It took more than 30 hours for sailors to put out the fire aboard the aircraft carrier Gerald R. Ford last week, sailors and military officials said, as the beleaguered ship continued its monthslong slog through President Trump’s military operations.
The fire started in the ship’s main laundry area last Thursday. By the time it was over, more than 600 sailors and crew members had lost their beds and have since been bunking down on floors and tables, officials said.
The U.S. military’s Central Command said two sailors received treatment for “non-life-threatening injuries.” People on the ship reported that dozens of service members suffered smoke inhalation.
And in the category of non-life-threatening, but still not ideal, many sailors have not been able to do laundry since the fire.
The ship, along with its 4,500 sailors and fighter pilots, was in the Mediterranean on Oct. 24 when Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered it to steam to the Caribbean to add weight to President Trump’s pressure campaign on Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela’s leader before his seizure.
From the Caribbean, the carrier rushed to the Middle East for the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran, which is now in its third week.
Speaking to sailors on board aircraft carriers is difficult in the best of circumstances. During a war, the ships and military bases involved in operations go “dark,” limiting the ability of service members to communicate with the outside world. The officials and sailors interviewed for this article spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
The Ford is now entering its 10th month of deployment. It will break the record for longest post-Vietnam War carrier deployment if it is still at sea in mid-April. That record, at 294 days, was set by the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln in 2020.
Crew members on the Ford have been told that their deployment will probably be extended into May, which would put them at an entire year at sea, twice the length of a normal aircraft carrier deployment.
The Navy kept aircraft carriers deployed for nine months at a time, sometimes a little longer, during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But deployments are not usually extended past six months. Longer than that, Navy experts say, is very difficult for both the ship and the crew.
“Ships get tired too, and they get beat up over the course of long deployments,” said Rear Adm. John F. Kirby, a retired naval officer who was Pentagon press secretary and a national security spokesman in the Biden administration. “You can’t run a ship that long and that hard and expect her and her crew to perform at peak capacity.”
The Ford is conducting flight operations around the clock, Navy officials said.
The fire, according to two officials, began in the vent of a dryer in the ship’s laundry facilities and quickly spread. Sailors battled the blaze for more than 30 hours, officials and sailors said.
The Navy did not respond to a request for comment. Central Command said in its statement that the fire caused “no damage to the ship’s propulsion plant, and the aircraft carrier remains fully operational.”
The fire was only the latest in a series of maintenance problems on the Ford, the Navy’s newest aircraft carrier. It has had plumbing issues with the 650 toilets on board. NPR reported that the undersized and poorly designed toilet system frequently breaks down.
A major maintenance and refitting period that the Ford was supposed to undergo early this year at the Newport News Naval Shipyard in Virginia has been put off, military officials said.
A military official said that the Pentagon was aware that the carrier was reaching the limits of its deployment strength. He said that the U.S.S. George H.W. Bush is preparing to deploy to the Middle East and will probably relieve the Ford.
Helene Cooper is a Pentagon correspondent for The Times. She was previously an editor, diplomatic correspondent and White House correspondent.
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