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Broken gear may make CG case for new ships

Within days of the Coast Guard releasing its $9.3 billion fiscal 2009 budget request, which sets aside millions of dollars for new vessels, service officials set out to underscore the shoddy state of the current Coast Guard fleet with some maritime horror stories — tales of hull cracks, broken gear and lost propellers.

In speeches scheduled Friday and again Feb. 14 by Coast Guard Commandant Adm. Thad Allen about the state of the Coast Guard in general and its recapitalization program in particular, the lifesaving service seemed likely to renew its case that despite the embarrassments over its Deepwater modernization plan, the Coast Guard badly needs its new ships and aircraft.

First was the case of the 64-year-old cutter Acushnet — the Coast Guard’s oldest ship and as such, bearer of the informal title “Queen of the Fleet” — which, in December, lost its screw, said Coast Guard spokesman Cmdr. Brendan McPherson. The ship’s propeller separated completely from its shaft, a significant problem made worse because the ship’s age means it has no off-the-shelf spare parts, forcing the Coast Guard to custom-build a new propeller and all the other equipment needed to fix the ship. In its budget request, the service announced that it hopes to decommission the Acushnet by 2009.

Then there was the story of the 378-foot cutter Dallas, which had to delay its deployment from Charleston, S.C., last week because its equipment for making fresh water broke — the ship didn’t even get out of sight of land before it had to request parts to make repairs, McPherson said. That, in turn, delayed the deployment of the Coast Guard’s first armed MH-65C Dolphin helicopter, carried in the Dallas’ hangar for use against drug smugglers in the Caribbean.

And on Sunday, the 378-foot cutter Rush, one of the Dallas’ younger sister ships, turned back from a search-and-rescue mission off Alaska when water began seeping in through a corroded, two-foot crack in its hull — “never a good thing on a ship,” McPherson said. The Rush was expected to dock at Dutch Harbor as early as Wednesday and the cutter Jarvis, another 378-foot sister ship, was sent in its stead. Two other sister ships, the Morganthau and Chase, have had similar hull corrosion failures since 2005.

The lifesaving service also announced Monday that the crew of the cutter Bear was celebrating the 25th year of the ship’s Coast Guard career, a comparatively spry vessel compared to the World War II-vintage Acushnet and the Nixon-era 378-foot cutters.

“I saw that, and that really hit me between the eyes,” said Lt. Rob Wyman, spokesman for the Coast Guard’s Atlantic Area command. The average age of a Coast Guard vessel is about 35 years, officials said.

The service has tried to be diligent about extending the service of its cutters as much as possible, McPherson said, but, as demonstrated by the corrosion problems aboard the Rush, there is a point beyond which shipyards can do no more. (“The law of diminishing returns,” he said.) Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff alluded to the Rush on Monday, although not by name, when he unveiled his $50.5 billion fiscal 2009 budget request and urged Congress to fully fund the Coast Guard’s shipbuilding plan.

“That cutter is 40 years old. How many band-aids are you going to put on top of it? I think we owe it to the Coast Guard’s men and women who go out and take their lives in their hands, performing rescues at sea or securing the country, to occasionally replace their equipment with something that is modern, up-to-date and isn’t going to burst a seam,” Chertoff said.

But for all the recent troubles, only one new Coast Guard ship is expected to join the fleet soon — the first 418-foot national security cutter, the Bertholf, which has been scheduled for delivery to the Coast Guard in the spring and for commissioning sometime this summer.

The Bertholf and its seven follow-on ships will be phased in to replace the 378-foot high-endurance cutters. Shipbuilders at Northrop Grumman Ship Systems in Pascagoula, Miss., have said they can apply the “lessons learned” from the Bertholf to build subsequent copies quicker and cheaper, but it will be years before the remainder of the large new Deepwater vessels join the fleet.

The Coast Guard last year suspended work on its first try to design a new fast response cutter, and even though its fiscal 2009 budget asks for money for three of the ships, the service isn’t expected to even pick a design until March or April, McPherson said. Nor has the Coast Guard settled on a design for its offshore patrol cutter, a ship smaller than the Bertholf but bigger than the FRC; the budget request includes no money for the OPC.