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After Dangerous Collisions, Navy Will Pause for Safety Check After Dangerous Collisions, Navy Will Pause for Safety Check
(about 3 hours later)
WASHINGTON — United States Navy ships worldwide will suspend operations for a day or two this week to examine basic seamanship and teamwork after the second collision of a Navy destroyer and a commercial ship in two months, the top naval officer said Monday. WASHINGTON — United States Navy ships worldwide will suspend operations for a day or two this week to examine basic seamanship and teamwork after the second collision of a Navy destroyer with a large commercial ship in two months, the Navy’s top officer said on Monday.
The officer, Adm. John Richardson, the chief of naval operations, said he had ordered two major actions after the collision between the destroyer John S. McCain and an oil tanker early Monday off the coast of Singapore that left 10 sailors missing and five injured. The officer, Adm. John Richardson, the chief of naval operations, said he had ordered two major actions after the collision between the destroyer John S. McCain and an oil tanker early Monday off the coast of Singapore that left 10 sailors missing and five others injured.
First, Admiral Richardson said he had ordered an “operational pause” for Navy fleet commanders to review within the week teamwork, safety, seamanship and other “fundamentals.” During that time, commanders will suspend ship operations for a day or two. Second, the admiral said he had ordered a broader, monthslong review to examine the specific situation in the western Pacific, where the Navy has suffered four major ship accidents since February. First, Admiral Richardson said, he ordered an “operational pause” for Navy fleet commanders to review teamwork, safety, seamanship and other “fundamentals” aboard all 277 Navy vessels. Commanders will space out the review to avoid hampering operations, like the war games in South Korea that started on Monday.
“That gives great cause for concern that there’s something out there that we’re not getting at,” Admiral Richardson told reporters at the Pentagon. Second, the admiral said, he ordered a broader, monthslong review to examine the specific problems with the Navy’s Seventh Fleet, based in Japan, where the Navy has suffered four major ship accidents since February.
“That gives great cause for concern that there’s something out there that we’re not getting at,” Admiral Richardson told reporters at the Pentagon during a brief news conference.
Off the Singapore coast, search teams scrambled on Monday to determine the fate of the missing sailors from the John S. McCain, a guided-missile destroyer that had been passing east of the Strait of Malacca en route to a port visit in Singapore.Off the Singapore coast, search teams scrambled on Monday to determine the fate of the missing sailors from the John S. McCain, a guided-missile destroyer that had been passing east of the Strait of Malacca en route to a port visit in Singapore.
At 5:24 a.m. local time, before dawn broke, the destroyer collided with the Alnic MC, a 600-foot vessel that transports oil and chemicals, the Navy said. The destroyer was damaged near the rear on its port, or left-hand, side. At 5:24 a.m. local time, before dawn broke, the destroyer collided with the Alnic MC, a 600-foot vessel that transports oil and chemicals, the Navy said. The destroyer was damaged near the rear on its port, or left-hand, side. Ten sailors on the ship remained unaccounted for. Five others were injured, none with life-threatening conditions, a Navy official said.
Ten sailors on the ship remained unaccounted for. Five others were injured, none with life-threatening conditions, a Navy official said. Ships with the Singaporean and Malaysian navies and helicopters from the assault ship America were rushing to search for survivors. The collision occurred in one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes, a narrow waterway of strategic significance connecting the Indian Ocean with the South China Sea, where Beijing has been challenging American naval dominance. It immediately raised questions about the training and safety record of Navy ships, happening just two months after another Navy destroyer, the Fitzgerald, collided with a freighter off Japan, killing seven American sailors.
Families of the ship’s crew members waited through the night in the United States, hoping for news of their loved ones. The collision caused significant damage to the Fitzgerald above and below the waterline, flooding berths, a machinery area and the radio room.
“No word yet but some sailors have called on cell to families,” wrote Marla Meriano, the mother of Meghan Meriano, a 24-year-old electrical officer, in a Facebook post. “Thank you for all the prayers and remarks,” she wrote two hours later. “God has his plan and we serve him.” On Friday, after the release of a preliminary report on the collision, the Navy announced that the Fitzgerald’s top two officers had been relieved of their duties and that several sailors had been punished.
The collision occurred in one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes, a narrow waterway of strategic significance connecting the Indian Ocean with the South China Sea, where Beijing has been challenging American naval dominance. It immediately raised questions about the training and safety record of Navy ships, coming just two months after another Navy destroyer, the Fitzgerald, collided with a freighter off Japan, killing seven American sailors. Admiral Richardson said the broader review of the Seventh Fleet would examine its pace of operations; readiness issues, including maintenance, equipment and personnel; and whether the fleet was properly training its officers and ship crews.
“Clearly this is an annus horribilis for the U.S. Navy,” said Euan Graham, the director of the International Security Program at the Lowy Institute in Sydney, Australia. Adm. Phil Davidson, the head of the Fleet Forces Command in Norfolk, Va., will oversee the broader review, drawing on experts inside and outside the Navy, including commercial shipping companies, Admiral Richardson added.
Kirk Patterson, a former dean of the Japan campus of Temple University who has crossed the Pacific in a sailboat and circumnavigated Japan, said the collision was “really hard to understand with all the technology that’s out there in the world on a boat, especially a naval destroyer that’s supposed to be the best in the world.” Traversing the Malacca Strait is like going on a superhighway at sea — not too difficult on a calm, clear day but often harrowing in bad weather. Ships often do not stay in designated traffic separation zones. Many merchant ships light up their decks at night to ward off local pirates, but the bright lights can also dangerously obscure the vision of officers on approaching ships.
For a destroyer to be hit by an oil tanker would be like the collision of an “F1 sports car and a garbage truck,” he said. “Which one is going to be able to avoid the collision? An F1 racing car equipped with state-of-the-art missiles.” To deal with these challenges, extra sailors are assigned as lookouts and others are added below decks to help in case of steering or engine problems. A ship’s commanding officer, navigator or executive officer is often on the bridge during the traversal. Navigation teams routinely hold briefings before entering narrow waters to go over safety issues. Radar operators and combat information officers also track ships.
Kirk Patterson, a former dean of the Japan campus of Temple University who has crossed the Pacific in a sailboat and circumnavigated Japan, said an oil tanker hitting a destroyer would be like the collision of an “F1 sports car and a garbage truck.”
“Which one is going to be able to avoid the collision?” he said. “An F1 racing car equipped with state-of-the-art missiles.”
A destroyer going through a difficult passage like the Strait of Malacca would typically have half a dozen sailors, including two officers, on the bridge watching for the lights of other ships, said retired Navy Capt. Bernard D. Cole, an adjunct professor at Georgetown University and professor emeritus at the National War College.A destroyer going through a difficult passage like the Strait of Malacca would typically have half a dozen sailors, including two officers, on the bridge watching for the lights of other ships, said retired Navy Capt. Bernard D. Cole, an adjunct professor at Georgetown University and professor emeritus at the National War College.
In such clogged traffic, it would also be common for the commanding officer or the executive officer, the two most senior officers on board, to be on the bridge, he said. There would also be a navigator and other enlisted men in the combat information center scanning radar. When an oil tanker is detected, Captain Cole said, the officer on deck or the commanding officer will propose some kind of evasive action to avoid a collision. But “in some places like the approaches to the Malacca Strait, geographically you don’t have a lot of flexibility.”
Once the oil tanker was detected, Captain Cole said, the officer on deck or the commanding officer would propose some kind of evasive action to avoid the collision. But “in some places like the approaches to the Malacca Strait, geographically you don’t have a lot of flexibility.” Bryan McGrath, a security consultant who commanded a Navy destroyer from 2004 to 2006, said it was impossible for now to say whether there was any common cause in the two collisions. However, he said, Navy officials should consider whether an operational increase in the face of provocative behavior from China and North Korea might be undercutting readiness.
A picture of the John S. McCain showed a gaping hole in its side right at the waterline, but the ship did not appear to be listing. The two collisions of United States Navy vessels with large commercial vessels have caught the international shipping community by surprise. Deadly collisions among large commercial ships have become extremely rare, even though large freighters and tankers vastly outnumber naval vessels on the high seas.
In a statement, the Navy said the destroyer had reached Changi Naval Base in Singapore. “Significant damage to the hull resulted in flooding to nearby compartments, including crew berthing, machinery and communications rooms,” the statement said. “Damage control efforts by the crew halted further flooding.” The number of large commercial vessels in operation has been gradually climbing for many years, and that increase has not been accompanied by a spate of collisions. One of the very few collisions in the past decade took place near Hong Kong waters in 2014, when a Chinese cargo ship laden with cement was hit by a large container ship and sank quickly with most of its crew aboard. More frequent episodes have involved large vessels running over small coastal craft, or river collisions by barges — not crashes at sea between two big ships.
Navy ships “frequently transit” the strait without incident, said Cmdr. Clay Doss, a spokesman for the Seventh Fleet, with which the John S. McCain is deployed. “It’s not unusual at all,” he said. Navy ships are unusually vulnerable if they become involved in collisions, and those vulnerabilities may explain why so many sailors have perished or disappeared in the two crashes this summer.
Yet Bonji Ohara, a research fellow at the Sasakawa Peace Foundation in Tokyo, said that one recurring problem was that while naval ships tended to have live crews on watch, most commercial ships work on autopilot mode to reduce costs, which can lead to problems in busy sea lanes. The crews of naval vessels have their sleeping berths near the water line, so the berths may flood quickly after a collision. By contrast, the crews of commercial vessels tend to sleep in cabins near the back, above the cargo and engines, and far above the water.
While Mr. Graham said it “beggared belief” that any merchant vessel approaching the Strait of Malacca would be operating on autopilot, he acknowledged that “years of cost-cutting within the industry can mean that ships have skeleton crews that will be at their lowest level of watchfulness in the hours just before dawn.” “The architecture of the ships is completely different,” said Basil M. Karatzas, a longtime New York ship broker. Military designers have tried to keep the profiles of naval vessels as low as possible, to make them smaller targets for enemy guns, aircraft and missiles, and have avoided putting sleeping quarters high above the water.
For the John S. McCain to collide with the Alnic MC, a handful of separate functions in the safety chain, such as binocular sightings by officers in the observation deck and radar operations in the bridge and below, must have failed, according to a senior Navy officer. Another major difference: Almost all tankers have double hulls, as do about a third of dry-bulk freighters, which carry cargos like corn and iron ore. These vessels have about a yard of space between the inner and outer hulls to act as a buffer during minor collisions, and this has made oil spills a rarity in recent years on the few occasions when tankers have brushed against other vessels. Military vessels seldom have such wide hollow spaces because they are designed to be sleek and fast.
While on operations, warships do not emit standard satellite tracking signals that other larger vessels use to avoid collision. “They don’t want other countries to know where they are going,” Mr. Graham said. “There is a degree of stealth. So that puts the balance of responsibility on the warship to maintain watchfulness in case it’s not spotted by other vessels.” Capt. Harry Bolton, the director of marine programs at California State University Maritime Academy in Vallejo, Calif., said modern large commercial vessels have multiple electronic systems that are directly integrated with the autopilot to prevent collisions. Officers on commercial ships also undergo frequent training exercises with an emphasis on collision avoidance.
Commercial tankers can be reluctant to shift their course, because maneuvering requires turning off the autopilot and costs time and money, the Navy officer added. Officer training and electronic systems have helped yield a sharp improvement in shipping safety around the globe. According to a shipping safety report this year by Allianz, the German insurance giant, there were 17 commercial vessels sunk in collisions as recently as 2007; last year, there was only one, a smaller vessel.
The Alnic MC, which has a gross tonnage roughly three times that of the John S. McCain, is registered under a Liberian flag and was built in 2008, according to a marine registry. The tanker, which is now anchored in Singapore for damage assessment, was struck on the front part of its hull, but none of its crew were injured, according to a statement from the Maritime and Port Authority of Singapore. No oil leaks have been reported in the area, according to the Singaporean authority. The American Navy’s series of collisions this year, at a time of steadily improving overall shipping safety, suggests that the Navy may need to do more training of the officers on its bridges, Captain Bolton said.
The Strait of Malacca is a strategic choke point between the Indian and Pacific Oceans. Much of Asia’s oil imports transit through the channel and into the South China Sea. “That’s a lack of what we call bridge-team management,” he said. “It’s fixable: They bring the same kind of training that we get.”
President Trump, asked about the collision by reporters at the White House on Sunday night, said, “That’s too bad.” He later offered his “thoughts & prayers” to the sailors aboard the ship.
The collision on Monday came two months after one of the Navy’s deadliest accidents in years, when the Fitzgerald collided with a freighter off Japan. Seven people on the Fitzgerald were killed, and the Navy relieved the destroyer’s two top officers of their duties on Friday after an investigation into the collision. Both of the destroyer’s top commanding officers were asleep when the collision occurred.
In May, the Lake Champlain, a Navy guided-missile cruiser, collided with a South Korean fishing vessel, but no injuries resulted from that crash. In February, another such cruiser, the Antietam, ran aground in Tokyo Bay, gushing more than 1,000 gallons of hydraulic fluid near the American naval base at Yokosuka.
The John S. McCain, the Antietam and the Fitzgerald are all in the Seventh Fleet and are based in Yokosuka. The ship involved in the collision on Monday is named after John S. McCain Sr., a Navy admiral during World War II, and his son, John S. McCain Jr., a Navy admiral in the Vietnam era. They are the grandfather and father of Senator John McCain of Arizona, who offered his prayers for the crew.