Video: 'Carrier Ablaze (1960)'

(Monday, December 19, 1960, 10:30 a.m. EST; during the Cold War) — Fifty shipyard workers were killed and more than 300 were injured today when fire broke out on the hangar deck of the nearly completed aircraft carrier USS Constellation at the Brooklyn Navy Yard in New York City.

It took 17 hours for firefighters to extinguish the fire, some of whom had been “driven to the raw edge of exhaustion” after being called into service in the Park Slope air accident just three days before.

The fire broke out on the main deck when a small hoisting truck sheared off a plug on a tank of volatile jet aviation fuel used to flush the ship’s piping system. The liquid gushed along the deck into a well where a welder’s torch ignited it.