The neglected 43-year-old stepchild of the Cold War chugs along into 21st century

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This was published 4 years ago

The neglected 43-year-old stepchild of the Cold War chugs along into 21st century

Seattle: The icebreaker Polar Star was 1600 kilometres out of its home port of Seattle last December, three days into its yearly voyage to resupply scientific bases in Antarctica, when a powerful swell hit its bow and flooded the deck.

Contractors prepare to exchange the propellers on the Coast Guard Cutter Polar Star while it undergoes repair work at a dry dock in Vallejo, California.

Contractors prepare to exchange the propellers on the Coast Guard Cutter Polar Star while it undergoes repair work at a dry dock in Vallejo, California. Credit: USCG

The ship shuddered.

The roar of the ventilators in the galley quit as Joseph Sellar, a stocky 25-year-old Coast Guard culinary specialist from New Hampshire, watched seawater explode from the ceiling.

He lunged toward a switch to close the overhead vents. With a loud pop, an outlet ejected a purple spark.

"Are we sinking?" asked a petty officer on temp duty from Virginia.

Sellar knew better.

Coast Guard Petty Officer 2nd Class Garett Brada, a diver deployed aboard the US Coast Guard Cutter Polar Star, checks his dive gauges before a cold water ice dive off of McMurdo Station.

Coast Guard Petty Officer 2nd Class Garett Brada, a diver deployed aboard the US Coast Guard Cutter Polar Star, checks his dive gauges before a cold water ice dive off of McMurdo Station.Credit: USCG

"Calm down," he said, whipping out his phone to record the gusher.

The United States spends $US2 billion a day on the most advanced military ever assembled, with more aircraft carriers, fighter planes and nuclear submarines than any other nation. The Pentagon intends to develop a space fleet of orbiting lasers, missile sensors and satellites.

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Then there is the Polar Star.

The only US ship capable of bludgeoning through heavy ice, it is the neglected 43-year-old stepchild of the country's Cold War military industrial complex.

The Coast Guard Cutter Polar Star breaks ice in McMurdo Sound near Antarctica in support of Operation Deep Freeze.

The Coast Guard Cutter Polar Star breaks ice in McMurdo Sound near Antarctica in support of Operation Deep Freeze.Credit: USCG

After decades of abuse, the vessel lists to port, but its sewer pipes drain to starboard, jamming and overflowing toilets. Rust coats decks, hatches and ladders. Lead paint peels from walls marked with warnings of asbestos.

While Russia will soon have more than 50 icebreakers, the fire-engine-red ship lumbers on as a Cold War relic.

Crew members scour eBay for discontinued replacement parts. A petty officer who used a surfboard repair kit to fix a generator, saving the ship from encroaching ice, received an award from the Coast Guard commandant.

The Coast Guard Cutter Polar Star breaks ice in McMurdo Sound.

The Coast Guard Cutter Polar Star breaks ice in McMurdo Sound.

Each time the ship makes the 18,500-kilometre journey to Antarctica, it falls apart. Turbines quit. Seals rupture. Resistors fail. Then it limps home for months of repairs.

The torrent that inundated the galley December 1 destroyed the top oven, subjecting the crew to cold cuts for a week while a $US50,000 replacement was flown to Honolulu, the ship's next port. Machinery that desalinates water also broke.

As problems went, these were not especially unusual for the Polar Star.

"She's an old beast, and you gotta know how to run her," Sellar says. "You can't just turn the key."

A seal lay on the ice in front of the Coast Guard Cutter Polar Star while the ship is hove-to in the Ross Sea near Antarctica.

A seal lay on the ice in front of the Coast Guard Cutter Polar Star while the ship is hove-to in the Ross Sea near Antarctica.Credit: USCG

The sun rises in Antarctica each October and doesn't set again until February.

At that time, the season of science, when more than 1000 researchers and support staff live at McMurdo Station - a jumble of dorms and dozens of other buildings located on the Ross Sea's Winter Quarters Bay - and the much smaller Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station 1600 kilometres inland.

None of this research would have been possible without the Polar Star.

It debuted in 1976 as one of the world's most powerful non-nuclear ships. Six diesel locomotive engines and three gas turbines generate 75,000 horsepower to spin propellers as big around as grain silos.

Engineers at Lockheed Shipbuilding & Construction Co. shaped its hardened-steel hull - 120 metres long and 28 metres wide - like a football, pointed at both stem and stern. With a draft as deep as an aircraft carrier, the Polar Star can rock, ram and reverse through ice up to seven metres thick.

That's what it takes to reach McMurdo year after year, carving a path for a freighter loaded with everything the scientists need to survive.

Operation Deep Freeze, as the annual mission is known, has often been brutal, but never more so than in 2006, when massive icebergs clogged the Ross Sea, forcing the Polar Star to ram through a record 160 km miles of ice.

The ship made it through just one more season before commanders moved to retire it.

They relied instead on its slightly younger sibling, the Polar Sea - an arrangement that lasted until 2011, when that ship suffered a catastrophic engine failure and the Coast Guard relegated it to a Seattle dock as a parts donor.

A $US62 million repair job resurrected the Polar Star, but the years sitting idle meant its machinery and wiring would never be the same.

Two days after the flood that destroyed the oven, engineers smelled smoke coming from an old Westinghouse electrical panel in the ship's main control room.

Peeling open the metal cabinet, they found the culprit: a burned-out coil the size of a coffee can. Without it, the port propeller was useless.

A backup was nowhere to be found in the ship's parts shop, which stores 5000 replacements for items judged most likely to fail. So electricians back in Seattle extracted the identical coil from the Polar Sea and sent it by air to Honolulu.

The Polar Star chugged into Pearl Harbor, using a gas-guzzling turbine usually reserved for ice-breaking. The next day, the ship suffered yet another indignity: Its whistle stuck.

For two minutes, the foghorn echoed across Pearl Harbor.

The Polar Star spent six days in port before embarking again on December 10, its port propeller and desalination machinery working.

Crew members were relieved. But the next day, the desalination unit quit again, forcing the crew to skip laundry and limit showers to two minutes.

The next stage of the voyage - through the Southern Ocean - proved especially rough as massive waves battered the ship.

Crew members rolled from bunks. Dinner plates sailed off tables, slamming against walls.

But at least the ship was moving. On January 9, it reached the ice edge at McMurdo Sound. The vessel that had loomed large by Seattle's Space Needle tower seemed to shrink like a toy boat against the glaring expanse of white.

Four days and 6 kilometres into the ice, the Polar Star sprang a leak.

Seawater sprayed through a broken fitting into a cramped compartment that houses the shaft turning the main propeller, which drives water past the rudder.

Without a speedy fix to regain steerage, the Polar Star would face a nightmare scenario: getting stuck in ice as the ocean froze around it.

With no other heavy icebreakers in its fleet, the US would have little choice but to rely on foreign help for a rescue.

Crew members figured that if anyone could plug the hole, it would be chief engineer Brad Jopling, the son of a Montana heavy-equipment mechanic. Jopling, 40, never complained about being woken at odd hours by mechanics presenting handfuls of broken parts.

A portable pump slowed the water's rise while he and his team devised a plan.

Two Navy divers suited up. Laden with ropes, rubber mats and heavy plastic wrap, they were about to descend 10 metres to Polar Star's idled propellers when a watch officer noticed a different threat: a pod of killer whales.

Two hours later, the divers finally splashed into the water and bound the mats around the leaking prop shaft where it protruded from the hull. The hope was that, wrapped in plastic, the mats would form enough of a seal to slow the flow.

On a second try, they managed to cut the stream to a trickle.

The plan had worked.

The Polar Star suffered ship-wide power outages twice over the next 11 days. Steel bars meant to stabilise propeller shafts broke so many times that engineers ran out of the bolts needed to repair them.

McMurdo sent four more bolts in a helicopter, which set down on the ice because the ship's flight deck was no longer certified for landings. A crane lowered Jopling in a "man basket" to walk out and retrieve them.

On January 24, the Polar Star finally docked at McMurdo. That night, in light of the Coast Guard's continued lack of pay because of a Donald Trump-forced government shut down, scientists passed the hat for a $US1500 bar tab at the station's three watering holes.

The day before the Polar Star departed McMurdo, Stanclik let crew members walk out on the ice sheet for a few hours. Some played touch football. One group admired seals and an emperor penguin. Kutkiewicz broke out her cross-country skis.

But the sense of peace was short-lived.

On February 11, one day into the trip home, another fire broke out. Then another.

Courtney Will, a damage-control petty officer, was working in the ship's coffee shop two levels below the main deck when she heard a boom.

"Well, that didn't sound right," she said to a co-worker.

More than 1000 km north of Antarctica, sirens blared.

The Polar Star pulled into port in Seattle on March 11.

Four days later, the Coast Guard announced that a Mississippi company would build a new heavy icebreaker by 2024 for $US746million.

It was a major triumph for a branch of the military long neglected by Congress.

Even so, Coast Guard officials expect the Polar Star to remain in service at least seven more years to accompany the new vessel to Antarctica for two seasons as a backup.

TNS 

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