfed, that may have changed.

The future of the vessel, which is in the middle of its service life, is likely more in question now after seeing that the fire is burning missionized spaces in its island, which also points to the fire now being far more widespread than originally indicated. This is despite the Admiral stating that the ship would be repaired and would sail again, which seemed like a dubious claim at this time.

The island is also packed with the ship's most critical electronics, including its radars, electronic warfare arrays, and many of its communications systems. Just forward of the island is a large structure that houses half of the ship's Rolling Airframe Missile and Evolved Sea Sparrow Missile launchers. One of the ship's Phalanx close-in weapon systems is also mounted atop the island itself.


UPDATE:

The forward island has melted in with its mast now leaning forward at an extreme angle. What are supposedly Sea Hawk helicopters are now using Bambi Buckets to douse the flames from above.

Navy Says At Least One Fire Continues To Burn On The USS Bonhomme Richard
The service says the ship is stable and structurally sound, but that it's too early to assess its salvageability.
BY JOSEPH TREVITHICK JULY 14, 2020

U.S. Navy Rear Admiral Philip Sobeck, head of Expeditionary Strike Group Three, says that the USS Bonhomme Richard is stable and structurally safe despite a still ongoing fire onboard the Wasp class amphibious assault ship. The vessel has now been burning continuously for more than 48 hours now and has produced sustained temperatures of at least 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit in some areas.

Sobeck addressed reporters at Naval Base San Diego, where the Bonhomme Richard is still pier-side, on July 14, 2020, during his third press conference in as many days. He was joined by the commanding officer of the base, Navy Captain Mark Nieswiadomy, Navy Region Southwest Environmental Director Jason Golumbfskie-Jones, head of Coast Sector San Diego Captain Timothy Barelli, and Federal Fire San Diego Chief Mary Anderson.

You can get fully up to speed on how the fire has developed and the state of the Bonhomme Richard in The War Zone's previous rolling coverage of this situation.

The key new details from this latest press conference are:

 - The ship is stable and the structure is safe.
 - No major damage to the ship's four main engineering spaces.
 - No threat to the ship's fuel tanks at present.
 - The fuel tanks are well below any of the remaining active fires or heat sources, so any risk to them at this point is low.
 - The ship has salt water-filled compensation tanks that also help keep the fuel tanks cool.
 - There is at least one active fire in a forward area of the ship.
 - Firefighters had been unable to get to those spaces until today.
 - There is another heat source that could be another fire aft.
 - These two areas are isolated from each other.
 - Helicopter Sea Combat Squadron Three (HSC-3), based at nearby Naval Air Station North Island, has conducted more than 1,200 water bucket drops, in total.
 - In addition to other external firefighting operations, these drops have been essential in allowing firefighters to actually get on the ship.
 - 61 personnel have been injured, in total, so far, 38 sailors and 23 civilians.
 - None of those individuals are hospitalized.
 - An explosion occurred while the crew was securing the space where the initial fire had broken out before they could safely energize the fire suppression system.
 - The fire spread rapidly from the front to the rear of the ship.
 - Navy is working with San Diego authorities to step up monitoring of potential adverse environmental impacts.
 - Coast Guard is prepared to respond to any potential environmental issues, including an oil spill.
 - No visible evidence of oil spill at present.
 - Hope that all fires will be out within the next 24 hours.
 - Too early to tell the full extent of the damage.

The Navy's position that the ship, which has been visibly listing, is stable and structurally sound is a significant and positive development. There had been concerns that areas that had been exposed to persistent temperatures in excess of 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit could be compromised.

Still, the pictures that have already emerged online show significant internal damage, as well as to the flight deck and superstructure. It will take the Navy a not-insignificant amount of time to just conduct a full damage assessment. The situation certainly continues to be serious, as well, even as the remaining fires are increasingly under control. Of the 61 injuries, two occurred just overnight. Thankfully, the pair of Navy sailors did not need to be hospitalized.  The Navy had also earlier announced that five sailors who had been in the hospital after suffering minor injuries after the fire broke out on July 12 had been released. They were the last of a group of 17 who had needed more serious medical attention.

The exact cause of the fire remains under investigation, but the Navy had previously said that it began in Bonhomme Richard's lower vehicle storage area, where large amounts of cardboard, rags, drywall, and other flammable material had been present as part of maintenance on the ship. That work also meant that many of the spaces were full of debris and other obstacles, which made the firefighters' jobs harder, as well.

"There’s plastics that go around cabling, those kind of things, there’s different rags, there’s all the things that are used to kind of maintain the ship, clean the ship … and so right now we’re testing and we’re checking everything that we know, and we’re within EPA [U.S. Environmental Protection Agency] standards," Rear Admiral Sobeck had told reporters yesterday, also addressing potential environmental concerns. The San Diego Air Pollution Control District has advised local residents to stay indoors, if possible, to avoid potential exposure to pollutants.

"A one-nautical mile temporary flight-restriction zone from surface to 3,000 feet altitude has been established to maintain the safety of all firefighting aircraft," U.S. Coast Guard Commander Chris Wright, the head of the response department at Coast Guard Sector San Diego, said in a statement on July 13, according to Defense News. “Neighboring marinas are also currently being advised to utilize protective safety measures.”

The Coast Guard “continues to assess environmental sensitivities and has contracted an Oil Spill Response Organization to preemptively deploy a protective boom to guard against any potential environmental concerns," Wight added. Bonhomme Richard had approximately one million gallons of fuel onboard when the fire started. The Navy said yesterday that the blaze was just two decks away from the ship's fuel tanks.

While the Navy has not yet declared whether it believes the ship to be a total loss, if it is unable to repair the ship and return it to service, it could impact the service's ability to respond to various contingencies. Including Bonhomme Richard, the Navy presently has eight Wasp class amphibious assault ships. It also has two newer America class amphibious assault ships, including the USS Tripoli, which is the first example a distinct subclass.

This category of ships forms the core of the Navy's Amphibious Ready Groups, which, together with embarked U.S. Marine Corps expeditionary units, sometimes with significant airpower in the form of F-35B Joint Strike Fighters, are constantly patrolling or otherwise postured around the world. It is worth noting that the Marine Corps is now exploring new concepts operations that do not necessarily involve the use of traditional large amphibious warfare ships.

It remains to be seen exactly what will become of the Bonhomme Richard, but the Navy is clearly still hopeful that the ship will be salvageable at the end of the day.

US Navy’s top officer reveals grim new details of the damage to Bonhomme Richard
By: David B. Larter   July 22, 2020

WASHINGTON — A series of explosions and a 1,200-degree inferno damaged 11 of the amphibious assault ship Bonhomme Richard’s 14 decks, according to a summary of the damage by the U.S. Navy’s top officer, which was obtained by Defense News.

Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Michael Gilday, in a letter to the service’s admirals and master chiefs, said the fire caused “extensive damage” to the ship.

“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 letter does not address one of the key questions in the wake of the fire: What will become of the ship? The Navy has a long history of reviving its damaged ships as it did with the destroyers Fitzgerald and McCain, and Congress is usually willing to float the money. But it’s unclear if the Navy will want to invest what will likely be hundreds of millions of dollars into a 22-year-old ship. After a 2012 fire onboard the attack submarine Miami, the Navy determined the roughly $700 million price tag was too steep to justify.

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.”

In the letter, Gilday praised the work of Bonhomme Richard’s crew, as well as the hundreds of sailors who rushed to the scene, many without orders to do so. Several dozen sailors and civilian firefighters were hospitalized, most with smoke inhalation and heat injuries.

“There were Sailors from across the San Diego waterfront who responded to this fire — hundreds of them; many without receiving direction to do so,” Gilday wrote. “Every single fire team was led by BONHOMME RICHARD Sailors — no question, this was THEIR ship and they would walk point on every firefighting mission. Most had to be ordered … and re-ordered … to go home at some point and get some rest. I also met with the air crews of HSC-3; the aerial bucket brigade who dropped nearly 700K gallons of water on the blaze, day and night, from their helos. Their efforts were critical in helping get the fire under control; and they used their IR [infrared] capability to locate hot spots and vector fire teams to the source. Awe inspiring teamwork.”

Gilday closed the letter by pledging to learn from the fire and to draw on the positives from the situation.

“We will thoroughly look into and learn from the fire on BONHOMME RICHARD,” he wrote. “We will be committed to doing that together. I have no doubt about that. As we look hard into recent events — and revisit and assess what we’ve learned from previous incidents, I am relying on you to reinforce those aspects of our culture demonstrated on BONHOMME RICHARD and across the Navy right now. Focus on the positive attributes — that will overcome the negatives we want to avoid.”

Arson suspected in Bonhomme Richard fire, defense official says
Julie Watson, The Associated Press and Lolita C. Baldor, The Associated Press
August 26

SAN DIEGO — Arson is suspected as the cause of a July 12 fire that left extensive damage to the amphibious assault ship Bonhomme Richard docked off San Diego, and a U.S. Navy sailor was being questioned as a potential suspect, a senior defense official said Wednesday.

The sailor was being questioned as part of the investigation by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the official said, adding that defense department leaders were notified of the development. The official, with knowledge of the investigation, spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity to provide details not yet made public. The sailor was not detained.

The amphibious assault ship burned for more than four days and was the Navy’s worst U.S. warship fire outside of combat in recent memory.

The ship was left with extensive structural, electrical and mechanical damage and its future remains uncertain.

The development in the investigation was first reported by KGTV, the ABC affiliate in San Diego. The Navy declined to answer questions.

“The Navy will not comment on an ongoing investigation to protect the integrity of the investigative process and all those involved,” said Lt. Tim Pietrack, a Navy spokesman. “We have nothing to announce at this time.”

The Naval Criminal Investigative Service also declined to comment on the case.

The amphibious assault ships are among the few in the U.S. fleet that can act as a mini aircraft carrier. If the Bonhomme Richard is not repaired, it could cost the Navy up to $4 billion to replace it, according to defense analysts.

The Bonhomme Richard was nearing the end of a two-year upgrade estimated to cost $250 million.

About 160 sailors and officers were on board when the flames sent up a huge plume of dark smoke from the 840-foot (256-meter) amphibious assault vessel, which had been docked at Naval Base San Diego while undergoing the upgrade.

Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Mike Gilday visited the ship a day after the blaze was extinguished. He said then that the Navy thought it had the fire under control only hours after it broke out the morning of July 12 in the ship’s lower storage area, where cardboard boxes, rags and other maintenance supplies were stored. But winds coming off the San Diego Bay whipped up the flames and the fire spread up the elevator shafts and the exhaust stacks.

Then two explosions — one heard as far as 13 miles (21 kilometres) away — caused it to grow even bigger, Gilday said. The Navy was looking into what caused the explosions, though Gilday said at that time that they had not found any indications yet of foul play.

The fire sent acrid smoke billowing over San Diego, and local officials had recommended people avoid exercising outdoors.

Firefighters attacked the flames inside the ship while firefighting vessels with water cannons directed streams of seawater into the ship and helicopters made water drops.

More than 60 sailors and civilians were treated for minor injuries, heat exhaustion and smoke inhalation.

For the fire-ravaged ship Bonhomme Richard, the US Navy has no good options
By: David B. Larter    October, 1. 2020

WASHINGTON – In deciding how to move forward with the warped and carbonized hulk of the amphibious assault ship Bonhomme Richard, U.S. Navy leaders face a series of choices and all of them are bad.

The Navy has not yet produced an estimate to repair the damage to the ship, which burned for five days in July. Assessing the full extent of the five-day fire that gutted much of the upper decks and levels of the ship will take some time yet.

But no matter what the Navy decides, it will be painful.

The bottom line? The Navy can either: fix Bonhomme Richard at enormous cost; replace her with a new LHA, a class of ship that Congressional Research Service says is running about $3.8 billion per hull, further constricting an already squeezed shipbuilding budget; try to pull an old big-deck out of mothballs and overhaul it for a few years of service; or it can cut bait entirely and lose the capacity all together.

The service is facing a budget crunch, with the Columbia-class ballistic missile submarine slated to have an outsized impact on the service’s budget for years. That means replacing the older Wasp-class amphibious assault ship (LHA) with a more capable and much more expensive America-class LHA would be challenging without a congressional largess.

Officials who spoke on background said that the Navy’s working assumption is that the repairs could cost as much as, or even exceed, $1.5 billion, though that number is subject to change based on a full assessment of the hull that has not been completed yet. If the repair cost $1.5 billion or thereabouts, it would roughly equal the original cost of construction. But that would still be significantly less than the cost of building a new big deck to replace the Bonhomme Richard.

In a phone call with Defense News, a Navy official who spoke on background said there were four ongoing investigations regarding the July Bonhomme Richard fire. Naval Sea Systems Command is conducting an investigation and a failure review board, geared toward safety and lessons learned. A command investigation delves into how the ship’s chain of command handled the situation both prior to and during the catastrophe. And finally, a Naval Criminal Investigative Service investigation joined by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms is also on scene.

On top of everything else, the damage assessment team has to “take a back seat” to the criminal investigation while it is ongoing, the official said.

All the teams are trying to stay out of each other’s way, but some spaces that a damage assessment team might need to access are inaccessible because the criminal investigators might be using them, for example, the official said.

This has hampered progress toward getting a fuller picture of what needs to be done and how much it will all cost to repair, the official said. All four investigations feed into one another and the official explained the best guess now is that the results may not be available until the end of the year, either in November or December.

In all, the Navy believes it’s possible to repair Bonhomme Richard, but the decision will ultimately be “a strategic one,” the official said, He added that on the San Diego waterfront, which teamed up to fight the nearly week-long fire, sailors are hopeful that the ship will be repaired.

Options

The consensus among Navy analysts who have seen the damage to Bonhomme Richard in pictures and heard it described by the chief of naval operations in a July memo obtained by Defense News, is that large sections of the ship will need to be re-fabricated entirely.

“You may have to just cut it off and rebuild it above the hangar deck," said Jerry Hendrix, a retired Navy captain and analyst with the Telemus Group. "Put her into dry dock and rebuild her from the hangar deck on up.”

Industry officials who spoke on background said It may be possible to build sections of the ship at Huntington Ingalls Industries' shipyard in Pascagoula, Mississippi, where the ship was built and float them through the Panama Canal to assemble on the West Coast. But it’s unclear if Ingalls has the capacity to accommodate that kind of an interruption to the already jam-packed schedule with more than a dozen amphibious assault ships, dock landing ships, destroyers and Coast Guard National Security Cutters already either under construction on in the planning process, according to an Ingalls Shipyard fact sheet.

It’s also unclear if the West Coast’s limited dry dock infrastructure, already strained to keep up with maintenance jobs and new ship construction, would be able to support a plan like that.

Likewise, the ship may be able to be towed through the Panama Canal to Ingalls Shipbuilding but the same capacity question arises, said Bryan Clark, a retired submarine officer and now a senior fellow at Hudson Institute.

If the repair requires “Bonhomme Richard to go back to Ingalls, it is unclear if they have the space and manpower to support the job without significant growth in the workforce,” Clark said.

Repairing, versus procuring a new America-class ship would have the added benefit of pulling money from a different pot of money than the already accounted-for shipbuilding budget. Instead, the money would come from the operations and maintenance fund.

But that approach isn’t exactly a panacea for the Navy’s Bonhomme Richard problem, Clark said.

“Additional O&M funds for BHR would come from existing O&M accounts that are already pressurized,” he said. “If the Navy doesn’t get additional funding from Congress, the repair may not be feasible.”

An alternative to a full repair would be to try a partial repair to return the ship to some usefulness, Clark said.

“Wasp was used as a tech demonstration and concept development ship for several years in the last decade because it needed various upgrades,” he said. “Wasp is now back in full service, of course. BHR could, however, be returned to partial service, for example as a F-35 carrier, but the well deck could be left unrepaired if it is too hard to fix.”

Structural integrity

But even that option may not be feasible, and the ship may be much more damaged than we know yet, said Sal Mercogliano, a former civilian mariner and maritime historian with Campbell University who studies the maritime industry closely.

“I think Bonhomme Richard is a total constructive loss and they’re just not admitting it yet,” Mercogliano said. "The amount of damage done to her is difficult to assess because she burned and held all that heat for so long.

"Even in a building that catches on fire, you immediately start worrying about the integrity of the structure. That’s magnified on a ship because you have all that steel that conducts all that heat throughout the structure. You would have to analyze every centimeter to see where the weaknesses in the steel are, let alone getting her underway and putting all those stresses on the hull.

“She was cooked for six days. In the commercial industry, we’d write it off and get the insurance money.”

If the damage assessment team finds that the hull is too damaged to be salvaged, Hendrix suggests looking at one of the older classes of big-deck amphibs, such as the Tarawa-class ships. Both Peleliu and Nassau are in the reserve fleet.

“I don’t know what that would cost, but I’m betting it would be less that what we’d spend on a Bonhomme Richard rebuild,” he said.

The issue is that the old LHA class is likely incompatible with the F-35, said Mercogliano.

“Even if you broke one of the Tarawas out, they still can’t do the F-35,” he said. “It doesn’t have the flight deck for it and it’s an open question as to whether the elevators could handle it."

The Navy has cut bait entirely on a fire-damaged ship in the recent past.

When a 2012 arson devastated the Los Angeles-class attack sub Miami, the Navy opted to decommission the ship after the repair bill rose to $700 million. That was, however, at a time when the Navy was taking a huge financial hit from across-the-board budget cuts.

The Navy took more than a year to decide to scrap Miami.

For Mercogliano, if the Navy doesn’t want to lose the capacity, it may just have to bite the bullet and buy a new one from the shipbuilding fund.

“You’d be better off spending the money to get a brand-new ship and getting 30- to 40 years out of it," he said.

Navy Will Scrap USS Bonhomme Richard
By: Megan Eckstein November 30, 2020

The Navy decided to scrap the amphibious assault ship that burned for nearly five days earlier this year, concluding after months of investigations that trying to rebuild and restore the ship would take too much money and too much industrial base capacity.

The July 12 fire aboard USS Bonhomme Richard (LHD-6) began in the lower vehicle storage area but ravaged the island, the mast and the flight deck as it burned its way through the inside of the big-deck amphib. The ship remained watertight throughout the ordeal and hasn’t been moved from its spot on the pier at Naval Base San Diego, but between the fire itself and the days-long firefighting effort, about 60-percnet of the ship was ruined and would have had to be rebuilt or replaced, Rear Adm. Eric Ver Hage, the commander of Navy Regional Maintenance Center and the director of surface ship maintenance and modernization, told reporters today in a phone call.

“After thorough consideration, the secretary of the Navy and the chief of naval operations have decided to decommission the Bonhomme Richard due to the extensive damage sustained during that July fire. In the weeks and months since that fire, the Navy conducted a comprehensive material assessment to determine the best path forward for that ship and our Navy,” he said.

Three main options were considered: rebuild and restore the ship to its original function of moving Marines and their gear around for amphibious warfare; rebuild the ship to a new configuration for a new mission, such as a submarine or surface ship tender or a hospital ship; or decommission and scrap the ship.

Ver Hage said restoring Bonhomme Richard to its original form would have cost between $2.5 billion and $3.2 billion and taken five to seven years. That work would have taken place in the Gulf Coast, he said.

Rebuilding the ship for a new purpose would have cost “in excess of a billion dollars” and also taken about five to seven years. Though cheaper than rebuilding to the original configuration, Ver Hage said it would be cheaper to just design and build a new tender or hospital ship from scratch.

Decommissioning the ship – and the inactivation, harvesting of parts, towing and scrapping the hull – will cost about $30 million and take just nine to 12 months.

“Examining those three courses of action, we reached the conclusion that we needed to decommission the platform,” he said.

The inactivation can’t start just yet, as four investigations into the fire are still ongoing. Bonhomme Richard is already being prepped for towing, though, and Ver Hage said harvesting of some systems has been happening since September and will continue. Once the investigations end, more substantive work can be done to take out larger systems that could be reused by other ships in the fleet, inactivate the ship, and either tow it to the Gulf Coast for scrapping or tow it to storage in the Pacific Northwest until a Gulf Coast yard is ready for it.

Four investigations are taking place in parallel: a Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) criminal investigation, which now includes the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF); a command investigation led by Vice Adm. Scott Conn, the commander of U.S. 3rd Fleet; a Naval Sea Systems Command failure review board, which will look at safety, structural and design issues related to the ship and how changes could be made to prevent a fire from moving through the hull the way it did on Bonhomme Richard; and a NAVSEA safety investigation board to examine the events that look place on the ship leading up to the fire compared to existing policies and procedures.

The Navy will now be down an amphibious assault ship – and one that had been recently upgraded to accommodate the F-35B Joint Strike Fighter – which will be a blow to operators. However, Ver Hage said the comprehensive assessments looked at what would happen to the industrial base and new ship construction for the fleet if the Navy opted to rebuild Bonhomme Richard, and the price – not in dollars, but in burden on the industrial base – was too great to justify.

“In the end, the decommissioning decision had a number of factors, and one of which was, what would be the impact of the dollars spent and the actual effort to rebuild, what would be the impact on the industrial base? The dollars definitely would disrupt our strategy for investment. And then from an industrial base perspective, we had concerns that it would impact new construction or other repair work, and we knew that Gulf Coast would be the spot to get the building or the restoration done because of the capacity and their capabilities – but in the end made the decision for multiple factors, as I mentioned, that decommissioning would be the way to go,” Ver Hage told USNI News during the call.

Bonhomme Richard was nearing the end of a maintenance period when the fire broke out, and among the work that had been done to the ship was a modernization of computer and other systems to support F-35B Joint Strike Fighter operations.

By September, the crew was already removing from the ship gear that hadn’t been damaged by fire or water, Rear Adm. Philip Sobeck, the commanding officer of Expeditionary Strike Group 3 in San Diego, told USNI News during a visit to the pier on Sept. 18.

“We’re not dismantling Bonhomme Richard at all, we’re just preserving what we can,” he clarified, saying the gear could be put back into the ship if it was going to be rebuilt or could be put into the supply system if the ship was inactivated.
“The things that you can plug and play, we’re using that for other class ships, other things, and keeping sort of the supply system going.”

Ver Hage told USNI News during the media call that the ship was extensively damaged, and part of assessing that damage was pulling out gear and looking at it more closely on the pier – everything from antennas on the mast to launching gear in the well deck.

“We knew that, whether we were going to repair or upgrade to a different configuration or decommission, that we needed that gear off the ship. So that allowed us to move out with confidence on getting the most sensitive equipment off the ship. And now that we have a decommissioning decision, we’re going to get after some equipment that might be a little heavier, maybe down in the engineering spaces or electrical components or things that we would have left in place if it was going to be reused, if the ship was going to be brought back to life,” the rear admiral said.

Ver Hage’s team at Naval Sea Systems Command is working with Naval Supply Systems Command to determine what else to scavenge off the ship that could be useful in building up the readiness of other ships in the fleet.

It’s unclear if any of the systems just installed during the recent modernization period could be saved. The Navy spent about $250 million for an 18-month availability to upgrade Bonhomme Richard to support the F-35Bs. Ver Hage said that work was “clearly a loss” for the Navy and Marine Corps.

Navy Secretary Kenneth Braithwaite and Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Mike Gilday made the decision to scrap the ship last week, just before Thanksgiving, Ver Hage said. They informed Navy leadership and Congress today.

It’s still unclear what will happen with the ship’s crew, though Ver Hage said Naval Surface Force Pacific would work with the personnel system to ensure all Bonhomme Richard sailors are taken care of.

Ver Hage did not want to comment on what this could mean for future Navy procurement and trying to insert another amphibious assault ship to help replace Bonhomme Richard.

He said the current America-class LHAs cost about $4.1 billion apiece and that Ingalls Shipbuilding has a hot production line, simply saying that the Navy is in a good place for LHA construction for now.

Since the end of World War II, the Navy has lost less than 30 ships due to unforeseen circumstances, USNI News reported following the fire aboard the Los Angeles-class nuclear attack boat USS Miami (SSN-755) in 2012. The last ship scrapped ahead of its planned decommissioning date was USS Guardian (MCM-5) after the mine countermeasures ship was grounded on the Tubbataha coral reef in 2013 and had to be dismantled.

What’s next for the Bonhomme Richard warship?
By: Everett Pyatt December 10, 2020

Now that the secretary of the Navy has concluded the fire damage from the four-day fire is so extensive that the amphibious assault ship Bonhomme Richard cannot be repaired, what is next?

This is a sound decision. Just looking at public pictures, it is quite clear that damage is so extensive, repair is not sensible. There is likely much hidden damage. Detailed examination resulted in the same conclusion. This decision should not be reconsidered.

There are several studies in process trying to determine causes and lessons learned. These should make clear the ill-advised reasons for disabling the fire-suppression system. This ship was a warship designed to take weapons hits and survive the impact. A working fire-suppression system should have extinguished this fire upon inception. Why did it fail? Were adequate backup measures taken by the Navy and the contractor?

Second, the amount of combustible material supported four days of fire. How much of this was due to shipboard configuration, contractor supplies and Marine Corps mission equipment?

This ship had a major role in force planning. The chief of naval operations mentioned that ideas are being evaluated for replacement. That is the challenge.

Navy briefings stated that the Bonhomme Richard cost $750 million to build, or $1.2 billion in today’s dollars. However, the Navy said the ship design available to replace this ship with very similar performance is $4.1 billion.

Yes, over $4 billion.

This is another example of cost bloat allowed by the current acquisition system. Any replacement of this ship must start with zero-based performance and a ship budget that supports a cost related to the initial acquisition cost, adjusted for any F-35 fighter jet operations, costs, ship-hardening needs and combat communications requirements. That should be no more than $1.5 billion, or $300 million above basic ship cost in current dollars. Other cost increases should be considered on a case-by-case basis, much as the Ships Characteristics Board used to do.

Getting ship cost under control is a major task for the next administration. That must begin with this project if there is to be any hope of achieving the 355-ship Navy defined by law, and preliminary to any expansion above the current 355-ship law and dream.

Everett Pyatt is a former assistant secretary of U.S. Navy for shipbuilding and logistics.

Former USS Bonhomme Richard Towed from San Diego Ahead of Scrapping
By: Sam LaGrone April 15, 2021

The remains will now be towed from California, around the tip of South America and to Texas, where the ship will be dismantled, USNI News understands. While there was a contract to salvage the remains of the ship, it’s unclear the status of the contract to scrap the hull.

The towing of the 22-year-old hull comes the day after the ship was formally decommissioned in a ceremony at the pier in San Diego. The crew of the former amphibious warship has largely been reassigned throughout the fleet, with a small contingent still assigned to the ship.

“As BHR sailors disperse throughout the fleet, take the teamwork, spirit, and unity to your next command,” Capt. Gregory Thoroman, Bonhomme Richard’s commanding officer, said in a speech at the ceremony. “For this crew and what we experienced together is the embodiment of our core values of honor, courage, and commitment. The resiliency I saw – man or woman, seaman and up to our highest ranks, united in our common cause and strength to depend on each other – lived up to my motto of train to fight and fight to win. It has been my honor and absolute privilege to serve as your commanding officer.”

The ship suffered a fire last year that burned for four days while it was undergoing a $250 million upgrade. After the fire, the Navy determined it was both cost and time prohibitive to repair the ship, and service leadership elected to scrap the hull instead.

Several investigations into the fire are ongoing.