Prepping for USS Stennis' refueling
For aviation boatswain’s mates on USS John C. Stennis, daily life no longer involves the rush of a sending an F/A-18E fighter roaring into the sky.
Instead, they hunker down in among the 3-inch diameter pipes on the red-painted floors of the carrier’s internal cofferdams -- the spaces where firefighting chemicals can pool.
The carrier’s internal communications technicians find themselves tracing cables, and pulling those that over the years have been bundled and tucked away behind bulkheads because the equipment they once connected was replaced long ago. Machinists mates are moving off the chain hoists and other gear they once used to lift pumps, values or motors for maintenance work.
The Stennis has been tied up at Naval Station Norfolk’s pier 11 for nearly 10 months, preparing for the multi-year, multi-billion-dollar refueling and complex overhaul that will keep her crew and thousands of Newport News Shipbuilding workers and contractors busy for the next four years.
The carrier won’t pull into Newport News until January but work on the refueling began a year and half ago, and five months before the Stennis' most recent deployment, flying combat missions in Afghanistan. From there, the carrier, based on the West Coast since 1998, came to Norfolk in the spring of 2019, where Stennis sailors busied themselves with the mission of helping student aviators win their carrier qualifications.
Then “In December, we shut down and became a maintenance carrier,” Capt. Randy Peck said.
It means a huge change in the work sailors do and in the look of the ship, Peck added.
For Lt. j.g. Maribel Benitez, the challenges of uprooting from Washington State have been offset by the rare experience of deployment.
“Hampton Roads has embraced our crew and we are proud to be part of this community.” she added.
For sailors, a tour on the Peninsula for what will be a four-year refueling and overhaul comes with advantages, said Master Chief Marc Puco. There are opportunities for education and training that can fast-track a career. Their housing options look pretty good after a long deployment abroad. And for many, a tradition of pitching in with community service projects is both rewarding and a way of putting down roots quickly.
Ultimately, the refueling -- the overhaul 25 years into the life of nuclear-powered carrier -- will pretty much gut the ship and rebuild, replace or refurbish all the systems inside, as well as adding all the new technology and equipment developed for carriers since Newport News Shipbuilding delivered the Stennis in 1995.
There will be plenty to keep sailors, as well as shipyard workers, busy. In fact, there already is.
Down the ladder in one of the carrier’s steep companionways, squeezing past a snaking, one-foot-diameter black tube of ventilation ducting and then past a newly-rustproofed cofferdam, sparks fly as a sailor presses a grinder to a compartment wall on one of the carrier’s galleys.
Several yards forward, Stennis sailors have already cleared everything out of the sick bay -- including layers of tile, half an inch thick -- so that they could open up one of a series of “SMO-cuts” (ship maintenance openings) the shipyard will need so its new 315-ton gantry crane can reach deep into the ship’s hull.
This particular SMO-cut is an oval, 7 feet in diameter. The ones on the decks immediately above and below are still being cut. They’ll allow the yard’s new crane to show how it can position heavy pieces of equipment more precisely, said Stennis chief engineer, Capt. Robert Williams.
The new clinic now sits on the carrier’s flight deck, in a two-story temporary building next to the “island” superstructure that houses the bridge, the flight operations center and radar equipment/
On the other side of the flight deck, the catapult that shoots jets off into the air is disassembled. The 100-yard long trough that houses the catapult is empty now -- Stennis’s sailors have removed the two-foot-diameter steel cylinders that, driven by blasts of steam, accelerate planes to the speeds that let them take to the air.
But Stennis sailors won’t be jumping down into the catapult trough to tackle the rust that coats many of its large nuts and bolts, Williams said. The trough and its guidelines have to be precisely aligned. Shipyard machinists use lasers when they’re working on the catapult and its elements, and so work on its innards is reserved for the yard.
Figuring out who on the Stennis crew can do what, now that they’ve shifted focus from running a ship and keeping an air wing aloft to preparing for the mid-life overhaul means taking account of sailors different and highly-specialized skill.
Peck and his department heads, meanwhile, want to make sure sailors are keeping the skills they’ve developed running the ship as sharp as possible -- training, temporary attachment to other ships when they’re at sea, and classes are all part of the program for the Stennis for the next four years.
Williams doesn’t want hull maintenance technicians, for instance, to be worried about taking ill-fitting doors off their hinges or scraping tile off decks when other sailors can do that. Instead, Williams wants his hull technicians to be using their welding and metalworking skills to, for instance, fix watertight doors that need repairs.
But some of the biggest tasks -- refueling the ship’s nuclear reactor, as well as work on the Stennis’s powerful engines and the complex mechanical and electrical systems that bring a ship to life -- are the shipyard’s work.
Many of these systems lie deep in the hull -- which is why the SMO-cut in the old sickbay won’t be the only one made in the weeks to come.
There will be plenty of other holes cut in the Stennis, Williams said, pointing out two new ones in a steel wall meant to keep the hanger deck watertight. Thick, orange-insulation covered cables for temporary power and lighting have been woven through. Stringing those and the miles more of others that will be needed once the Stennis is in drydock is another job for the sailors.
A construction trailer serves as temporary office space: pallet-loads of flattened cardboard cartons and a line of green trash dumpsters, filled to the brim, are lined up in front.
“Normally, you’d either see this hanger deck filled with aircraft or if there’s no air wing onboard, completely empty,” Williams said, walking past two shipping containers that serve as equipment stores and gathering spots for the Newport News Shipbuilding welders, fitters and cleaners already at work on the Stennis.
They got started back in the summer of 2018, when the shipyard’s in-house carrier experts began flying out to Bremerton, Wash,, then the Stennis’s home port, to begin to scope out the scope of the refueling project.
That summer, Newport News Shipbuilding won a $187.5 million contract to begin planning the refueling. In 2019, it won a $290.5 million for advance work on the Stennis.
Bringing the plan into action will cost billions. The contract that covers the bulk of the yard’s refueling and overhaul now underway on USS George Washington totaled $2.8 billion. That work is slated to be completed in 2022.
The contract for executing the plans for the Stennis, when it pulls into the yard in January, is still underway. It involves a lot of discussion about what work is to be done, based in large part on what the shipyard’s staff found on their “ship check” visits in 2018 and the Navy’s inhouse evaluations and plans for boosting the carrier’s war-fighting muscle, said Gary Graham, the shipyard’s director for its refueling and complex overhaul program.
The shipyard is the only place that can do this work -- which some say is one of the most complicated engineering challenges in the world.
It involves almost a complete reconstruction of the ship the shipyard built between 1991 and 1995, with pretty everything inside the hull being replaced or refurbished, in addition to any new equipment or systems the Navy wants to add.
Some of that work could even involve reconfiguring the hull itself, Graham said.
Meanwhile, as the shipyard and Navy hammer out final details on the contract, Williams is putting his finishing touches on a detailed plan for what’s to be done when and by who.
It means answering tens of thousands of questions about what work depends on other tasks' being complete, as well as what work risks messing up a job someone else has already completed and what options are there if a task takes longer to complete than first planned.
Stennis will be the seventh Nimitz-class carrier to undergo a mid-life refueling and overhaul at the yard.
It’ll be a long haul, Peck says -- in a way, he thinks it will be as if four different crews are involved, though with plenty of overlap. It’s not likely that everyone on the Stennis now will be there when a rebuilt carrier leaves Newport News Shipbuilding in the middle of the decade.
The crew that had been deployed and that was on the ship when the yard’s teams made their first ship check visits has already begun to give way to the crew that brought the Stennis into Norfolk. As they prepare the Stennis for the shipyard they’ll be gradually replaced by other sailors who will be working side by side with shipyard workers while the Stennis is in drydock, before they in turn slowly give way to the group that will be sailing the carrier down the James River and through Hampton Roads to rejoin the fleet.
“It’s like a 4-by-100 relay race; the first runner hands the baton off to the second, who hands off to the third and on to the fourth,” Peck said.
“You want those handoffs to be smooth and seamless ... you want everything we’ve learned about warfighting to remain here,” he said. “How we do this refueling and overhaul set the course for us for the next 25 years.”
Dave Ress, 757-247-4535, dress@dailypress.com
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