prodigal1 wrote in news:122lvub6np3v389
@news.supernews.com:

but it's the paint that is actually burning yes?



The paint and the grease and the compartment contents....Steel doesn't
even melt until we get over 3000F, I think.

Wiring fires, where the thermoplastic insulation on the cables catches
fire and trails the fires from compartment to compartment through open
collars through bulkheads was the cause of a disasterous fire in the
Eastern Med many years ago. I was involved in a massive Navy program to
inspect the ships along the East Coast of the USA for electrical hazards,
as part of a "Tiger Team" that traveled from port to port. On one old
carrier, alone, we found over 32,000 problems that required immediate
attention.

One problem I vividly remember was in a big fan room that pumped air into
the main control room for the conventional oil-turbine propulsion
system...actually 8 of them on the carrier, the USS Saratoga. I was
inspecting the fan room and noticed someone had burned a hole in the deck
with a torch to route a temperature sensor tube into this fan room from
the deck below. The hole was open so you could see the "top of
something" but couldn't make out what it was because it was huge. The
hole was a violation. What I found MOST scary was what I was looking at
was the top of the #4 main propulsion BOILER! If the boiler had exploded
or caught fire in the compartment, the superheated fumes would have been
sucked through this big hole in the deck, sucked into the ventilation fan
which pulled a vacuum on this little fan room to suck air down an
airshaft from way up under the flight deck....AND BLEW IT INTO THE MAIN
CONTROL ROOM KILLING THE GUYS WHO WOULD HAVE HAD TO SHUT OFF THE BOILER!
Man, THAT report got their attention!

Anyway, on the carrier, we ran most suppliers on the SE coast clean out
of a product called TempSeal, which is a fireproof foam product that
hardens and expands in the collars the wires go through as it sets,
sealing up these big open collars the wireways penetrate the bulkheads
through so fire cannot follow along the wire insulation from compartment
to compartment, the cause of the major fire in the ship that started this
massive program. We must have used 1000 pounds of the stuff in 3 months.

Lots of stuff burns, very hot, in a steel ship that isn't petroleum in a
fire. The paint is the big fuel, layers and layers of it that built up
over the years....just to make it pretty.