Navy ship heads to scrap yard
Amphibious assault vessel Bonhomme Richard was damaged in a f ire in July.
SAN DIEGO — A f ire that raged for almost f ive days in July has doomed the San Diego- based amphibious assault ship Bonhomme Richard to the scrap yard, Navy officials said Monday.
The ship will be decommissioned within a year and will be scrapped, a Navy official told reporters during a conference call. The cause of the fire is still under investigation.
The cost of repairing the ship was estimated to be $ 2.5 billion to $ 3.2 billion, Rear Adm. Eric Ver Hage said. The cost and time involved were deemed to be too much by Navy leadership.
“After thorough consideration, the secretary of the Navy and the chief of naval operations have decided to decommission the USS Bonhomme Richard,” said Ver Hage, the commander of Navy Regional Maintenance Center.
The Navy looked at all possible courses of action to “make sure we understood the art of the possible,” Ver Hage said. Officials assessed every space on the ship, and Ver Hage said about 60% of it — the f light deck, the island and many of the decks immediately below them — would need to be completely replaced.
The Navy looked at three options for the ship — repairing it to full mission capabilities, refurbishing it as a tender or hospital ship, or decommissioning it, Ver Hage said.
In addition to the expense, rebuilding the Bonhomme Richard would take five to seven years, Ver Hage said. To reconfigure the ship would cost more than $ 1 billion — more than the cost of building a brand- new tender or hospital ship. Decommissioning will cost the Navy about $ 30 million and will take nine months to one year, Ver Hage said. He talked of possibly towing it to storage or to ship breakers in the Gulf of Mexico, adding that no contract has been awarded.
The decision to decommission the ship was made by Navy leaders just before Thanksgiving, Ver Hage said, and Navy leadership and Congress were briefed on the decision Monday.
The f ire on the 844- foot ship began about 8: 30 a. m. on July 12 and sent acrid plumes of smoke into the San Diego sky for two days.
By the following Tuesday morning, the smoke plume was noticeably smaller, although the fire smell stayed in neighborhoods nearest the base for two more days.
An email from the Navy’s top admiral days after the blaze revealed the ship had f ire, smoke and water damage on 11 of its 14 decks. Some decks were warped and, in some spaces, gutted.
Officials have said the fire began in the ship’s lower vehicle storage area. Arson is suspected. The Naval Criminal Investigative Service searched the home of a Bonhomme Richard sailor in August, according to an ABC 10News report. A San Diego Navy official declined to comment Monday on the sailor or the status of the multiple ongoing investigations.
Early on, Navy leaders left open the possibility of repairing the ship.
“The survivability of the ship is there — it’s survivable,” said Rear Adm. Philip Sobeck, the commander of Expeditionary Strike Group 3, the day the fire was extinguished. “It’s in stable condition all the way through. The ship can be repaired. Whether or not it will be ... is to be determined.”
Adm. Mike Gilday, the chief of naval operations and the Navy’s top officer, agreed at a San Diego news conference the day after the f ire was out that the ship was salvageable.
“The question is should we make that investment into a 22- year- old ship,” he said.
Commissioned in 1998, the Bonhomme Richard was in dry dock at General Dynamics NASSCO in San Diego last year and has been undergoing additional maintenance at San Diego Naval Base. Its last deployment was in 2018.
The ship cost $ 761 million, according to estimates by the Federation of American Scientists.