Twenty five years ago, the US Navy contracted to build two fleet oilers, the USNS Bejanmin Isherwood and the USNS Henry Eckford. The Navy spent at least $300 million dollars on their construction. Due to shipyard defaults and various legal wranglings, the ships were never completed and never went into service. Now both ships are on their way to the scrap yards, having never spent a single day in operation.
These are not high-tech warships. They are simple oil tankers, specifically Henry J. Kaiser Class Fleet Replenishment Oilers, of which 16 had already been built. Militarily contracting is notoriously wasteful, but this may set a new low.
Two never-finished Navy ships head to scrap heap
They are the two ships no one wanted, almost constantly embroiled in one dispute or another for the past 25 years. The two Navy behemoths have never gone on a mission, were never even completed, yet they cost taxpayers at least $300 million.
Now the vessels, the Benjamin Isherwood and the Henry Eckford, are destined to leave Virginia waters for good and be scrapped at a Texas salvage yard, with no money coming back to the U.S. Treasury.
Once the two Navy oilers have departed, “it will close one of the saddest chapters in American shipbuilding and for that matter, federal fiduciary folly,” wrote Joseph Keefe, a global maritime commentator, this week on the website MaritimeProfessional.com.
Sad.
No wonder the country is broke.
Guess where the scrape is headed?
Probably to China.
The way our “government” wastes money is phenominal.
This is pretty normal. The USS United States back in the 60’s, a load of ships under construction at the end of WWII. The Navy tends to keep things forever just in case they might need them. They had an unmodified Liberty ship in their mothball fleet for 60 years before they sold it. And they tend to cancel things when they know they don’t. The navy started out this way when the first 6 ships were authorized. Only 3 were completed and that was after construction was halted for over a year. The private sector isn’t any better. I don’t know about ships, but I know that many big construction projects get started and never get finished. One skyscraper in NYC was a 4 story stump from 1929 to after 2000. This is just the norms of the way we all live. How many of us have unfinished projects sitting around. A classic car to fix up, a novel to write, a remodel to finish.
I think this aritcle isn’t entirely fair. It isn’t true that these ships are “simple oil tankers.” A Navy replenishment oiler has 20-knot speed capability. No commercial tanker I have ever heard of has that. They are twin screw, geared diesel powered, also unlike every commercial oil tanker built in recent times. Accordingly, they are uneconomical to operate in ordinary tanker (crude or product) trades. In addition, these ships have accommodations for a substantial crew so they can refuel other ships while underway. They also have limited provision supplies (way beyond their own crew’s needs) and the specialized underway replenishment equipment to transfer these to another ship in the open ocean, while both ships are moving, without getting it wet. Accordingly, they were expensive to construct and there is no particular surpise in that.
Construction began on these ships in 1984 (see the Wikipedia article at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_J._Kaiser_class_oiler), and continued until 1996 when the last one was delivered. The last 3 hulls were double hull, recognizing that OPA-90 has taken effect during the production run, although the Wiki article doesn’t make it clear if the standoff distance between the two hulls was fully satisfactory with regard to today’s rules.
The two cancelled hulls were built by Sun Shipbuilding in Chester, PA. When that shipyard went bankrupt, along with many US yards in the steady decline of our shipbuilding industry that continues today, the contracts were taken over by another shipyard which also went bankrupt. This is not a sequence of events that suggests there was a huge profit in building these vessels, but rather that the Navy got its money’s worth out of them.
Because of the time period in which they were built, the two laid up hulls are single hull. It would be illegal, since OPA-90 went into effect, to use them as commercial tankers.
Finally, I would like to correct the overly hasty comment of Phil from Ohio. The surplus hulls will be towed to Brownsville, Texas, where the US shipbreaking industry is still very much alive. There, the steel will be recycled and the dangerous materials will be properly disposed of according to EPA rules. (Durst I say this is a more profitable industry today than building ships?) They will not be sent to China, Bangladesh, or India where ships are often broken up in unsafe conditions and the hazardous materials just dumped.
I agree that the ships are not “ordinary tankers” in the commercial sense. They are however quite ordinary Navy oilers. They are numbers five and six in a series of 18. They do not have complicated weapons systems or electronics nor mission requirements that push the edge of technology. They are about as ordinary as naval vessels get.
And yes, Penn Ship, the shipyard which took over in the old Sun yard did go bankrupt in 1989 after the Navy contracted for the ships in 1986. The Navy then contracted with Tampa Shipbuilding to finish the ships but cancelled that contract in 1993 after more technical problems, cost overruns and the inevitable lawsuits. Then when the ships were 84% and 93% finished the Navy decided that they didn’t need them anyway.
The management, or indeed mismanagement, of this sad project reflects very badly on the Navy’s inability to supervise ship construction. The results speak for themselves.
I was a operating engineer on the Kaiser, Humpherys and Lenthall at Avondale Shipyard. When the Lenthall was finished I went to work for Military Sealift Command, Atlantic.
I sailed on the Kaiser, Humphery, Lenthall, Grumman, Kanawha, and Big Horn. These are good ships to work on. The living conditions are very good. Everyone has their own stateroom and most have private baths.
The Engineering plant is a pleasure to operate. I won’t go into any more detail except to say these plant are capable of operating unmanned.
We never missed a commitment.
If the Military was not forced by politician trying to get reelected to spread the money around we would not be having the problem with bad contracts.