Bunker Hill en route to help Haiti mission - Navy News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq - Navy Times

Bunker Hill en route to help Haiti mission

SAN DIEGO — The guided missile cruiser Bunker Hill was making full speed Saturday from the coast of Panama to reach Haiti and join U.S. military efforts in the Caribbean island devastated by Tuesday’s massive earthquake.

Bunker Hill will join other San Diego-based ships, including destroyer Higgins and aircraft carrier Carl Vinson, already off the coast of Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s capital city. Officials fear that the death toll, currently estimated at about 50,000, will rise above 100,000 as searches and assessments continue.

The ships are part of the Navy’s expanding sea base, which will include four ships with Norfolk, Va.-based Bataan Amphibious Ready Group as well as the hospital ship Comfort, which was leaving its home in Baltimore for the humanitarian and disaster relief mission led by U.S. Southern Command. The Bataan group is carrying landing craft and Marines, vehicles and helicopters with the 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit from Camp Lejeune, N.C.

With Port-au-Prince’s seaport nearly destroyed by the powerful quake, and a limited tarmac and support at the city’s international airport, military and U.S. Coast Guard helicopters are filling a central role in assisting evacuations of the wounded, transporting military and medical personnel and delivering supplies to areas made even more remote and inaccessible by vehicles.

“The big action going on here are helicopters flying of the Carl Vinson,” Higgins’ commanding officer, Cmdr. Carl Meuser, said in a telephone interview Saturday from the ship, which was operating 16 miles from the capital. “There are heavy lift helicopters and carrier-onboard delivery aircraft flying” between Haiti, Vinson and the naval base at Guantanamo Bay.

Higgins, carrying a crew of about 270 sailors, arrived Thursday off the coast. Meuser said Navy officials were concerned that the quake might have altered the seabed and potentially put underwater obstacles in the way that could damage ships’ hulls, so the ship guided Vinson through the channels and into the port.

Bunker Hill had left San Diego on Jan. 10 to load weapons at Seal Beach Naval Station, Calif., and was headed to Panama for a scheduled port visit when orders came to join the Haiti mission.

“By Wednesday, we were making full speed toward Panama to accelerate our arrival,” said Capt. Dominic DeScisciolo, Bunker Hill’s skipper, in the joint teleconference call with Higgins’ commander as his ship sailed off the Pacific side of Panama. The ship’s sailors “really want to try to make a difference to ease the suffering on the ground.”

The ship is expected to reach Haiti and by early Monday join Vinson and Carrier Strike Group 1, which is led by Rear Adm. Ted Branch aboard Vinson.

Like Higgins, Bunker Hill does not have its own complement of helicopters but is “a very capable ship,” DeScisciolo said, noting the ship’s advanced radars, sensors and air control capabilities that “will allow us to provide these services for all of the helicopters navigating back and forth from Guantanamo to Port-au-Prince.”

“Our full goal is to try to stem the human suffering,” he said.

Higgins can support the Navy’s H-60 Seahawk helicopters, while Bunker Hill, with a larger flight deck, can accommodate an array of Coast Guard, Air Force and Marine Corps helicopters, including the CH-46E Sea Knight medium lift transport that will arrive in the region with the Bataan ready group.

That air support, along with fixed-wing aircraft that are operating out of the capital’s airport, will be critical in delivering much-needed water, food and medical supplies to help the affected Haitians because the quake knocked out the capital’s seaport.

“The port facility itself was wrecked,” Meuser said, noting that a large crane used to move containers from the pier “just fell into the water. The port itself is just unusable.”

As they join in with delivering supplies and aid and helping transport the wounded, both skippers also have their attention on the security situation, particularly off the coast as fears surface of a mass migration of Haitian refugees if help doesn’t come quick enough. Haiti’s recent past is dotted with the tidal wave of refugees escaping civil war and severe poverty and taking to the high seas in small boats, inflatable tubes and even 50-gallon drums in efforts to reach Florida, Cuba or other islands.

“That is something that is getting a fair amount of attention at levels above me,” Meuser said. “At this point, we haven’t seen that big migration or signs of that.” If the situation gets dire, he said, “we could very well have something of a mass migration.”

Such flow of refugees “has been done before,” he added.

That could lead to “the worst case scenario,” said DeScisciolo. “If the poor, destitute Haitians decided … they would rather take their chances and take to their boats … that will pose quite a vexing problem for us. We certainly would keep our ship secure.”

Ships would render aid to any imperiled on the seas as needed under existing international laws of the sea, the skippers said.

Higgins’ equipment includes two rigid-hull boats and boat teams that could help pluck Haitians out of the water, and the ship could provide food and aid, “but then we have to take them some place,” Meuser said.

Meuser said the mission, coming near the end of Higgins’ round-the-world deployment, shows the Navy is “the global force for good” hailed in the service’s latest recruiting slogan. “We are going to stay here as long as we are told to stay,” he added.