Canada has decided to temporarily withdraw from service three British-made submarines, after a fire on a fourth vessel killed one sailor, the Defense Ministry said in a statement Tuesday.
Fire struck the HMCS Chicoutimi sub last week shortly after leaving Scotland for its base in Canada, killing a sailor and injuring nine. The vessel was stranded off northwest Ireland for five days, and towed back to Scotland on Sunday.
"It would be prudent to keep all submarines alongside until more analysis can be done on the possible causes of the fire," said Chief of Maritime Staff Vice-Admiral Bruce Maclean in a statement.
The submarines being docked are the Corner Brook, the Victoria and the Windsor, which, like the Chicoutimi, are diesel-electric-powered submarines built for the British Royal Navy in the 1980s, then refitted and sold to Canada in 2000.
The subs have been plagued by leaks, mechanical defects and, in one case, a dented hull.
Ottawa has not ruled out seeking compensation from London.
Recently a fire had broken out aboard the HMCS Corner Brook, according to Conservative Bill Casey, an opponent of Liberal Prime Minister Paul Martin.
Casey said the fire "was similar to the fire on board the Chicoutimi, in that it had involved the cables that ran through the captain's cabin."
Casey represents the eastern province of Nova Scotia. Its capital, Halifax, is home to Canada's main naval seaport on the Atlantic.
"I don't have any information on the issue that the member speaks about, but we'll certainly look into that," said Keith Martin, the parliamentary secretary to Defense Minister Bill Graham.
Commodore Dan Murphy, president of a board of inquiry into the Chicoutimi incident, told a news conference in Glasgow, Scotland on Tuesday that a fire spread through the commanding officer's cabin on the second deck and an electrical panel below it.
A smaller blaze also broke out in an oxygen generator 15m away from the captain's cabin, he added.
"It was startling for all of us," Murphy said.
"This was a major fire. There were, in fact, two fires -- one of a lesser degree -- and three locations were involved," he said.
The Chicoutimi was officially handed to Canada on Oct. 2, and was on its maiden voyage when the fire broke out.
On Oct. 7, Stephen Harper, the leader of the opposition in the Canadian Parliament, called for an inquiry into the purchase of the submarines.
The Victoria is currently at the Esquimalt naval base on the Pacific coast, while the other two subs are based in Halifax.
‘DISCRIMINATION’: The US Office of Personnel Management ordered that public DEI-focused Web pages be taken down, while training and contracts were canceled US President Donald Trump’s administration on Tuesday moved to end affirmative action in federal contracting and directed that all federal diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) staff be put on paid leave and eventually be laid off. The moves follow an executive order Trump signed on his first day ordering a sweeping dismantling of the federal government’s diversity and inclusion programs. Trump has called the programs “discrimination” and called to restore “merit-based” hiring. The executive order on affirmative action revokes an order issued by former US president Lyndon Johnson, and curtails DEI programs by federal contractors and grant recipients. It is using one of the
One of Japan’s biggest pop stars and best-known TV hosts, Masahiro Nakai, yesterday announced his retirement over sexual misconduct allegations, reports said, in the latest scandal to rock Japan’s entertainment industry. Nakai’s announcement came after now-defunct boy band empire Johnny & Associates admitted in 2023 that its late founder, Johnny Kitagawa, for decades sexually assaulted teenage boys and young men. Nakai was a member of the now-disbanded SMAP — part of Johnny & Associates’s lucrative stable — that swept the charts in Japan and across Asia during the band’s nearly 30 years of fame. Reports emerged last month that Nakai, 52, who since
EYEING A SOLUTION: In unusually critical remarks about Russian President Vladimir Putin, US President Donald Trump said he was ‘destroying Russia by not making a deal’ US President Donald Trump on Wednesday stepped up the pressure on Russian President Vladimir Putin to make a peace deal with Ukraine, threatening tougher economic measures if Moscow does not agree to end the war. Trump’s warning in a social media post came as the Republican seeks a quick solution to a grinding conflict that he had promised to end before even starting his second term. “If we don’t make a ‘deal,’ and soon, I have no other choice but to put high levels of Taxes, Tariffs, and Sanctions on anything being sold by Russia to the United States, and various other
In Earth’s upper atmosphere, a fast-moving band of air called the jet stream blows with winds of more than 442kph, but they are not the strongest in our solar system. The comparable high-altitude winds on Neptune reach about 2,000kph. However, those are a mere breeze compared with the jet stream on a planet called WASP-127b. Astronomers have detected winds howling at about 33,000kph on the large gaseous planet in our Milky Way galaxy approximately 520 light-years from Earth in a tight orbit around a star similar to our sun. The supersonic jet-stream winds circling WASP-127b at its equator are the fastest of their kind
RSS