“Get everything ready.”

That is what the one piece of paper that Robinson received said when the assignment to fabricate the first Carrier Temporary Fire Response system in all the shipyards was first bestowed upon them—from scratch.

Where there was nothing to warn people of a fire but a primitive warning system of radios, cell phones, and people running around telling people to evacuate, there is now a better assurance in going home in one piece.

Head of Operations Code 300 Mike Robinson, who was one of the main coordinators of the affair, also said that this will save the shipyard money since there’s no need for two fire watches per area, radio maintenance, nor training personnel to use the said radios.

The Origin Story: trial by fire.

The physical manifestation of this feat began with Mark Shewmaker from Carrier Fire Control & IC Branch (Code 271), who took it upon himself to draw up all the paperwork necessary to begin, before calling on the rest of the codes. According to one of its employees Blesdimir Hernandez, Electrical Department (Code 950) typically fabricates the smoke detector systems for the submarines, so they were familiar with the engineering needed to create a new one for the carrier. This enabled them to complete the system within the span of three to four months of ten hour work days. Shewmaker had designed it so the crew could troubleshoot it, but it was not easy.

After being workshopped between shops on how it was going to work, it was put together in the workshop, then disassembled for transportation and put back together on the ship. Unfortunately this trial often ended in error and had to be done several times in order to achieve perfection. When they did not have the material they needed that day, they had to improvise and work around hiccups in order to get the deed done and in accordance with Shewmaker’s design. “We had a situation where we tried to make the system modular so we could take each piece apart, store it, put it back in, and that involved a plug connection in every single box,” Robinson said. Because of the rain messing up those connections, he had people spending a better part of a week of up to 12 hour shifts rewiring all the boxes to eliminate damage. He proudly stated, “We didn’t have a company or private contractor install it. Shipyard talent did.”

But wait, there’s more.

“This system is to bring the carriers and the dry dock in compliance with the 8010 standard, which is the fire protection standard for ships,” Robinson explained, “The next step is to hard wire the system into parts of the Dry Dock 8 and upgrade the system accordingly.”

Giving credit where it’s due.

 “(NAME) greatly contributed to the successful development, manufacture, installation, troubleshooting and repair of the first ever temporary Fire Alarm Announcing System for Dry Dock 8 for the USS George H.W. Bush (CVN 77) Dry Docking Planned Incremental Availability (DPIA) 2019. (She/He) applied (his/her) expertise in routing over 7,000ft of electrical signal and power cable, staging 14 fire pull stations, 30 speaker strobe stations, and 8 main power and control stations. (Her/His) attention to detail and tireless effort played a vital role in USS GEORGE H W BUSH to meet the stringent 8010 fire protection standard.”

This is the write up for the award for the dedicated team who pulled off this feat. Shewmaker might have been the one write the song and Robinson might have been the one orchestrating the piece, but one can tell the write up previously mentioned was written for a team because it has (his/her) spaced dotted throughout, which means you can plug in any one of the individuals from the group and the statement would still stand true. They took the initiative when they were brand new and inexperienced in comparison with their older co-workers—a testament to how vital the next generation truly is to the innovative success of the shipyard. Notably, most of them are apprentices and/or haven’t even been employed by the NNSY for a year.

Because of these people, families can have more confidence in their family members coming home. Production employees working on carriers can now rest easy and truly be able to say, “No one gets hurt today!”

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