HMCS Kootenay: the deadly fire.

Title Annotation:	THE COLD WAR; Her Majesty's Canadian Ship Kootenay
Author:	Steele, John Gordon
Geographic Code:	1CANA
Date:	Mar 1, 2011
Words:	1790
Publication:	Esprit de Corps
ISSN:	1194-2266

Conclusion: an eyewitness account of the blaze and the aftermath of one of Canada's worst peacetime tragedies at sea

In last month's edition, author John Gordon Steele recalled how the engine room of HMCS Kootenay had caught fire on October 23, 1969. At the time, the frigate was on patrol roughly 200 miles west of Plymouth, England. Full of ammunition and fuel, the ship V company was filled with dread once they realized every sailor's worst nightmare--a fire at sea--was upon them.

The explosion caught everyone by surprise. No one was prepared for the whole ordeal of extinguishing the blaze. Our most valuable firefighting equipment was impossible to get at, as it was located near the engine room were a huge fireball had blazed its fiery path and basically forced men out along the way. It was one thing to attack a fire prepared, but quite another to be caught suddenly in the middle of it with only one thing on your mind: getting out of there to get organized.

'Fireproof hoses had been partially burned by the intense heat and what was left remained on their storage racks, while the wooden eases that held the chemox breathing apparatuses in that section had been burnt to charcoal.

Men were assigned to gather all equipment possible from the rest of the ship in order to extinguish the fire and assemble at midships above the engine room. We attacked the fire from the upper deck going down through hatches to get above the engine room. Before each man was sent down, he was equipped with a respirator to enable him to breath in the smoke-filled areas. A guideline was also hooked to each sailor, letting him signal to the men above by a set number of tugs on the line. He was thoroughly soaked with water.

After the men were above the engine room, they positioned P-250 water pumps into the tube openings that led into the engine room, thereby completely smothering the fire with seawater and foam.

The heat was so extreme that it melted the aluminum ladders in the engine room. Some officers and their subordinates braved an even more dangerous task by going down below to fight the blaze with underwater oxygen tanks strapped to their backs. Our after magazine had been flooded completely to avoid a possible explosion that could have killed every man on board. On the upper deck more water pumps had been activated to spray water on the outside of the ship's hull in an attempt to prevent it from cracking open.

At the most critical phase of the fire, we hadn't enough available equipment to counteract. It seemed for most of us that we were doing all we possibly could and yet we might still have to abandon ship. At about this time our boilers had become quite hot, and began blowing out spurts of hot water, showering the men who had gathered at midships to aid the injured who were being placed in the officers' lounge nearby.

When the boiler safety valves burst, one man yelled out, "She's gonna blow!" Those who heard him believed he meant that the ship was about to explode. Instinctively I walked over to the port railing and grabbed onto it tightly thinking, this is it!

Then, about 70 men including myself began to run back aft and unintentionally interfered with a helicopter transfer of a badly burned man, believing the ship was going to explode. We then realized the misunderstanding and continued to go about our duties.

By about noon we had extinguished the fire. When the smoke had slowly filtered out and the heat became manageable, a few of us went below to take a look at the damage. It looked like the inside of a huge blackened incinerator. From midships to somewhere back aft, a distance of about 60 feet, the main passageway was totally burned out. Electrical wires on the deck head were burned and had shorted out. Later on in the afternoon, near 3 pm, a second explosion erupted, caused when these wires arced, but all was soon under control. Paint on the bulkhead had completely melted off in certain areas and some bulkheads were extremely warped from the severe heat of the fire.

Someone told me that an officer and one of the ship's crew had been nearby when the explosion rocked the boat. Temporarily blinded and severely burned, they both managed to make their way from the engine room as far forward as the anchor cable deck only to find that they couldn't open it. This means they climbed four flights of stairs by relying on their sense of touch and their memories. They went back down and then up five more flights of stairs to reach the command position through choking smoke and heat, hardly able to breath or see to give their reports.

The cafeteria had instantly filled with the smoke from the open engine room hatch located near the rear cafeteria door. I was told that it was at this door that the body of a man was later found. It appeared as though he used his body as a block to try to stop men from using this exit and to force them to use the safer forward exit. Some of the men in the cafeteria had made it past this man and were slightly burned. Around the corner from the forward cafeteria exit in the galley, we later found the body of another man. He apparently tried to make his way to a ladder from the upper deck near the officers' quarters but had been overcome by smoke inhalation.

When there was no danger of a third explosion, a tugboat was summoned. Until then we were towed by the Saguenay, our sister ship. The tow from the Saguenay lasted about six hours, when the towing line broke; we then hooked up another towing line and awaited the arrival of the Royal Auxiliary Naval tug Samsonia.

Emergency power terminals were connected to our forward and after diesel engines to provide us with lighting below decks. The ship's P-250 pumps had also been activated to pump out the flooded compartments, The cleanup job of the main passageway had been started, but it would require extensive work to restore it to sea-worthy conditions.

The officers' lounge had been turned into a makeshift hospital room and the torpedo house into a temporary tomb where a wreath of pungent death odour hung. It even overcame the familiar smell of saltwater-sprayed air. It had come to this; our voyage across an ocean had taken the lives of men too soon. I could understand the tragedy more if they were the victims of war. War somehow seems to justify death by defending ideologies, but there were no ideologies at stake here.

There it was, a tomb of unknown seamen perched on top of a floating ammunition dump. Unknown to me that is. In the navy we are trained to remain close to each other, protect and support each other. But on a ship, with many men in different trades of duty, we had been divided into our own secluded grey nests of morals.

Most of the crew were unable to sleep that night because of the great shock imposed on all and possibly the thought of another explosion. Not many--if any--men on board the Kootenay had ever experienced anything like this before, but we managed to carry out normal sea routines with somewhat less of the crew. We were divided into watches, each taking turns at cleaning up the ship, standing watch, and sleeping when we could.

It became rather cold and damp down below and the crew dressed as warmly as possible. The petty officers in charge of cleaning up the ship detailed many of us that were able and one night most of us got an extra ration of rum. The journey back to Plymouth was saddening. All the smiles and pats on the back, the kidding around was gone--morale had almost vanished, leaving behind long exposed faces of anguish. We had all been reduced to a common solitude of the solo seafaring man and each one of us was beginning a new phase of experience to pass on to others.

The most disheartening task of the whole event came when we removed bodies from the engine room. I volunteered to help bring out one of the bodies wrapped in a blanket. As I picked up the torso section it felt like picking up a bag full of charcoal ashes. While lifting the body up to the upper deck from the "mortar well," the blanker flapped open and revealed what was left of a face. It looked like an unsculpted mass of wax with eyeglass frames embedded into it. The lenses were gone. I turned away at this sight, thinking it could have been me. The dry pungent smell of death lingered in the air. I felt almost unworthy; somehow guilty for manhandling what was once a living, functioning person.

Then there were those with secondary guilt, placing the blame on others who appeared unscathed by the entire ordeal of fighting the fire.

Initial news releases reported contradicting information about the real source of the explosion, the number injured and the number deceased. In the aftermath of this tragedy nine men were given last rites at land and at sea, 53 were hospitalized, and the source of the explosion was believed to have been in the starboard gearbox. An American press facsimiled a picture of the Kootenay's starboard side revealing a hole above the waterline, below the torpedo house and near the after-gun magazine.

During the days that followed the catastrophe I was assigned to transport the exploded gearbox parts to a Royal Naval laboratory. A three-man board of inquiry had already been set up to investigate behind closed doors the cause of the explosion. While performing dockyard duties I overheard rumours that the explosion was the work of sabotage carried out by a terrorist group based in the British Isles. Of course, to bare out this rumour would imply that the group had access to the engine room.

By January 19, 1970, according to Canadian News Facts, the explosion was blamed on a faulty bearing installation. The report went on to say that a ball of flame was sent through the ship's engine room by an overheated bearing igniting oil. It continued to explain that the explosion was traced to the faulty fitting of bearing shells in 1965, which prevented oil lubrication in the gearbox. But the question of why the Kootenay was diverted to Plymouth, England, and what engine room labour occurred prior to the blast were never addressed.