Gator oil leaks: What went wrong? - Navy News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq - Navy Times

Gator oil leaks: What went wrong?

NORFOLK, Va. — Experts who have examined the photos of major oil leaks aboard the amphibious transport dock San Antonio are calling the workmanship on the new amphib “sloppy,” “unacceptable” and “criminal.” One former chief engineer said any other CHENG in the Navy would be “thankful this wasn’t their ship.”

But it is someone’s ship, and despite the finger-pointing, experts say the Navy has a serious problem on its hands.

The ship that was handed over to the Navy late, incomplete and $1 billion over budget now has more unwanted attention. A little over two months into its deployment, the ship entered the yard on Oct. 31 in Bahrain to fix the oil leaks — an embarrassing midcruise pit stop that’s expected to last longer than the initial two-week estimate.

Not long after the ship entered the yard, a series of photos showing lube oil leaking from failed welds in one of the ship’s main machinery spaces surfaced on the Internet.

On Nov. 12, Time magazine called the San Antonio “the Navy’s Floating Fiasco.” And its newest woes have the attention of the Navy’s highest authorities.

“The secretary has been briefed on the issue and has been getting periodic extended updates about the progress of the repairs,” said Capt. Beci Brenton, spokeswoman for Navy Secretary Donald Winter.

While the brass is watching and the shipbuilder defends its work and promises to make fixes, one question remains: How was this allowed to happen? And are other problems lurking?

‘I’m fuming’

Margaret Mitchell-Jones, spokeswoman for shipbuilder Northrop Grumman, defended the contractor’s performance and said the company is taking “corrective actions.”

“The quality of our work is something we take very seriously, and we have a rigorous program in place that includes inspecting and evaluating our work to ensure it adheres to the Navy’s requirements,” she said in a statement. “When issues arise, we aggressively address them in an immediate and methodical way. Upon hearing there may be a problem with lube oil leaks on LPD 17, we immediately responded with technical staff to assist in the Navy’s efforts and began our own in-house critique.”

She added that “we are proactively conducting a comprehensive review of our procedures, processes and policies surrounding the LPD-class ships currently under construction at our Gulf Coast shipyards. This effort includes the implementation of short-term corrective actions until, aligned with our customer, we fully determine the cause and need for any long-term corrective actions to ensure conformance and reinforce the commitment to quality we have in our work. We have invited and welcomed Navy participation throughout our own internal review process.”

On Capitol Hill, lawmakers also are taking notice. Josh Holly, a spokesman for the Republican side of the House Armed Services Committee, said members “continue to follow [San Antonio’s] challenges. The seapower subcommittee is aware of the most recent issues, although the Navy has not briefed us yet.”

Rep. Joe Sestak, D-Pa., a former vice admiral, said after viewing the photos: “It looks like more of a systemic problem from when it was built.”

“The ones who suffer are the bluejackets,” said Sestak, a member of the House Armed Services Committee and former top warfare requirements and programs officer for the Navy.

Naval analyst and author Norman Polmar put it more bluntly.

“It’s criminal. It’s criminal that the Navy accepted this ship,” he said. “And this is two and a half years after the Navy accepted the ship. It’s bad enough that it was delivered this way.”

Polmar said he thinks the San Antonio should be towed back to the shipyard.

“As a taxpayer and as a naval analyst,” he said, “I’m fuming.”

The first-in-class ship was delivered late and incomplete at $1.8 billion, $1 billion higher than planned. Two InSurvs — one in 2005 and a second in 2007 — made clear the ship would have long-term problems.

Following the lube oil leaks, inspectors from Naval Sea Systems Command, Naval Surface Force and regional maintenance commands have gone aboard the follow-on ships in the class — the New Orleans, Mesa Verde, Green Bay and New York — to examine welds in the lube oil system. Navy Times has learned the engineers did not find systemic problems, but they did find faulty welds, according to sources familiar with the inspections.

Who’s to blame?

Those familiar with the situation do not blame the crew or Navy engineers for the problem, comparing it with the discovery of a flaw in your car’s chassis during a road trip: You may have topped off the oil and filled the gas tank before you left, they say, but you can’t be expected to examine work completed long ago, when the car was built at the auto plant.

Even those responsible for ensuring the material condition of the fleet — the ultracritical Board of Inspection and Survey — do so under certain assumptions, one Navy source said.

“Even InSurv wouldn’t have found faulty welds,” the Navy source said.

Cmdr. Jensin Sommer, a spokeswoman for 2nd Fleet, said her command “certifies units for deployment and for integrated training with carrier and expeditionary strike groups so they’re ready for integrated operations.”

“That’s a different type of readiness than material condition,” she added.

Pat Dolan, spokeswoman for Naval Sea Systems Command, said naval engineers declined a request to explain the damage because they refused to comment on photos that had not been officially released.

The photos were posted on a blog and later authenticated by Dolan.

She did say that when the ship pulled into Bahrain, it was greeted by a crew of more than 30 engineers, pipefitters and welders flown to Bahrain from the U.S.

As of Nov. 13, there were no initial cost estimates and no available progress reports. “We’re still looking at mid- to late November for the repairs to be completed,” Dolan said.

She added that engineers are conducting a “root-cause analysis” and the repair and ship crews are fixing the flaws, noting “some that require replacing whole sections of pipe.”

Earlier, Dolan said the oil leaks had not posed a danger to sailors working near them.

Other problems lurking?

Naval experts and engineers familiar with the San Antonio’s history are concerned that if these welding problems went undiscovered until now, what other problems are waiting to pop up?

Jan van Tol, a retired captain who commanded the amphibious assault ship Essex, said he had deployments during his career commanding three ships that were interrupted by major breakdowns, and that it’s not unusual to have technical experts come aboard.

But the size of the repair team and the nature of this casualty is notable, he said.

“It surprises me to see oil leaking from such major points. I associate leaks with moving parts,” he said. “What’s unusual is the sheer number of people who are going out to address what appears to be a wider-ranging problem.”

Van Tol said he thinks any such flaw — if detected — would have prevented the ship’s deployment. So how did the ship get as far as it did?

“Are these systemic problems in one or more of the ship’s systems and physical plant? If they are, that goes to the question of craftsmanship and why did the Navy accept the ship? Are there ship-wide problems of a similar nature of poor craftsmanship and quality assurance? Who made the decisions to allow it to reach this point?” he said. “It raises the question of supervision and oversight, both at the shipyard and on the Navy’s side.”

He won’t go as far as other critics, but he did say the situation “certainly doesn’t look good.”

“It’s imperative to take a harsh, harsh look at how they got to this place. The Navy really needs to learn some harsh lessons,” he said.

Those lessons may soon be in the syllabus.

Sestak, the former three-star, has called for a hard look at the defense acquisition process since his arrival in Congress in 2007. He believes the problems aboard the San Antonio are a symptom of a larger institutional breakdown among the defense industry, the Pentagon and Congress.

As a former commander in the fleet, he said he finds it hard to believe that the San Antonio could have been allowed to deploy if anyone knew these breakdowns were imminent.

“I expected to be handed machines of war that had a certain level of readiness I then had to maintain. At times there were unexpected problems. Something could break. But I never expected to deploy with a machine of war, particularly a relatively new one, that had systemic problems that would take weeks at a time [to fix],” said Sestak, who commanded the George Washington Carrier Strike Group.

“When it’s something that appears systemic to the construction of the machine of war, we’re giving short shrift to our warriors out there.”

He said operators preparing for deployment care about how the ship and the crew perform; it’s not their job to inspect welds. Quality construction is supposed to be a given, something certified long before the ship is ever put into action.

In pre-deployment certifications, “they’re not looking inside the welds. They’re looking at how it’s operating at that moment,” he said.

Sestak said the LPD 17 class is just one weapon system among many with major problems.

“I’d like to go back to ‘What are the institutional processes that permitted this to happen?’ That is where I’d like to go back to the sources and find out how this can be done better,” he said. “I have proposed that we should have hearings on acquisition reform in the new session, with LPD 17 part of that.”

For Polmar, the naval analyst, the Navy’s experience with the San Antonio is a scandal worthy of investigation. He compares it to the infamous Air Force tanker deal that sent an Air Force civilian and an industry executive to jail.

Besides the money and shoddy product, Polmar said putting such a problematic ship to sea put sailors’ lives at risk.

“It’s as big in some respects as the tanker deal because it’s difficult to get to the truth of this,” he said. “It’s difficult to find out who accepted the ship. People went to jail and were fined in the tanker deal, and that’s the minimum of what should happen here.”

What’s particularly shocking, he said, are the repeated problems in such a new product.

“We’re talking about a warship,” he said. “You can see how the oil is leaking through those welds. You may see that on a ship that is 20 or 30 years old, not a ship that’s two or three years old.”

One naval historian, who asked not to be named because of his affiliations, was asked to think of another surface Navy program this problematic.

“The only thing I’d compare it to are [the littoral combat ship] and DDG 1000,” he said. “It just seems like the Navy can’t get it right anymore.”

See pictures of the San Antonio’s oil leaks