CO: Upgrades needed for toilets on carrier - Navy News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq - Navy Times

CO: Upgrades needed for toilets on carrier

Six months into a deployment that included ongoing problems with the ship’s commodes, the commanding officer of the carrier George H.W. Bush said the toilet system needs to be upgraded to help prevent clogs.

The toilet system works perfectly when used properly, Capt. Brian “Lex” Luther, the skipper of the carrier since March, said in a telephone interview Tuesday evening. However, the system needs bigger pipes to prevent clogs, he said.

The problems, Luther said, occur when things that the system was never designed to handle end up in the pipes. Hull maintenance technicians dispatched for repairs have pulled out socks, underwear, shirts, hardboiled eggs, nuts, bolts, feminine hygiene products and, once, a mop head.

“When stuff goes down the system, and it’s not designed for that, it causes clogs,” he said.

Since the deployment began in May, waste and toilet paper did not create a single malfunction, he said.

Hull maintenance technicians have spent more than 10,000 hours working on the system since May, amassing volumes of data along the way. That allowed the ship’s company to completely re-engineer the vacuum system’s protocols. And based on that data, Luther recommends a series of upgrades to the Bush’s vacuum collection marine sanitation system when it returns to Norfolk.

The system was designed with unusually narrow pipes to help keep a high vacuum pressure. However, these narrow pipes make it more likely that the system will clog. They should be wider to let potential clogs move through, Luther said.

Additionally, the individual commodes need to be upgraded. Sometimes vacuum pressure is lost when someone presses the flush button with his boot instead of his hand, breaking a mechanism. Or a tube is knocked out of place during a regular cleaning, causing pressure to drop, Luther said.

The toilet problem has become unbearable, said sailors onboard the carrier, who spoke with Navy Times on the condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to speak with media. There have been occasions during the deployment when every toilet went offline. More frequently, every commode aft of midship will be out of order, they said. Or several heads in a single area will go down, and when they are repaired, a new problem will occur elsewhere, sailors said.

The problem has left sailors searching for a proper place to relieve themselves, a quest that can last an hour. Often, when they do find a working commode, they need to wait in line and the head is filthy from overuse. As a result, sailors are taking extra showers or using industrial sinks in their workspaces. Men are urinating into bottles and emptying the contents over the ship’s side. Some have cut down on their food and fluid intake, and some women are holding it for so long that they’re developing urinary tract infections.

Luther said that 8.8 percent of sailors onboard have received some sort of medical attention on this deployment. Figures later provided by the carrier show that 1.3 percent of the sailors onboard have been treated for urinary tract infections and 0.2 percent were treated for dehydration. Comparable figures for other deployments were not available Tuesday night.

The ship’s sanitation system is divided into forward and aft sections, which operate independently of each other. However, six times since the deployment began, both sections broke simultaneously, leaving each of the carrier’s 423 toilets inoperable. However, at the worst, both sections were concurrently down only for 15 minutes. No commode is immune, Luther said, and his own toilet has gone out of service.

“If you use vacuum, you lose vacuum. Whether you’re me, the admiral, or the most junior sailors. And even I’ve gotten a call from the admiral who said ‘Hey! What’s up with that?’ ” Luther said. “It’s egalitarian."