Fitzgerald in Drydock

Photos have just been released showing the patching:

YOKOSUKA, Japan (July 11, 2017) – The Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Fitzgerald (DDG 62) sits in Dry Dock 4 at Fleet Activities (FLEACT) Yokosuka to continue repairs and assess damage sustained from its June 17 collision with a merchant vessel. FLEACT Yokosuka provides, maintains, and operates base facilities and services in support of U.S. 7th Fleet's forward-deployed naval forces, 71 tenant commands and 26,000 military and civilian personnel. (U.S. Navy photo by Daniel A. Taylor/Released by FLEACT Yokosuka Public Affairs Office)

YOKOSUKA, Japan (July 11, 2017) – The Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Fitzgerald (DDG 62) sits in Dry Dock 4 at Fleet Activities (FLEACT) Yokosuka to continue repairs and assess damage sustained from its June 17 collision with a merchant vessel. FLEACT Yokosuka provides, maintains, and operates base facilities and services in support of U.S. 7th Fleet’s forward-deployed naval forces, 71 tenant commands and 26,000 military and civilian personnel. (U.S. Navy photo by Daniel A. Taylor/Released by FLEACT Yokosuka Public Affairs Office)

YOKOSUKA, Japan (July 11, 2017) – The Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Fitzgerald (DDG 62) sits in Dry Dock 4 at Fleet Activities (FLEACT) Yokosuka to continue repairs and assess damage sustained from its June 17 collision with a merchant vessel. FLEACT Yokosuka provides, maintains, and operates base facilities and services in support of U.S. 7th Fleet's forward-deployed naval forces, 71 tenant commands and 26,000 military and civilian personnel. (U.S. Navy photo by Daniel A. Taylor/Released by FLEACT Yokosuka Public Affairs Office)

YOKOSUKA, Japan (July 11, 2017) – The Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Fitzgerald (DDG 62) sits in Dry Dock 4 at Fleet Activities (FLEACT) Yokosuka to continue repairs and assess damage sustained from its June 17 collision with a merchant vessel. FLEACT Yokosuka provides, maintains, and operates base facilities and services in support of U.S. 7th Fleet’s forward-deployed naval forces, 71 tenant commands and 26,000 military and civilian personnel. (U.S. Navy photo by Daniel A. Taylor/NReleased by FLEACT Yokosuka Public Affairs Office)

Note the work that would have gone into scribing and cutting the I-beams. Presumably, the beams or a proxy were scribed underwater, then the beams were cut above water and finally welded in place below.

The article mentions that the hull is warped. Perhaps, we may be writing it off rather than repairing.

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23 Responses to Fitzgerald in Drydock

  1. MLHMLH says:

    Just amazing to have been done at sea!

  2. ctlaw says:

    It looks like they started by welding eyelets to the hull above the waterline to support the pieces. Note how all the sheets and beams also have eyelets.

    My guess is they also welded eyelets below the hole. With the pieces hanging from the upper eyelets, you could then tighten cables that went between the upper and lower eyelets to draw the pieces in toward the hull.

    • 10 Cents10 Cents says:

      Do you think the eyelets were part of a repair kit kept on board or fabricated in a machine shop?

  3. ctlaw says:

    My guess is the eyelets were part of a repair kit at the shipyard. My understanding is that the repair was done at the shipyard before drydocking.

  4. BrentB67BrentB67 says:

    Amazing to see how much damage was done below the waterline during the collision.

    Even more amazing that just seven (7) of our brave sailors were called home. That ship could easily be in Davey Jones locker right now but for the hard work of her crew.

    I’ve not seen anything about the investigation. Any updates?

  5. Xennady says:

    Gosh. Well, I’m going to be mean.

    The crew managed to get their ship rammed by a container ship. That’s not bravery. That’s incompetence. Those seven sailors died because of it.

    Alas. Now I was told by someone in the nav that the rate with the specific task of navigating the ship had been abolished, merged with the rate that does all the paperwork.

    I don’t know if that’s actually true, and I’ve been too infuriated to check. But it sure seems to be. In the last few years we’ve had this incident, the Port Royal grounding, the San Francisco kissing a seamount, and the actual loss via grounding of a salvage ship.

    Something ain’t right. Worse, thanks to the safety triangle, there have likely been swarms of almost-catastrophes averted in the last minute or the last second, just because someone happened to look up.

    At this rate, it’s simply a matter of time before something really spectacular happens, like an explosion that blows a multi-billion dollar ship apart, or perhaps a reactor incident that renders one too radioactive for use.

    Old saying- a fish rots from the head down. And the US Navy seems damned rotten to me. The people at the top- social justice warriors I don’t doubt, more worried diversity than their sinking ships- need to go.

    All of them.

  6. Xennady says:

    Indeed I did miss it.

    My God. Running a ship aground while it’s at anchor- this sort of thing reminds me of the French naval museum at Toulon, which had a diorama of one of their ships after it had blown up, plus a bunch of pictures of the dockyard after the Germans got through with it.

    Not good.

  7. DevereauxDevereaux says:

    One normally junks a car that has bent the frame as no longer useful. ?Why is not a boat like that. If they warped the keel, ?how is she ever going to sail straight.

    • ctlaw says:

      That’s what rudders are for.

    • DevereauxDevereaux says:

      No, rudders are for turning. If you have to keep using the rudder just to make it run straight, it will lose speed, use more power or be slower – generally a bad result.

  8. Xennady says:

    Don’t worry. The navy now has a giant machine to straighten ship’s frames when they get warped, just like at a body shop for cars.

    That one weird trick has drastically reduced the navy’s insurance premiums, because now they don’t have to total so many of their vessels after they get rammed by container ships, get blown onto rocks while at anchor, or simply forget that reduction gears need oil, which happened to at least one LCS.

    In fact, the navy hopes that the cost savings from the new lower premiums are such that they will be able to afford to train crews on actual ships instead of at computer terminals.

    By the way, that last has been a factor in the long and embarrassing string of failures on these brand-new Littoral Combat Ships- I swear I’m not masking that up- which shows how far off the rails the navy has managed to get.

    Or perhaps I should say onto land, ha ha.

  9. BrentB67BrentB67 says:

    Xennady, that isn’t mean, that is keeping it real, but please consider this.

    The ship is piloted by an Officer of the Deck (OOD) and a handful (3-5 sailors). I absolutely agree that there is no excuse for them sailing that Destroyer in the path of the container ship.

    However, that doesn’t detract from the bravery and hard work of the sailors, Chiefs, and Officers not on the bridge that saved the ship.

    • Xennady says:

      Remember Todd Beamer?

      He was the let’s roll guy from flight 93- and a genuine hero. But the thing is he only got to be a hero because so many other people dropped the ball.

      I’d rather he never got that chance, and had lived out his life in boring obscurity. And was still living it, actually.

      Getting back to the topic of the navy’s latest charlie foxtrot, I’d rather there were no heroes, because that ship had managed to achieve the completely banal amount of competence required to NOT get rammed by a slow moving container ship.

      The crew could not meet that rather low bar, alas. To be blunt, that’s what jumps out at me about this incident, not that people died, or were heroic.

      As I said, it seems this sort of thing happens quite often of late, giving plenty of sailors the chance to be heroes, just like Todd Beamer. I note (at least) one guy on that ship died attempting to save others, another genuine hero. I intend no sort of diminishment to his heroism, or that of any other.

      But again, balls were dropped. I’m tired of it. It’s all well and good to recognize heroism, but also let’s recognize incompetence, idiocy, and failure. In the last few years it seems like the entire country- including the navy- has been relocated to the ballpit at Chuck-E-Cheese, so busy has our political class including its seagoing adjuncts been at dropping balls.

      I want this to cease. It seems to me that there has been cause enough for the leadership of Uncle Sugar’s canoe club- all of it, every high-ranking zero- to get dumped over the side, yet somehow nothing remotely like that ever happens, despite endless expensive failure and fumbling disasters like this one.

      Forgive my rambling, and I’m not trying to be offensive to you or anyone else.

      But Holy Sweet Jebus. I just can’t manage to be thrilled just because the crew managed to stop their ship from sinking after this, not when I can recall what happened to the Franklin, or the second cruiser Houston.

  10. BrentB67BrentB67 says:

    I doubt seriously the keel is bent. Destroyers have fixed keels and this happened at slow speed.

    If the keel was bent it is doubtful the ship would’ve survived. Too many plates would buckle when the keel bends.

  11. ctlaw says:

    This piece appears to reflect the erroneous timeline of the Fitzgerald being hit after Crystal made a U-turn.
    https://www.sandiegoreader.com/news/2017/jul/12/cover-how-navy-culture-fitzgerald-disaster/?page=3&

  12. Xennady says:

    From MLH’s link- “An initial investigation has found that the USS Fitzgerald’s crew did not respond adequately to signals, did not understand that the other ship was drawing near, and may have failed even to summon the commanding officer.”

    My God. Prison isn’t enough. These imbeciles need to be paraded around, pour le encourage les autres.

    And their superiors need to be relieved of command. When a crew of a navy ship doesn’t understand that another ship is drawing near something has gone seriously awry with the entire chain of command, all the way up to the zeroes inhabiting the cancer on the Potomac.

    Why isn’t that obvious, to everyone, including the zeroes?

    This incident says nothing good about the navy, duh.