This post has been updated with additional information from the Coast Guard.
An electrical fire in a transformer forced USCGC Healy (WAGB-20), one of two American icebreakers, to cancel its Arctic mission, USNI News has learned.
This is the second time in four years that a fire cut Healy’s summer mission short. The medium icebreaker had just begun its summer patrol northwest of Alaska in the Chukchi Sea when the fire broke out July 25, USNI News reported earlier this month.
The fire affected “one of the ship’s two main propulsion motors. Ship’s force swiftly extinguished the fire with no reported personnel casualties,” Coast Guard Lt. Cmd. Jennie Shaye, 13th District public affairs officer in Seattle, told USNI News Wednesday.
Technical representatives are aboard investigating the fire’s cause. Healy is sailing under its own power.
Repair will prove difficult because “much of the machinery aboard is antiquated” and parts may no longer be available, Coast Guard Adm. Kevin Lunday said, speaking at the Brookings Institution earlier this month.
“If you want to get under way on a major Coast Guard cutter today, you have to do what we call a controlled parts exchange with other ships at the pier. That’s a fancy term for cannibalization. We’ll steal parts or borrow, actually, from the other ships just to get another ship under way,” the vice commandant said at Brookings. “Now you can do that for short amounts of time, but when you do it over a number of years, you’re eating your own readiness, and that’s what we’re seeing.”
The 27-year-old icebreaker is headed south to its home port of Seattle for repairs, with a stop in Dutch Harbor along the way. It was due in Aug. 14.
“If Healy can’t continue that patrol, the U.S. will have no icebreakers in the Arctic this summer,” Lunday added at the Brookings event.
The cancellation occurred as the United States laid claim to an extended continental shelf, requiring more presence to assert sovereignty in that part of the Arctic. In 2023, during Healy’s circumnavigation of the globe, a Russian research vessel shadowed the icebreaker as it transited the East Siberian Sea near the Northern Sea Route.
Russia rejects the U.S. claim to an extended continental shelf.
One of the scientific missions canceled because of this fire is the Global Ocean Ship-Based Hydrographic Investigations Program (GO-SHIP). The goal was to make the first ever single ship, single-season, high-resolution transect of hydrographic observations across the Arctic basin.
“The high-resolution surface-to-bottom multidisciplinary observations the team collects during this mission will be compared to earlier partial datasets [that began in the 1990s] to better understand the Arctic environment,” reads a Coast Guard release.
Healy also caught fire in 2020 while 60 nautical miles off of Seward, Alaska, on its way to the Arctic. An electrical fire broke out around 9:30 p.m. with crew extinguishing it about 30 minutes later, USNI News previously reported.
The Coast Guard’s other icebreaker, USCGC Polar Star (WAGB-10), is undergoing the fourth phrase of its planned service life extension program at Mare Island, near Vallejo, Calif. The work, which began in April, is expected to be completed this month “to meet its commitment to Operation Deep Freeze 2025,” a Coast Guard news release said.
Before returning to Mare Island, Polar Star completed a 138-day deployment to Antarctica, including operating for 51 days below the Antarctic Circle.
The final phase of the maintenance program is scheduled for next year. The staggered schedule allows Polar Star to complete its annual deployments to polar regions.
Polar Star was commissioned in June 1976.
The vessel had completed its latest Antarctic mission by clearing a shipping channel of ice to allow supplies to reach the National Science Foundation’s research scientists studying the southern polar region.
