The 43rd Fire

"Only the dead know Brooklyn," Thomas Wolfe once wrote. For a time last week it seemed that Brooklyn knew only the dead. Less than a week after the collision of two giant airliners plunged a jet into the heart of town, Brooklyn echoed again to the roar of sirens and the cries of the anguished. For 16 1/2 hours one snowy day last week, 3,000 men and every piece of firefighting equipment in New York City and from as far away as suburban Yonkers battled a raging fire in Brooklyn Navy Yard that killed 49 men, injured 154 others, and consumed the vitals of one of the Navy's biggest, newest ships, the supercarrier Constellation.*

"Carom Shot." Aboard the big flattop --christened in October by Mrs. Christian Herter and scheduled to go to sea in May --were some 3,500 civilian workers, fitting out the newest queen of the seas. On the hangar deck Navy Lieut. Vito Milano, supervisor of hull construction, was getting things ready for a pep rally to celebrate progress (85% complete) and ask for more. A fork lift truck started to pick up a big steel trash bin; apparently the bin nudged a heavy steel plate, which sheared off the valve of a 500-gallon tank of diesel fuel, used to test the big ship's generators. (Said Pipe Fitter Solomon Fried: it was like a "carom shot at billiards.") The fuel gushed out over the hangar deck, poured down a bomb elevator well to the deck below. There a spark from a welder's torch set it afire. Lieut. Milano tried to plug the flow, then yelled for workmen to call the Navy Yard fire department. Moments later he peered through a cable hole toward the bomb elevator and "saw orange." He ordered the word passed to all hands to abandon ship.

Through the hangar bay and in the compartments above the main deck Constellation became a giant bake oven. The racing flames, fed on a maze of wooden scaffolding and trash that littered the decks, ate hungrily through fire-resistant wiring insulation and paint. Rushing for safety, work crews found the companion-ways blocked by billowing smoke, retreated to airtight compartments (there are 3,000 in the ship), where they hammered on bulkheads in the hope of attracting help. One man was trapped for six hours before firemen found him. Some dropped from portholes into the icy East River, where they were picked up by tugboats. A coolheaded crane operator at dockside lifted more than 1,000 men off the flight deck on a portable platform. In one spectacular rescue, firemen ran up a 50-ft. vertical ladder, then stretched another ladder horizon tally from the top to a porthole, and pulled 26 men to safety. Most of the dead were suffocated by smoke.

Ironically, Constellation was unable to defend herself. The ship has built-in fire-fighting equipment to flood its fuel compartments and cover the four-acre deck with foam in case of heavy attack.* But at dockside, the carrier was most vulnerable to fire damage, and entirely dependent on outside help. At the naval inquiry, Lieut. Milano admitted that 42 small fires had been snuffed out aboard Constellation before last week's holocaust.

Costliest Fire. Constellation burned internally until 3 a.m. At one point, water from the fire hoses caused the big ship to list 4DEG to starboard, but the crew was able to bring her back to a 2DEG list by flooding portside compartments. Inspecting the gutted queen the next day, Navy Secretary William Franke found the flight deck catapults and most of the electronic equipment ruined, the 1 3/4-in.-thick steel main deck badly buckled. Total damage was reckoned at $75 million.

Just as dismaying was the fact that the commissioning of Constellation will be delayed at least a year, and with it the Navy's tightly scheduled combat readiness program. The largest of the Forrestal class carriers, with a capacity of 100 planes (including 15 of the lethal A3D jet bombers), Constellation is the pride of the fleet. Even more dismaying was New York Fire Commissioner Edward F. Cavanagh Jr.'s free-spoken implication that the fire could have been avoided or minimized. The use of metal scaffolding (standard equipment on all city-owned piers), he said, would have made "a substantial difference in the intensity and extent of the fire." Talking about hazardous carelessness in general, he said: "There is just no excuse for these things. Get these slobs out of business. That goes for official as well as civilian slobs." The commissioner explained that he certainly was not casting any reflection on the U.S. Navy.

* The carrier is the third vessel to bear the name. The original Constellation, a 36-gun frigate, the Navy's oldest ship, is now a museum piece at Fort McHenry, Baltimore. Her namesake, a sloop of war, was built in 1855--although some historians insist that this was the original ship rebuilt and restored. Another Constellation, scheduled to be a battle cruiser, was scrapped after her keel was laid, as a result of the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922. * On March 19, 1945, in the Inland Sea, the flag carrier Franklin was hit by two Japanese bombs, engulfed in flames and explosions. But the crewmen extinguished the fires in five hours, and the ship--in World War II the most severely damaged carrier to be saved--limped 12,000 miles back to New York, with 724 of her crewmen dead or missing, 265 wounded.

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