Published On 6/5/2026
|
Last update: 19:06 (Mecca time)
The American CNN network said that new scenes obtained showed that the fire that caught fire on the largest aircraft carrier in the world, the USS Gerald Ford, last March during the war on Iran, was larger and more dangerous than what the US Navy reported.
According to the special video broadcast by the network yesterday, Thursday, the fire completely consumed the sailors’ bedrooms. The scenes showed a destroyed ceiling with wires hanging from it and piles of ash on the floor of the rooms.
One of the sailors who was on board the aircraft carrier said: “I really thought we would lose the ship…either we would struggle or we would die.”
According to the account of this sailor and a senior American official familiar with the incident, the fire-fighting system malfunctioned and the sailors were forced to put out the fire themselves.
The novel “Containment”
The US Navy issued a brief statement at the time of the incident, saying that the fire had been “contained” and that two sailors had received medical treatment for “non-life-threatening injuries,” stressing that the aircraft carrier was “fully operational.”
However, the senior official who spoke to CNN said that this statement downplayed the impact of the fire on the aircraft carrier, which was at the time in the Red Sea to support US military operations against Iran, indicating that the incident affected its capabilities.
The network asked a new question to the US Navy spokesman about the size of the fire and the malfunction in the fire-fighting system. He said, “The investigation into the fire is continuing.”
The aircraft carrier’s crew spent nearly 30 hours fighting the fire and removing its effects to prevent the fire from igniting again. About 600 sailors lost their cabins due to the damage, according to what the network previously reported.
For two full days, the “Gerald Ford” was unable to conduct flights, according to what the Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Darrell Caudle, announced last April, and the carrier was forced to head to Greece for temporary repairs.
