USS San Diego among many eyeballed for lax fire safety

Fire in the hold

A report to Congress by the United States Government Accountability Office in the wake of the July 2020 fire that devastated the USS Bonhomme Richard has found that when it comes to extinguishing construction fires aboard its ships, the Navy is woefully understaffed, employs a mishmash of firefighting strategies, and has conducted no system-wide analysis of the problem. “U.S. Navy ships undergoing maintenance face a high risk of fire, in part because repairs can involve sparks or welding in confined areas with flammable material. Navy organizations collect and analyze lessons learned from fires through a number of processes.

However, the Navy does not have a process for consistently collecting, analyzing, and sharing these lessons learned,” says the April 2023 report. “Although the Navy has begun improving the collection of data related to fires aboard ships during maintenance in the Navy’s safety database, no organization is analyzing the broad effects of fires on the Navy’s operations and strategic resources. Without conducting such analyses, the Navy will not have a complete picture of the magnitude of risks associated with ship fires.”

GSA auditors toured two big Navy sites — Norfolk, Virginia, and San Diego — where they reviewed maintenance procedures on the USS San Diego, a San Antonio-class amphibious transport dock ship being fixed at BAE Systems San Diego Ship Repair. “Navy guidance states that during the maintenance period, ship personnel are to complete training courses. The Commanding Officer of the ship is responsible for ensuring that a sufficient number of trained personnel are available to respond to in-port emergencies on the ship,” per the document.

“The surface ship guidance also states that a ship’s repair party manual must include other resources such as additional ship personnel to relieve in-port emergency teams when fighting a large fire.” But a potentially dangerous gap was found. “During our tour of the USS San Diego, ship officials stated that their ship’s requirement was about 440 personnel. However, the ship had 310 personnel onboard at the time — about a 30-percent reduction of personnel from the requirement.”

In September of last year, Navy sailor Ryan Sawyer Mays was acquitted of arson by a military judge in the USS Bonhomme Richard case. “The ship’s lower vehicle storage area became a junkyard, and I believe throughout this entire process the Navy was attempting to clean up their mess by accusing Seaman Mays of these allegations,” said defense lawyer Gary Barthel, a former Marine judge advocate, after the verdict, according to a September 30 Associated Press dispatch. Days before the USS Bonhomme Richard fire, “Mays had angrily texted his division officer, complaining about having to live among contractors who were doing work that was ‘hazardous as fuck,’” according to a September 23 account of the disaster by ProPublica.

“A worker was welding near his bunk as he slept, and Mays said he was burned by a stray spark. In 2015, a major fire started on another warship in a shipyard with similar conditions: sailors moving aboard while ‘hot work was being done.’”

Per the GSA’s April report, “Following the USS Bonhomme Richard fire, the Naval Safety Command began a comprehensive historical review of major fires onboard U.S. Navy ships. The Naval Safety Command identified multiple recurring trends in causal factors in 15 shipboard fire-related events over a 12-year period. The command concluded that non-compliance with fire prevention, detection, and response policies and procedures was likely prevalent across the fleets.” In a March 31 letter, a Navy representative concurred with the auditors’ conclusions.

Oily Maienschein

Ex-San Diego city councilman, current California Assembly Democrat, and would-be 2024 candidate for San Diego City Attorney Brian Maienschein, who is currently facing an independent legal analysis of whether he has enough lawyering experience to hold that position, also operates a campaign fund called Maienschein for Attorney General 2030.

Latest special interest donors include petroleum giant Chevron, which contributed $5500 on April 11, according to a disclosure report filed with the California Secretary of State. But that’s peanuts compared to the whopping $210,000 Democratic Senate pro Tem Toni Atkins picked up on May 2 for her so-called ballot measure committee from the California Apartment Association Issues Committee...More bad news for the San Diego Workforce Partnership, whose governing board declined to renew the contract of CEO Peter Callstrom on March 23 after ex-employee Tabatha Gaines filed suit against the agency, alleging that Callstrom was the cause of a “hostile working environment” there. Now lawyers for the state’s Fair Political Practices Commission have ruled that the partnership can’t get a financial piece of a contract to come up with “behavioral health workforce initiatives” previously suggested by the non-profit when it was paid by the county as a consultant for the mental health project. “Because [the San Diego Work Force Partnership] took on the role of an advisor in the initial contract, which required that [the partnership] design strategies for the County to assist with recruiting and retaining its public behavioral health services staff, they cannot enter into the subsequent contract to implement the behavioral health workforce initiatives that [the partnership] recommended in their report under the initial contract,” opined FPPC General Counsel Dave Bainbridge in an April 3 advice letter to Chief Deputy County Counsel Shiri Hoffman.

— Matt Potter

(@sdmattpotter)

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