thedrifter
05-15-07, 07:36 AM
Unfinished business
InSurv notes thousands of individual problems aboard San Antonio; crew contends with ‘incomplete’ ship
By Christopher P. Cavas - ccavas@militarytimes.com
Posted : May 21, 2007
The amphibious transport dock San Antonio has been at sea more than half of the past year — more than 200 days — performing a long series of trials to certify that the Navy’s newest Marine-transport ships can perform their missions as designed.
Now the Navy is getting down to some details left aside when the “gator” was delivered from its builder in July 2005 — which involve actually finishing the ship.
But it’s a long list of details: 5,564 “cards,” or individual problems, listed by the Board of Inspection and Survey in a series of Final Contract Trials carried out March 26-30 on board the ship at Norfolk, Va.
A copy of the unclassified report, dated April 13, was obtained by Military Times. The survey detailed thousands of items reflecting how much work has been left incomplete since the ship was commissioned in January 2006. The InSurv also, in the opinion of some former commanding officers familiar with the report, raises questions about the ability of the Navy and the ship’s crew to properly maintain the vessel.
The Navy knew this would be a difficult InSurv, said Navy Capt. Bill Galinis, program manager of the LPD 17 program at Naval Sea Systems Command.
“There were no substantial surprises” in the survey, Galinis said. “I knew going in it was going to be a hard inspection.”
The number of defects listed in the report, Galinis pointed out, actually represents a significant improvement over the ship’s last InSurv in July 2005, which listed nearly 19,000 discrepancies.
Among the problems:
• The Ship-Wide Area Network, or SWAN, has numerous hardware and software problems.
• The crew has to jury-rig the Engineering Control System to hook up shore power.
• The ship’s ability to make fresh water or ventilate living and working spaces is degraded or not functional. “Operational availability” of the reverse osmosis units — necessary to make fresh water — is “one of the most troubled systems onboard,” the latest InSurv noted.
Construction of the ship was one of the more painful processes experienced by the Navy in decades. Problems began in 1998 with a failed contractor design plan, and the shipyard at Avondale, La., near New Orleans, was sold twice. Ongoing design and construction problems led to severe cost overruns and a long series of delays.
The Navy hoped to receive the ship in 2004 from Northrop Grumman Ship Systems, but delivery was constantly delayed by problems. Eventually the service agreed to take the ship in an incomplete condition in July 2005 and finish the work later. Problems were made worse a few weeks after that, when Hurricane Katrina struck the Ingalls shipyard in Pascagoula, Miss. The San Antonio rode out the storm pierside and, by all accounts, performed well, but the shipyard was devastated.
The San Antonio was commissioned in January 2006 and became a member of the Atlantic Fleet. Northrop Grumman’s responsibility to complete work on the ship expired that April, and the Navy is relying on two post-commissioning overhauls to finally put in place all the fittings the ship was intended to have from the beginning. The second and last of those overhauls began April 2 at BAE Systems in Norfolk.
But the InSurv shows just how much work remains before the ship meets its scheduled June 15 completion date. Of the San Antonio’s 943 spaces, 286 were listed in July 2005 as incomplete or uninspected. The latest InSurv reports that 138 spaces remain unfinished.
Electrical work incomplete
More problematic, however, is that “electrical work remains unfinished throughout the ship,” according to the InSurv.
Among those issues, reads the InSurv, are numerous dead-ended coiled cables. “An energized, dead-ended cable was discovered on top of Locker 36 in Operations Berthing Compartment,” according to the report.
And of the ship’s 269 watertight closures, 124 are not actually watertight.
The InSurv found that safety issues abound throughout the ship, including “safety of personnel, safety of equipment, safe ammo handling, safe navigation and safety of flight. All safety deficiencies that can be corrected near-term should be corrected by ship’s force and/or the program office as soon as possible.”
The July 2005 survey also reported that “safety deficiencies exist throughout the ship.” That report “strongly recommended that identified safety and security issues be resolved prior to crew move aboard.”
And yet the ship has performed “very, very well” in its underway exercises since commissioning, Galinis said.
The ship received an unsatisfactory rating in three major areas during the March survey — main propulsion, auxiliaries and aviation areas.
But Galinis hastened to point out that in all other areas the ship scored higher than in the 2005 survey.
The ship failed one major area that surprised Galinis when it was unable to get underway during the March InSurv. Although the problem was identified, there was not enough time during the five-day inspection to get a replacement part on board, he said.
But although significant finishing work remains, most of the problems uncovered by the latest InSurv appear to be crew-related concerns.
“About 40 percent of the cards were ship-completion related. About 60 percent, maintenance related,” Galinis said.
Results surprise some
At least two former commanding officers familiar with the latest report were taken aback by the results.
“I was very surprised by the number of unfinished spaces,” said a former amphibious ship commander. “For a ship that was ostensibly completed in July 2005, that is frankly surprising.
“Also, there are things like the live wires in berthing spaces — that is stunning to me. If they’d known about it, that would border on criminal negligence.”
The long list of electrical problems stunned the former amphibious officer.
“Those reflect issues of the contractor, but also things ship’s company should have caught,” he said. “Exposed wiring — a ship’s safety program should have caught that.”
“Electrical safety for me was always a leading concern,” the officer added. “It’s something that can immediately kill a sailor. There are no compromises. The combination of electricity and water is particularly dangerous, and that’s the environment in which ships operate.”
Other problems the ship’s crew should have dealt with, the former amphibious officer noted, included hundreds of maintenance or record-keeping issues. He noted, for example, the mislabeling of power panels and an unstable ladder around an electronic warfare system.
“An unstable ladder should be immediately tagged out and repaired,” he said.
Another former commanding officer found issues with the Navy’s decision to accept the ship in 2005 despite its incomplete state.
“My heart goes out to the crew,” he said. “Those guys and ladies have such pride in their ship, nobody wants someone to come aboard and say the ship is a mess. It’s unfinished.”
“Why do we put this on the backs of these kids?” he asked.
But the former CO also took issue with the ship’s command and noted that the InSurv reported the San Antonio’s command had no path to resolve many major issues.
“I don’t understand that,” he said. “I know how we do maintenance and structure, and I don’t get that. You’ve owned the ship for a year and a half, captain, and you leave the wires dangling?”
The former CO was also troubled by the numerous safety issues.
Could “our daughter or son die because the ship was accepted in an inappropriate state and sent to sea?” he asked. “This ship has been operating at sea with all these missing and unresolved issues.”
The problems listed in the report shocked the former CO.
“If someone had typed this up on the ship as joke, it would be a joke,” he said of the March InSurv. “Nobody would have accepted the ship in this condition. You couldn’t make that up.”
Relying on sailors to fix design issues is a bad decision, the former officer said.
“When I read a thing like this that says elevators are unable to operate because of poor design, I have to ask, do you expect the sailor to fix that?”
“We’re the best Navy in the world — why are we living with this?” he added.
Galinis insists numerous problems in the San Antonio are being corrected on later ships of the class, and noted that the survey of the second ship, the New Orleans, turned up about one-fifth of the issues first reported on the San Antonio.
But the New Orleans, Galinis said, also remains an unfinished ship, despite being commissioned in March. The ship also will be completed during an overhaul after it arrives at San Diego, he noted.
And the New Orleans already has experienced some teething troubles. The ship left its namesake city April 3 and stopped at Pensacola, Fla., where problems with the steering gear kept it in port for nearly two weeks. Those problems have been corrected, according to the Navy, and the ship was at sea again April 18.
The former commanding officers who reviewed the report were sympathetic to the crew and impressed by the ship’s ability to spend so much time at sea with so many problems. But the former CO shook his head at what the crew has been going through.
“There’s no good news story behind this thing,” he said. “I feel badly for the officers and crew to have to be saddled with this.”
Ellie
InSurv notes thousands of individual problems aboard San Antonio; crew contends with ‘incomplete’ ship
By Christopher P. Cavas - ccavas@militarytimes.com
Posted : May 21, 2007
The amphibious transport dock San Antonio has been at sea more than half of the past year — more than 200 days — performing a long series of trials to certify that the Navy’s newest Marine-transport ships can perform their missions as designed.
Now the Navy is getting down to some details left aside when the “gator” was delivered from its builder in July 2005 — which involve actually finishing the ship.
But it’s a long list of details: 5,564 “cards,” or individual problems, listed by the Board of Inspection and Survey in a series of Final Contract Trials carried out March 26-30 on board the ship at Norfolk, Va.
A copy of the unclassified report, dated April 13, was obtained by Military Times. The survey detailed thousands of items reflecting how much work has been left incomplete since the ship was commissioned in January 2006. The InSurv also, in the opinion of some former commanding officers familiar with the report, raises questions about the ability of the Navy and the ship’s crew to properly maintain the vessel.
The Navy knew this would be a difficult InSurv, said Navy Capt. Bill Galinis, program manager of the LPD 17 program at Naval Sea Systems Command.
“There were no substantial surprises” in the survey, Galinis said. “I knew going in it was going to be a hard inspection.”
The number of defects listed in the report, Galinis pointed out, actually represents a significant improvement over the ship’s last InSurv in July 2005, which listed nearly 19,000 discrepancies.
Among the problems:
• The Ship-Wide Area Network, or SWAN, has numerous hardware and software problems.
• The crew has to jury-rig the Engineering Control System to hook up shore power.
• The ship’s ability to make fresh water or ventilate living and working spaces is degraded or not functional. “Operational availability” of the reverse osmosis units — necessary to make fresh water — is “one of the most troubled systems onboard,” the latest InSurv noted.
Construction of the ship was one of the more painful processes experienced by the Navy in decades. Problems began in 1998 with a failed contractor design plan, and the shipyard at Avondale, La., near New Orleans, was sold twice. Ongoing design and construction problems led to severe cost overruns and a long series of delays.
The Navy hoped to receive the ship in 2004 from Northrop Grumman Ship Systems, but delivery was constantly delayed by problems. Eventually the service agreed to take the ship in an incomplete condition in July 2005 and finish the work later. Problems were made worse a few weeks after that, when Hurricane Katrina struck the Ingalls shipyard in Pascagoula, Miss. The San Antonio rode out the storm pierside and, by all accounts, performed well, but the shipyard was devastated.
The San Antonio was commissioned in January 2006 and became a member of the Atlantic Fleet. Northrop Grumman’s responsibility to complete work on the ship expired that April, and the Navy is relying on two post-commissioning overhauls to finally put in place all the fittings the ship was intended to have from the beginning. The second and last of those overhauls began April 2 at BAE Systems in Norfolk.
But the InSurv shows just how much work remains before the ship meets its scheduled June 15 completion date. Of the San Antonio’s 943 spaces, 286 were listed in July 2005 as incomplete or uninspected. The latest InSurv reports that 138 spaces remain unfinished.
Electrical work incomplete
More problematic, however, is that “electrical work remains unfinished throughout the ship,” according to the InSurv.
Among those issues, reads the InSurv, are numerous dead-ended coiled cables. “An energized, dead-ended cable was discovered on top of Locker 36 in Operations Berthing Compartment,” according to the report.
And of the ship’s 269 watertight closures, 124 are not actually watertight.
The InSurv found that safety issues abound throughout the ship, including “safety of personnel, safety of equipment, safe ammo handling, safe navigation and safety of flight. All safety deficiencies that can be corrected near-term should be corrected by ship’s force and/or the program office as soon as possible.”
The July 2005 survey also reported that “safety deficiencies exist throughout the ship.” That report “strongly recommended that identified safety and security issues be resolved prior to crew move aboard.”
And yet the ship has performed “very, very well” in its underway exercises since commissioning, Galinis said.
The ship received an unsatisfactory rating in three major areas during the March survey — main propulsion, auxiliaries and aviation areas.
But Galinis hastened to point out that in all other areas the ship scored higher than in the 2005 survey.
The ship failed one major area that surprised Galinis when it was unable to get underway during the March InSurv. Although the problem was identified, there was not enough time during the five-day inspection to get a replacement part on board, he said.
But although significant finishing work remains, most of the problems uncovered by the latest InSurv appear to be crew-related concerns.
“About 40 percent of the cards were ship-completion related. About 60 percent, maintenance related,” Galinis said.
Results surprise some
At least two former commanding officers familiar with the latest report were taken aback by the results.
“I was very surprised by the number of unfinished spaces,” said a former amphibious ship commander. “For a ship that was ostensibly completed in July 2005, that is frankly surprising.
“Also, there are things like the live wires in berthing spaces — that is stunning to me. If they’d known about it, that would border on criminal negligence.”
The long list of electrical problems stunned the former amphibious officer.
“Those reflect issues of the contractor, but also things ship’s company should have caught,” he said. “Exposed wiring — a ship’s safety program should have caught that.”
“Electrical safety for me was always a leading concern,” the officer added. “It’s something that can immediately kill a sailor. There are no compromises. The combination of electricity and water is particularly dangerous, and that’s the environment in which ships operate.”
Other problems the ship’s crew should have dealt with, the former amphibious officer noted, included hundreds of maintenance or record-keeping issues. He noted, for example, the mislabeling of power panels and an unstable ladder around an electronic warfare system.
“An unstable ladder should be immediately tagged out and repaired,” he said.
Another former commanding officer found issues with the Navy’s decision to accept the ship in 2005 despite its incomplete state.
“My heart goes out to the crew,” he said. “Those guys and ladies have such pride in their ship, nobody wants someone to come aboard and say the ship is a mess. It’s unfinished.”
“Why do we put this on the backs of these kids?” he asked.
But the former CO also took issue with the ship’s command and noted that the InSurv reported the San Antonio’s command had no path to resolve many major issues.
“I don’t understand that,” he said. “I know how we do maintenance and structure, and I don’t get that. You’ve owned the ship for a year and a half, captain, and you leave the wires dangling?”
The former CO was also troubled by the numerous safety issues.
Could “our daughter or son die because the ship was accepted in an inappropriate state and sent to sea?” he asked. “This ship has been operating at sea with all these missing and unresolved issues.”
The problems listed in the report shocked the former CO.
“If someone had typed this up on the ship as joke, it would be a joke,” he said of the March InSurv. “Nobody would have accepted the ship in this condition. You couldn’t make that up.”
Relying on sailors to fix design issues is a bad decision, the former officer said.
“When I read a thing like this that says elevators are unable to operate because of poor design, I have to ask, do you expect the sailor to fix that?”
“We’re the best Navy in the world — why are we living with this?” he added.
Galinis insists numerous problems in the San Antonio are being corrected on later ships of the class, and noted that the survey of the second ship, the New Orleans, turned up about one-fifth of the issues first reported on the San Antonio.
But the New Orleans, Galinis said, also remains an unfinished ship, despite being commissioned in March. The ship also will be completed during an overhaul after it arrives at San Diego, he noted.
And the New Orleans already has experienced some teething troubles. The ship left its namesake city April 3 and stopped at Pensacola, Fla., where problems with the steering gear kept it in port for nearly two weeks. Those problems have been corrected, according to the Navy, and the ship was at sea again April 18.
The former commanding officers who reviewed the report were sympathetic to the crew and impressed by the ship’s ability to spend so much time at sea with so many problems. But the former CO shook his head at what the crew has been going through.
“There’s no good news story behind this thing,” he said. “I feel badly for the officers and crew to have to be saddled with this.”
Ellie