Following an investigation of the fire that destroyed the US Navy amphibious assault ship USS Bonhomme Richard, Admiral Bill Lescher, the Navy’s No. 2 officer said, “The loss of this ship was completely preventable.”

USNI News reported that a cascade of failures – from a junior enlisted sailor not recognizing a fire at the end of their duty watch to fundamental problems with how the U.S. Navy trains sailors to fight fires in shipyards – are responsible for the five-day blaze that cost the service an amphibious warship, according to an investigation into the July 2020 USS Bonhomme Richard (LHD-6) fire.

The investigation into the fire aboard Bonhomme Richard, overseen by former U.S. 3rd Fleet commander Vice Adm. Scott Conn, found that the two-year-long $249 million maintenance period rendered the ship’s crew unprepared to fight the fire the service says was set by a crew member.

The Bonhomme Richard was “particularly vulnerable” to fire at the time, with scaffolding, tools, and combustible materials loaded onto the ship for maintenance, and personnel were unsure whether the firefighting equipment on board — including a sprinkler system that deploys flame-suppressing foam — was usable, military investigators found.

“Although the fire was started by an act of arson, the ship was lost due to an inability to extinguish the fire,” Conn wrote in his investigation, which was completed in April and reviewed by USNI News this week.

An hour into the fire, no water or retardant had been laid onto the fire, even though Federal Fire Service (FedFire) crews had laid down their hose line toward Lower V. The fire had spread unabated for nearly two hours before the first firefighters – crews from the San Diego Fire Department – poured water onto the flames.

The Bonhomme Richard’s crew did not lead firefighting efforts or effectively integrate its own firefighting teams with first responders from FedFire or the San Diego Fire Department, the investigation found.

The Washington Post notes that the Navy updated its ship-safety manual to address fire safety after the USS Miami burned in Maine in 2012, but vessels that have been damaged by fires since then were crewed by personnel who did not adopt its lessons and “were not fully prepared for the maintenance environment, the very phase at which the risk of fire was the greatest,” investigators said.

USNI News reports that in a subsequent opinion, Conn said, “[t]he considerable similarities between the fire on USS Bonhomme Richard (LHD-6) and the USS Miami (SSN-755) fire of eight years prior are not the result of the wrong lessons being identified in 2012, it is the result of failing to rigorously implement the policy changes designed to preclude recurrence.”