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Report: DDG 51 class buckling under stress

More than a dozen Arleigh Burke-class destroyers have suffered “significant” structural damage in rough seas because designers didn’t account for the effect of “bow slams” on the ships’ hulls, Navy documents said — and they said fixing the problem could cost almost $63 million.

A Navy PowerPoint presentation, obtained by Navy Times, confirmed a report Thursday in the British defense publication Jane’s revealing the design problems in the Burke class.

Support beams and other structures inside the destroyers warp so much from the stress of withstanding high seas that they must be cut out and replaced, even in new ships — the destroyer Gridley, commissioned in February, already underwent repairs in September. The report described the damage common to 13 ships, in both “Flight I” and “Flight II” variants of the destroyer. Later Flight II ships have their own helicopter hangars and slightly different weaponry than earlier destroyers in the class.

“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 presentation.

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

With each ship designed to serve for around 35 years, the Burkes are the Navy’s only destroyers in service. 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.