USS Miami (SSN-755)

USS Miami (SSN-755) is a United States Navy Los Angeles-class attack submarine. She was the third vessel of the U.S. Navy to be named after Miami, Florida. The contract to build her was awarded to the Electric Boat division of General Dynamics Corporation in Groton, Connecticut, on 28 November 1983 and her keel was laid down on 24 October 1986. She was launched on 12 November 1988 and commissioned on 30 June 1990 with Commander Thomas W. Mader in command.

On 1 March 2012 Miami pulled into the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in Kittery, Maine for a scheduled 20-month Engineered Overhaul (EOH) and system upgrades. A civilian employee started a fire aboard the boat on 23 May 2012. It impacted the forward compartment of the submarine which includes crew living, command and control spaces and torpedo room. The revised estimate to restore the USS Miami increased to approximately $450 million with completion estimated on 30 April 2015. Due to budget cuts, it was announced August 6, 2013, that the vessel would not be repaired and placed on the inactive list.

2012 fire
At 5:41 p.m. EDT on 23 May 2012, fire crews were called with a report of a fire on the USS Miami while being overhauled at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in Kittery, Maine. At the time the submarine was on a scheduled 20-month maintenance cycle, indicating the submarine was undergoing an extensive overhaul called "The Engineered Overhaul". Injuries to seven firefighters had been reported by national media. One crewmember suffered broken ribs when he fell through a hole left by removed deck plates during the fire. It took firefighters 12 hours to extinguish the fire.

Originally the U.S. Navy reported that the fire started when an industrial vacuum cleaner, used "to clean worksites on the sub after shipyard workers’ shifts," sucked up a heat source that ignited debris inside the vacuum. On July 23, 2012; Casey J. Fury, a civilian painter and sandblaster working on the sub, was indicted on two counts of arson after confessing to starting the fire. Fury admitted to setting the May 23 fire by igniting some rags on the top bunk of a bunk room. He claimed to have started the fire to get out of work early   On March 15, 2013; Fury was sentenced to over 17 years in federal prison and ordered to pay $400 million in restitution.

The U.S. Navy debated on whether to scrap the boat. Both of Maine's Senators, Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe, advocated repairing her. The U.S. Navy asked Congress to add $220 million to the operations and maintenance budget for emergent and unfunded ship repairs which would be used to help repair the Miami. The final outcome was a choice to repair the submarine at an estimated total cost of $450 million. The USS Miami was expected to return to service sometime in 2015. However, congressional inaction to fully resolve the United States fiscal cliff had put this in doubt.

To keep costs down, spare parts from the recently decommissioned USS Memphis (SSN-691) were to be used to repair Miami. Furthermore, integrity checks on the hull did not show changes to its metallurgy or strength; fixing the internal sections would be much cheaper than replacing hull sections. At first glance, it seemed more prudent to repair the USS Miami in the same manner as the USS San Francisco (SSN-711) since such a repair would cost "only" (around) 80 million USD. However, it should be noted that the hull of the USS Memphis was already 26 years old (as of 2012). Memphis is also a different version (or "flight") of 688 submarine, as it was not built with the vertical launch system that the newer Miami has, thus making the Memphis' hull incompatible with that of Miami.

On 6 August 2013, the U.S. Navy announced it will scrap the USS Miami, concluding the cost of repairs is more than it can afford in a time of budget cuts. A “comprehensive damage assessment” found that while the Miami could have theoretically been repaired, the necessary repairs were more extensive than first anticipated. This raised the expected repair costs from $450 million to $700 million. At that cost, repairing the Miami would have required cancellation of work on dozens of other surface ships and submarines. In the end, the Navy determined that repairing the Miami was not considered worth weakening overall fleet readiness. One factor in the heightened cost estimate was the effect of “environmentally-assisted cracking” in the steel piping and fasteners used in the air, hydraulic, and cooling water systems, which required more equipment to be replaced than previously thought. The U.S. Navy will lose five deployments Miami was to make over the ten years that remained in its service life, but funds will be used to support other vital maintenance efforts to improve the wholeness and readiness of the fleet.

The USS Miami is the first submarine and nuclear-powered ship to be lost in a U.S. naval shipyard, and the second warship lost in a U.S. naval shipyard after the destruction of USS Merrimack (Later renamed CSS Virginia upon raising) on April 20, 1861 in Norfolk Naval Shipyard during the American Civil War.

In popular culture

 * The USS Miami is one of two vessels featured in Submarine: A Guided Tour Inside a Nuclear Warship, a 1993 non-fiction book by Tom Clancy.