Fighting a fire on any kind of ship is a nightmare. Naval ships are no exception.
The primary problem is that usually the fire is below decks. Well, any time a fire is below you, you have a serious problem. Like fighting a basement fire in a house. Smoke and heat rise, which means any access that you have to attack the fire below you is a chimney filled with smoke and heat, with temperatures that can be anywhere from 1,200° to 2,000° F depending on what's burning. So making an attack "downhill" is already a huge issue. If you can't make quick access and knock down the fire, you get cooked.
Then there's access. Large ships are compartmentalized, especially naval vessels. So sections can be sealed off, which is usually how firefighting operations work. The fire is compartmentalized and the poor bastards in that compartment are now
very invested fire fighters. But the large compartmentalized structure also makes it VERY hard to say, advance a hose line from somewhere else. So if any of the firefighting systems are down, now you're stretching lines through hard to travel tight quarters for long distances. That's slow and requires a lot of effort. Since the ship was in port and under repair, not only are the fire fighting systems disabled, but there are very few people on the ship. So, even if the fire systems weren't down, and the compartments weren't locked open, you'd still have a lack of manpower to lock the fire down in a small enough compartment that a fire attack was feasible. This right here is an f*ing nightmare...
Next up is ventilation. Not a lot of windows and screen doors
. So very quickly the compartment with the fire fills with smoke. The faster the fire grows the worse the smoke is, and the compartment that the fire is in rapidly has smoke all the way down the floor, making visibility absolutely terrible, can't see your hand in front of your face. And then, there's the smoke itself. Smoke is made up of gases and hydrocarbons, both burned, unburned, and everything in between. It is also flammable at a hot enough temperature, so, when things really get going you get a flashover. Under the right conditions, smoke is fuel.
And then the heat. Naval ships are steel structures. Steel is a pretty wonderful conductor of heat. So the fire in the lower compartment raises the temperature of the compartment above it rapidly, to hundreds of degrees very quickly. Vertical arrangement of fuel is bad and spreads fire quickly. In something like a ship, the floor of the compartment above a working fire can get so hot it will burn you. It can get so hot the fire ignites the compartments above, even without direct flame impingement.
So the only option is getting to fires FAST and sealing them in a compartment small enough that it doesn't effect the whole ship. In port with few onboard that's not going to happen. And trying to make a fire attack from outside the ship is EXTREMELY difficult. They tried in this case, it didn't work well and firefighters were injured. Over 400 firefighters were involved and more than 60 people were injured in the event
https://www.firefighterclosecalls.c...ivilian-firefighters-injured-at-sd-ship-fire/
This wasn't a case of "letting it burn". By the time they really starting fighting the fire it was too late- it was a case of not being able to put it out because of the conditions at hand. Honestly, the fact that the fire was controlled before the ship sank is impressive with the amount of time the fire burned. They may identify ways that they could have either prevented the fire itself, or would have allowed a fast enough attack that it was containable before it went large, but with an explosion that may not have been possible anyway. The USS Forrestal was already mentioned, that ship was at sea with a full crew, best case scenario for containing a fire if it was possible. But the aircrafts fuel tank ruptured and munitions detonated. A fast spreading fire involved too many compartments too quickly, and once it goes "global" it's very difficult to deal with. My old man went out on the USS Forrestal after it was repaired, he was an F-4 mechanic. The entire machinist deck's crew was lost in the fire, he was one of the replacements when it sailed again.
