Report: Navy shares blame for San Antonio's woes

NORFOLK

Since the day the Navy commissioned it, the Norfolk-based amphibious ship San Antonio has been plagued with costly defects. Five years later, it sits along the Elizabeth River unfit to deploy.

Now a report says that the Navy, as well as contractors who designed and built the vessel, bears blame for the problems.

Released publicly Thursday, the report details findings from a six-month Navy investigation. While it looked only at the San Antonio, the inquiry could help answer questions about defects aboard the four other ships in its class that are now in service, including the New York.

The first of the five to take to the sea, the San Antonio has suffered the worst of the problems. In its short life, the $1.8 billion, 25,000-ton vessel has been called in for several major repairs worth at least tens of millions of dollars.

The most pressing of San Antonio's defects are with its four diesel engines, and that's where the Navy investigation focused. Fleet Forces commander Adm. John Harvey ordered the examination after crews discovered small metal bits embedded in the engines' bearings. Those bits had contaminated the engine oil, and that caused the bearings - and ultimately the engines - to fail.

But what allowed the bits and other contaminants to get in?

The investigation traced the problems to poor welding and shoddy work during the ship's initial construction, as well as to engine design defects. The San Antonio, which carries a 360-person crew, was built at Northrop Grumman's shipyard in Avondale, La. Its engine, a Colt-Pielstick, was made by Fairbanks Morse, although the Navy has not identified any defects in components manufactured by Fairbanks Morse, the company said.

But the Navy shares in the blame for failing to identify the flaws, the report says: If the government had properly overseen and inspected the vessel during construction, the problems could have been caught early.

Investigators also fault the San Antonio's crew for failing to uncover the defects before they caused major damage.

"Ship's force was slow to recognize lube oil contamination (because of) a variety of long-term issues," the report says. Specifically, it cites sailors who weren't properly trained and who didn't carry out vital systems checks.

Navy officials declined to discuss whether crew members were disciplined or consequences they could face.

"The chain of command has taken appropriate administrative action aboard San Antonio to hold accountable those responsible for the training and maintenance deficiencies aboard the ship," Naval Surface Force Atlantic said in a statement.

The report includes several pages detailing the training failures. The Navy requires 42 sailors aboard the San Antonio to complete a course on operating its engines; only three have. Fifty should have taken a class on the ship's lube oil system; only one has.

The report also says that unqualified sailors were teaching some training classes, that the lesson plans for others contain incorrect information, that months of training logs are missing, and that many sailors took courses on a system that doesn't exist on the San Antonio.

"I think it's clear that there were issues on several fronts," said Rear Adm. Dave Thomas, the commanding officer of Naval Surface Force Atlantic. He declined to say whether the San Antonio will be ready to deploy as scheduled later this year, although the report states it may not be.

Thomas said all the ships in the San Antonio class will receive improved engine oil filters, strainers and flushing systems. The Navy will implement new flushing procedures across the class and work to comply with the report's recommendation for better government oversight during ship construction, he said.

Eric Wertheim, author and editor of the Naval Institute Guide to Combat Fleets of the World, said the Navy appears to be taking the problems seriously. "The Navy and the Defense Department should look at this as an example of how every step of the process can go wrong," he said. "Most of the problem seems to be with the shipbuilder, but the Navy's the one that really needs to figure how to stop this from happening again."

In a written statement, Northrop Grumman said the Navy's findings support those that emerged from an investigation earlier this year by a technical team that included contractors. Recommendations from that investigation are being implemented, the statement said.

The San Antonio was last deployed in March 2009. It has spent much of the past 16 months under repair at the Earl Industries shipyard in Portsmouth. The Navy wouldn't disclose how much it has spent fixing the ship since its commissioning, saying the government is still negotiating those costs with Northrop Grumman and other contractors.

The San Antonio underwent at least $39 million in repairs in 2007. It will take at least $7.5 million to fix its current problems, Thomas said.

The Navy announced in January that the newest ship in the San Antonio class, the New York, needed major engine repairs.

Corinne Reilly, (757) 446-2949, corinne.reilly@pilotonline.com

Document: the complete report, PDF, 68 pages, 7 MB