NEWPORT NEWS, Va. – HII’s Newport News Shipbuilding is on contract to build two new facilities for U.S. sailors assigned to submarines undergoing overhauls at the Virginia shipyard, USNI News has learned.
The two buildings, slated to cost $9 million, will feature a galley and housing for sailors in one facility and workspaces in the other, a spokesperson for Naval Sea Systems Command told USNI News.
HII will build the new facilities close to the Newport News dry dock where USS Columbus (SSN-762) is currently undergoing an engineering overhaul. USS Boise (SSN-762), the Los Angeles-class attack submarine that lost its dive certification due to years of delays as it waited for an overhaul, is also in a dry dock at the shipyard.
The future facilities are similar to the carrier refueling overhaul work center, also known as the CROW, for which the Navy last month provided HII a $78 million contract modification to build.
“They would have the same concept – offices to work in off the ship,” Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Lisa Franchetti said of the new buildings for submariners. USNI News accompanied Franchetti last week as she toured HII’s Newport News Shipbuilding.
“And the design is being done by both the shipyard and the COs of the submarines that are in there right now,” she added.
The space does not currently have any buildings on it, so HII does not need to rip any structures down to put the new ones up, NAVSEA spokesperson Susan Mainwaring told USNI News. The Navy’s contract with HII expects the buildings to be finished by early 2026.
The new five-story CROW facility is also expected to be finished by 2026, in time for the mid-life overhaul of USS Harry S. Truman (CVN-75), Karey Malyszko, Newport News Shipbuilding’s vice president of plant operations, told Franchetti during the tour. The design for the CROW is about 30 percent complete.
The $9 million in funding for the two new submarine facilities is part of the $1.2 billion repair contract the Navy issued to Newport News earlier this year for the long-delayed Boise overhaul, USNI News understands. Boise came back from its last deployment nearly a decade ago. After facing years of delays because of the backlog at Norfolk Naval Shipyard, the Navy opted to send the boat to the private sector for its overhaul.
Building these new facilities for Navy submariners is part of a series of quality of life improvements currently underway at Newport News. Those improvements include a new parking garage that will feature 2,000 additional spaces and MicroMarkets with healthy food choices that sailors who are assigned to ships in the yard can access 24 hours per day, seven days a week, according to HII executives. A total of five markets are currently either open or in the planning stages.
The quality of life improvements at Newport News come after a Navy investigation, released in 2023, into the suicides of sailors attached to aircraft carrier USS George Washington (CVN-73) found that they faced some of the most difficult living conditions in the U.S. military. At the time, GW was at Newport News for its mid-life refueling and complex overhaul, which lasted nearly six years.
The investigation found that it took some sailors almost three hours to get to work on the carrier. Some female sailors, after driving to a parking lot to catch a shuttle bus to a dropoff point, would get catcalled during the 12-minute walk to the ship, USNI News previously reported.
During an interview with USNI News after the shipyard tour, Franchetti said the various improvements at HII are meant to better both a sailor’s quality of life and their quality of work, and to ensure they can have some separation between the two.
The CNO pointed to the new parking spots, to ensure sailors have a safe place to both put their cars and to walk to work, and efforts to put medical care and mental health services in places that are easily accessible from where sailors are working in the shipyard.
“When we’re on a base in a fleet concentration area, all those services are right there,” Franchetti told USNI News. “But when you go to an environment like a shipyard, they’re not necessarily all right there. So what we’ve tried to do is create this ecosystem of those services, to bring them closer to the sailor, so the sailor can go take care of whatever that kind of appointment is, and then get right back to work.”
