Fire Knocks Out Power and Propulsion on Uss Higgins

A major fire aboard uss higgins knocked out the destroyer's electricity and propulsion systems this week. No injuries to service members had been reported by Wednesday.

USS Higgins in the Pacific

The guided-missile destroyer is assigned to the U.S. Navy's 7th Fleet in the Pacific and is part of the forward-deployed surface force. It is homeported at Naval Station Yokosuka in Japan and assigned to Destroyer Squadron 15.

The ship is an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer equipped with the Aegis combat system, vertical-launch missile cells and anti-submarine warfare capabilities. Vessel tracking data showed the Higgins had been docked in Singapore as recently as February.

William R. Higgins

The destroyer is named for Marine Col. William R. Higgins, who was kidnapped in February 1988, tortured and interrogated before being killed. His remains were recovered from a Beirut street in December 1991.

The ship's namesake gives the destroyer a direct link to a long-running set of events tied to the 1988 kidnapping and the 1991 recovery. That history now sits beside a new operational problem: the ship was disabled by fire, but the extent of the damage and the repair timeline were still unclear on Wednesday.

Recent Navy ship fires

The Higgins fire was the third shipboard fire to strike the U.S. Navy in a matter of weeks. Earlier this month, a blaze broke out aboard the aircraft carrier USS Dwight D. Eisenhower and injured eight sailors.

A separate fire erupted in the laundry spaces of the aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford and wounded two sailors. The Gerald R. Ford and its accompanying strike group are expected to depart the Middle East in the coming days.

By Wednesday, the cause of the fire aboard Higgins remained unclear, along with the vessel's precise location within the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command area of operations. The ship was still counted among the Navy's forward-deployed Pacific force, but it had lost the systems that move and power it.