Overview
- The carrier is pierside at Souda Bay for assessment, repairs, and resupply tied to a laundry-room fire, with USNI News reporting the work will keep it there for more than a week.
- The blaze in the aft laundry on March 12th sent smoke through the ship, injured two sailors, led to more than 200 treated for inhalation, and contaminated over 100 beds in berthing areas.
- To restore basic living spaces, the Navy flew in 1,000 mattresses pulled from the unfinished USS John F. Kennedy and gathered nearly 2,000 sweatsuits and other clothes for displaced crew.
- Crew have faced chronic plumbing failures with roughly one sewage-related maintenance call a day, an issue the Government Accountability Office warned about for the class in 2020.
- The deployment reached 266 days by March 17th, and with the Ford pierside the USS Abraham Lincoln now provides the region’s only U.S. carrier presence as combat operations continue.