[Bubblehead Nuke]

Ok.. lets nuke this out:

To have a prolonged fire you must have fuel and air.

*IF* they had a hydrogen explosion, they then had a flash fire that would have quickly consumed all the available oxygen in the compartment. Once all the oxygen was consumed then fire would have gone out. Depending on how long and how hot the fire was, you may have smoldering insulation and other combustable materials. This is a reflash BEGGING to happen.

Lets say they got lucky and it did not catch anything else on fire and they just had a flash fire and snuffed itself due to lack of oxygen. When they opened the hatch they would find people dead due to the heat and burns as well as people dead due to a lack of oxygen.

About the 'rudder failure'. Well, that would have been handled simply by isolation of the hydraulic pressure( read: close a valve) and take manual control of the rudder spool valve and position the rudder in local control mode. Unfortunately, this would have made for a very short movie.

For the sake of argument, lets presume that this boat has an ignorant crew or a piss poor design. *IF* you cut into a pressurized hydraulic line you are going to get a fine mist that comes out. Think of it was a fuel injector on your car. You are going to get a nice mix of a flammable vapor in a large amout of air. Add a high heat source (glowing wire or hot sparks from a grinder) and you have that common occurance call combustion. Just like a car engine.

Again you are going to quickly consume all the availabe oxygen in the air and the fire will snuff itself out and you will find bodies bunt and dead or just dead.

A fire on a boat is a BADDDDD thing. Next to flooding it was our most trained on thing.