Any insight as to why fires on ships are hard to control? I hear it and believe. On the other hand I've been inside of military ships before and they are partitioned, with lots of metal doors to section off and contain damage, so I don't understand the difficulty.
Flammable materials like paint, lubricants, furniture, sailors are quite common inside those metal rooms. I have read of cases where the fires were so hot as to cause combustion through the bulkheads by radiant heat, regardless of the compartments being shut to section off the fires. The weight of water from firefighting efforts can cause stability issues, especially if it starts to slosh and compound any damage-related listing.
On top of these reasons, the segmented and compartmented nature of ships tends to intensify and concentrate heat. The segments that can burn, will burn hotter, much hotter, especially if they can establish a direction of airflow.
Flashover is always a major concern, everything emits flammable gasses nowadays when heated to sufficient temperature, and ship fires absolutely reach sufficient temperature readily.
I highly encourage everyone to watch this video, this is not just important on this but it's really important to understand the rapidity of fire progression in general. It's worth a watch from the start but I'm going to link to the point where it gets colorful. Imagine this is all taking place in a steel blast furnace with locked bulkheads - it's literally a matter of 30 seconds between "my trash can fire is out of control" and "everything in the room is literally on fire".
