Crippled Icebreaker Healy To Get Complex Rebuild; Huge Engine Heads To Panama Canal

WASHINGTON: The Coast Guard is in the opening stages of what promises to be a long, complex and expensive repair of its largest icebreaker, which suffered a crippling engine fire in August.

The service should know in the coming days where the repair work on the USCGC Healy will take place, but the effort promises to be mammoth, involving cutting the ship open to remove its 106-ton engine, and floating a new engine by barge from Baltimore through the Panama Canal to the West Coast.

The fire occurred just after Healy picked up a group of 11 scientists in Seward, Alaska to run experiments on ice flow patterns in the Arctic. The ship eventually sailed home to Washington State under its own power. As a result of the incident, the Coast Guard canceled all Arctic operations at sea.

On Tuesday, a 23-year-old replacement engine was hauled out of a building at the Coast Guard’s facility in Baltimore to begin the long trip to the West Coast.

The engine is so large a structure built around it had to first be dismantled. Once it was moved to the barge, it was covered by a custom-fabricated steel enclosure welded to the barge’s deck, because, as Lt. Cmdr. Stephen Brickey, a Coast Guard spokesman said, “the sensitivity of the motor requires extensive protection in order to make the VIP barge transit around and through the Panama Canal.”

The logistics of the Healy work, from the barge trip onward, promise to be immense.

“The cutter will need to replace the starboard propulsion motor, which presents unique challenges,” Brickey said. “When the cutter was originally built, it was basically built around these motors.” 

The Healy, built in the 1980s, and the heavy icebreaker Polar Star, constructed in the 1970s, are both increasingly at risk for mechanical accidents as they age, and the Coast Guard is holding on to them until three new cutters begin to arrive later this decade.

In a statement to Breaking Defense, Coast Guard Commandant Adm. Karl Schultz said “projecting leadership and protecting our national interests in the Arctic requires effective presence. The Coast Guard is the nation’s most visible, agile, and adaptive force able to project U.S. sovereignty and vigorously compete for advantage in the region. Repairing Coast Guard Cutter HEALY, one of only two U.S. Arctic-capable icebreakers, is critical to America’s national security interests in the high latitudes.”

The August blaze means the US has no operational icebreakers capable of deploying since the heavy icebreaker Polar Star just wrapped up a scheduled overhaul to prepare for a planned annual deployment to Antarctica in November. The Polar Star is currently in port in Seattle preparing for Operation Deep Freeze, which leads the breakout of McMurdo Sound to allow resupply of the McMurdo Station at Antarctica.

In a recent commentary for the Heritage Foundation, Maiya Clark pointed out that without the Healy, “the Coast Guard will be unable to perform other essential functions, such as law enforcement operations, search-and-rescue missions, research, and defense activities.” Clark points out that the Coast Guard’s own standard’s call for three medium and three heavy icebreakers, a requirement that the service is nowhere near filling.

If current plans hold, however, the service will take delivery of three new Polar Security Cutters over the next six years. Currently, only the first two have gotten any funding, and the first ship won’t be available until 2024. During his State of the Coast Guard speech in February, Commandant Adm. Karl Schultz, called the situation “a woefully unacceptable level of presence in an area where we must be a leading force.”

In August, the Coast Guard and Department of Homeland Security delivered a report to the White House outlining a potential new generation of nuclear-powered icebreakers, two months after the Trump administration issued a surprise public directive to do so. It’s unclear how that might affect future shipbuilding plans.

Meanwhile, two Russian companies announced an agreement earlier this year, to build the world’s most powerful nuclear icebreaker, the first step in a bold new Arctic strategy Moscow hopes will drive open lucrative new shipping routes, and allow Russia to assert itself more forcefully in the High North.