Sloppy welds. Superstructure skin that’s too thin in places. Too-heavy brackets and fasteners. Improper engine mountings. These are some of the flaws in the Coast Guard’s first-of-class National Security Cutter, Bertholf, according to a former Northrop Grumman contract shipwright. Martin Shearington, a California resident who has worked on scores of vessels in his 40 years at various yards across the country, says Bertholf, which was launched in September 2006, and her planned seven sisters will never meet Coast Guard performance goals.
“Those ships will never do what they were designed to do – they’re over-weighted,” Shearington said in a late September phone interview. “There’s going to be a lot of vibration on the ships – that’s understood – if they open up the engines to go fast. So they have to put extra eight on fasteners and brackets because of that, but they went overboard. When they throw loose the mooring lines, the damn ship might sink right there.”
“That’s an exaggeration,” he conceded. “But it’s not going to last half as long as the Coast Guard expects, because of the sloppy workmanship on it.”
For those closely following the ups, downs and more downs of the Coast Guard’s $25-billion Deepwater program launched in 2002, Shearington’s allegations come as no surprise. Deepwater aims to revamp the service’s entire inventory of ships, aircraft and electronics over the next 20 years. But it’s off to a poor start.
The trouble began in 2005. The Coast Guard 123-foot cutter Matagorda suffered hull buckling on its maiden voyage following an $8-million overhaul at Halter-Bollinger JV shipyard, a Northrop Grumman subcontractor in Louisiana. Matagorda was the first in a batch of eight 110-foot cutters being stretched by 13 feet and modernized under Deepwater.
Inspections revealed that all eight rebuilt cutters had hull problems. The shipyard denied the charge. Congress got involved. And amid ongoing investigations, whistleblowers surfaced, alleging that the hull problems were only the tip of the iceberg. Deepwater’s ambitious electronics, courtesy of Lockheed Martin, were also flawed – this according to former Lockheed engineer Michael DeKort. He and others said that both the Coast Guard and the industry team shared the blame for sloppy management, poor workmanship and a corporate culture that dodged accountability.
Sure enough, it soon came to light that Deepwater’s next major class of vessels, the 400-foot National Security Cutters, had structural problems that would require expensive, post-commissioning re-work to fix. Shearington’s gripes only corroborate – and add to – information leaked to The New York Times last year. A 2004 memo from Assistant Commandant Erroll Brown detailed structural deficiencies that would shorten the vessel’s planned 30-year “fatigue life” and could even jeopardize crew safety.
Read the whole story in the latest Defense Technology International.
Related:
Cutters got leaky networks
Coast Guard slams contractors
What’s next for Deepwater?
Coast Guard sinking ever faster
Deepwater: the good and the bad
Lockheed’s bad boats
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[...] The Navy and Coast Guard have struggled with poor workmanship at their yards, but most of the problems were confined to Gulf Coast yards that were damaged by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. [...]