Garrison Davis

I can't exaggerate how bad the sewage systems on the Ford work.

They are broken fucking constantly.

And per the Alameda Post...

Some crew members may be intentionally exacerbating problems with defective toilets aboard the ship by flushing T-shirts and other objects, as documented in an email from the ship's engineering department obtained by NPR.

Our sewage system is being mistreated and destroyed by sailors on a daily basis, that March 2025 email stated.

My whole maintenance technicians are currently working 19 hours a day right now to keep up with the demand.

It's a lot of flushed shirts.

Now, what I'm building to is that there's a perfectly good chance this fire didn't even start as an act of sabotage, but because somebody fucked up.

Maybe because they were exhausted.

Maybe because they've just been running the machines too long.

The laundry is always going while this thing's underway.

And if it's going for months longer, the normal shit like lint is going to build up.

In fact, I want to read a quote from that article in the National Interest.

If the ducts haven't been cleaned out properly, it is easy for small lint particles to catch fire, potentially leading to a larger blaze, not unlike a house fire caused by lint buildup.

So again, this fire was certainly not enough to sink the Gerald Ford.

It didn't destroy it, but it did enough damage that it became combat ineffective, or at least you could argue that's the case.

Obviously, we replaced it with a different carrier group.

There's not just not a carrier now, but the Ford was not originally scheduled to leave and left as a result of the fire in order to undergo repairs.

That gets at something very important, very relevant to the question of how a higher-intensity war, one involving ground troops against Iran, would go.

Because while Iran may or may not be able to sink a carrier, they certainly have the tools to potentially hit one, starting a fire or just damaging the deck badly enough to render it combat-ineffective.