Explosion from US Navy bomb shakes part of Florida [Video]

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW:

• The US Navy detonated a 40,000 pounds bomb beside aircraft carrier USS Gerard R. Ford on Friday.
• The explosion resulted in an earthquake (3.9 magnitude) that reached up to 100 miles across Florida.
• The Navy conducted a “shock trial” to test the stability of the ship.

The US Navy detonated a powerful bomb on Friday, near its own aircraft carrier ship. The explosion resulted in an earthquake that reached up to 100 miles away from Florida.

According to the US Geological Survey (USGS), Daytona Beach in Florida endured a 3.9 magnitude quake during the “shock trial” led by the USS Gerald R. Ford.

An astonishing 40,000 pounds bomb was blasted by the Navy beside its ship in the Atlantic Ocean. The drill was made to test the ship’s capability when in battle mode. It aimed to determine whether its most advanced carrier was ready for war or not when faced with such an enormous blast.

Based on the series of events, the aircraft carrier had successfully passed its first scheduled shock trial.

The water from the ocean bursted up in the air following the 18,144 kg-bomb explosion, per images and video footage.

The USGS determined that the seismic impact had reached up to 100 miles off the coast of Ponce Inlet located in the south of Daytona Beach.

Some netizens expressed their concerns on the explosion’s impact on “dolphins, whales and untold numbers of other sea creatures” that could have been “killed or seriously injured for hundreds of miles from the test area.”

The USS Gerald R. Ford was reportedly wired with sensors to gauge the impact of the shock, per the US Naval Institute (USNI).

“The first-in-class aircraft carrier was designed using advanced computer modeling method,” the Navy said. “Testing, and analysis to ensure the ship is hardened to withstand battle conditions, and these shock trials provide data used in validating the shock hardness of the ship.”

Last March, Ford Commanding officer Capt. Paul Lanzilotta told USNI News that the crew was getting ready for the blast operation,

“That’s quite a bit of work when you have a ship with 5,000 spaces in it, so we have to prepare all of our gear,” Lanzilotta said. “We’re also going to prepare the crew so the crew has to know what to expect.”

“They need to practice their damage control procedures because that’s something that we all need to be good at, and when we shock the ship we need to make sure that we have the ship in as ready a condition as we can,” he added.

The late Senator John McCain (R-AZ.) spearheaded the shock testing of USS Ford when he was still in Congress. Per USNI, McCain pushed for the trials to confirm the durability of the new carrier class prior to deployment.

Source: The Sun