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Earlier this year, NPR was the first to report about a failure on the USS Gerald R. Ford. That's the $13 billion aircraft carrier with a toilet system that would randomly break down. The crew of 4,600 spent nearly a year at sea with that faulty system. Now the Ford is finally back home in Norfolk, Virginia, which means the ship can be overhauled to fix the plumbing headache. Steve Walsh with member station WHRO in Norfolk has the story.
STEVE WALSH, BYLINE: During a recent Senate Armed Services Committee hearing, Senator Tim Kaine pressed the top leaders of the Navy about the problems with the sewage system on the USS Gerald R. Ford while it was out on its record-breaking deployment.
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TIM KAINE: Are we taking steps, with respect to the Ford and other ships in that category, to make sure that the plumbing system is sufficient for the needs of sailors deployed?
WALSH: The Virginia Democrat said he had heard from his constituents about problems on USS Ford. The carrier received increasing scrutiny as the Ford went from the military operation around Venezuela to the war in Iran. The story was picked up by outlets around the world, which questioned the strain on the crew as their deployment dragged on. Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Daryl Caudle pushed back on the seriousness of the issues with the toilets, which the Navy calls heads.
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DARYL CAUDLE: So this is a less than a 1% problem. Now, it's a significant problem when the heads are down.
KAINE: Right.
CAUDLE: But the time between somebody flushing a T-shirt in there, a rag in there, a something else in there that's not supposed to be by or procedure, till it was up again, is like a couple hours.
WALSH: NPR was originally contacted by a parent of a sailor on board the Ford about the plumbing problems. I asked Caudle about the issues with the system breaking down when he came to the homecoming for the carrier in May.
CAUDLE: The sanitation systems on board any ship - submarine, destroyer, cruiser, carrier - all have challenges. It's not whether or not if that happens. It's when it does, how do we attack it, fix it, get it back online? And the team on Ford, you know, is very good at that. It's more of a vacuum drag system. And they're extraordinary at keeping it up online.
WALSH: Still, the Ford is getting an upgrade, says Rear Admiral Kavon Hakimzadeh, commander of Norfolk Naval Shipyard. The problems on the Ford were known since before the carrier was finished being built. A decade earlier, toilets on USS George H.W. Bush kept going down when its vacuum system lost pressure, meaning the toilets wouldn't flush.
KAVON HAKIMZADEH: We are implementing the same fixes that the Navy did for the Bush.
WALSH: Emails reviewed by NPR show hull technicians on the Ford were asking sailors help to find leaks among the hundreds of toilets. A loose valve in one area can cause all of the toilets in that part of the ship to fail. Rear Admiral Hakimzadeh says they will install more valves so sailors can isolate the problems more quickly.
HAKIMZADEH: Right now, it's essentially in quarters. The new system subdivides it significantly further so that a problem in, like, one bathroom doesn't cut off a quarter of the ship.
WALSH: Given all the plumbing issues, the ship also requires an acid flush to clean the pipes. The Government Accountability Office said back in 2020 that it cost $400,000 and can only be done after the ship comes home from deployment.
For NPR News, I'm Steve Walsh in Norfolk, Virginia.
(SOUNDBITE OF THIS WIND BROUGHT FIRE'S "WE'REALLGONNABEDEADONEDAY") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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