The first Zuni rocket cooked off and perforated the fuel tanks of nearby aircraft, igniting streams of JP-5 jet fuel across the flight deck. Within a minute, three more Zunis detonated, blowing holes through the armored deck and sending burning fuel into the compartments below. Three minutes in, a bomb on a burning F-4 Phantom exploded, tearing an eight-foot hole in the deck and severing the firehoses that crews were already dragging into position. The blast also knocked out the twin-agent foam system meant to suppress exactly this kind of fire. Then the Mark 82 bombs began to go -- two in quick succession, then three more from a bomb rack that ruptured a 6,000-gallon fuel tank on a KA-3B tanker aircraft. The resulting fireball spread the conflagration further. In total, eighteen explosions ripped eight holes through the flight deck and into the levels below. Fifteen aircraft were destroyed. The fires reached four levels deep into the ship before they were contained.

Damage control teams aboard Enterprise attacked the fires despite severed hoses and a disabled foam system. The ambient roar of the flight deck had drowned out an airman's earlier warning about the huffer's exhaust direction, and now that same noise environment complicated coordination between firefighting teams. The Air Boss, responsible for flight and hangar deck fires, and the Damage Control Assistant, responsible for everything else, had no reliable way to communicate with each other. Crews overloaded the firefighting system by activating multiple suppression lines simultaneously, further reducing water pressure where it was needed most. Through all of this, the medical department performed emergency surgery in the ship's sick bay, aided by a shipboard dentist who had been cross-trained as an anesthetist -- a detail investigators would later cite as having saved lives. The captain of the destroyer USS Rogers maneuvered his ship to within feet of Enterprise's hull to pour water onto the carrier's burning flight deck. After four hours, the combined crews of three ships brought the fires under control.

The fire killed 28 men and injured 314 others. The cost of replacing fifteen destroyed aircraft and repairing the carrier exceeded $126 million in 1969 dollars -- roughly one billion when adjusted for inflation. Enterprise had been preparing for deployment to Vietnam, conducting training exercises in waters she had transited many times before. The sailors who died were not in combat. They were loading ordnance and starting engines on a routine operational day, in conditions that should have been manageable. Investigators would later note that an airman on deck had seen the problem developing and tried to raise concerns, but could not make himself understood over the noise. The question of whether moving the huffer would have mattered became academic: by the time anyone might have acted, the rocket's temperature had likely already passed the point of no return.

The investigation board praised Enterprise's firefighting response even as it catalogued the failures that made the fire so devastating. Key recommendations reshaped how the Navy prepared for flight deck emergencies. The air-start unit was redesigned to vent exhaust upward rather than sideways. Redundant communication and control systems were mandated so that key personnel could coordinate during a crisis. Flight deck crews received new training on ordnance cook-off temperatures and the critical time windows before munitions detonated. The Enterprise fire joined the USS Forrestal fire of 1967 -- a strikingly similar disaster that killed 134 sailors when a Zuni rocket accidentally fired on that carrier's deck -- as foundational case studies in Navy damage control training. Together, these two tragedies drove the development of the insensitive munitions program, designed to make shipboard ordnance less likely to detonate from heat or impact alone. The hard lessons of January 14, 1969, were written into doctrine, training curricula, and the physical design of every American carrier that followed.