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Navy: DDGs keep capability despite damage

The Navy’s 51 Arleigh Burke-class destroyers have lost no operational capability despite structural damage caused to more than a dozen ships by design flaws worsened by the pounding of rough seas, the Navy said Monday.

Crews noticed damage on the bows of 13 Burke-class ships between 1993 and 2003, including “denting of shell and deck structures of the bow,” but this was “only discovered under close inspection,” said an announcement from Naval Sea Systems Command. “The cause of the damage was determined to be due to stress which was higher than initially estimated when the ship was designed.”

The NavSea announcement characterized the damage as not severe, and the Navy’s almost $63 million multi-ship repair plan as being necessary only to make sure all the destroyers in the class could serve the 35 years for which they were designed. But NavSea’s statement stood in contrast to a report Thursday in the British defense publication Jane’s, which said the damage from “bow slams” was serious, and affected even new ships.

A Navy PowerPoint presentation, obtained by Navy Times, identified the destroyers that have suffered structural damage in rough seas: Arleigh Burke, Curtis Wilbur, Stout, Paul Hamilton, Stethem, Carney, Gonzalez, The Sullivans, Ross, McFaul, Higgins, Winston S. Churchill and Lassen. Jane’s also reported that the destroyer Gridley, commissioned in February, already underwent repairs in September.

“Damage ranges from local buckling of deck transverse beams and shell web frames and shell longitudinals resulting in several inches of permanent deformation,” said one slide in the Navy presentation.

Internal structure warping is not uncommon among surface warships; previously, the Navy’s cruisers and frigates have gone into shipyards for hull-stiffening repairs.

The Burke-class ships are the only destroyers today in the fleet. The first ship was commissioned in 1991, and shipyard Bath Iron Works of Bath, Maine, announced it has started work on the last, DDG 112, expected to join the fleet in 2011.

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