JOINT BASE LANGLEY-EUSTIS, Va. –
Ten U.S. Army Soldiers from Fort Eustis' 511th Engineer Dive Detachment completed critical repairs to a U.S. Coast Guard vessel moored at Cherry Point Marine Corps Air Station, North Carolina, Jan. 19-22.
According to U.S. Army 1st Lt. Grant Rice, the detachment's executive officer and officer-in-charge of the mission, the 110-foot vessel was taking on 9,000 gallons of water per day through a crack and holes somewhere along the hull, and needed to be stabilized and repaired. Depending on tidal conditions and the performance of pumps battling the flood, water rose as high as knee-level in some compartments of the vessel.
The vessel was outfitted with two $3 million diesel engines the Coast Guard planned to remove and repurpose. The flooding jeopardized the engines, and time was of the essence for the divers to quickly find and repair the damage. Had diesel fuel from the engines escaped into the surrounding waters, Rice said the Environmental Protection Agency could have fined the operators, or even temporarily suspended operations at the harbor.
An advance party arrived in North Carolina Jan. 19, and immediately donned scuba gear and plunged into the 44 degree Fahrenheit waters to inspect the vessel's hull. Less than an hour later, diver Sgt. David Dilmore had discovered a four-foot crack, varying in width from a hairline fracture up to a three inch-wide split, as well as several small holes surrounding the crack.
The Soldiers quickly determined the proper method for patching the surface, and began producing the concrete form and sheet metal patch required to complete the repair.
"The hull was extremely corroded and made it difficult to weld upon," Rice explained. "If we had tried to weld, there is a good chance we could have burned holes through the hull making the situation worse, which ultimately led us to the decision to make a concrete patch on the internal surface of the hull."
The engineers used an oxyacetylene torch to cut the sheet steel patch, and divers employed a hydraulic grinder underwater to remove surface oxidation on the hull, which provided an acceptable surface to weld the patch.
Upon pouring the initial layer of the concrete patch, Staff Sgt. Kevin Karraker, the mission noncommissioned officer in charge, noticed water seeping through the patch material. Though the holes and cracks in the hull were sealed, water was entering the hull through the shaft tube where the propeller shaft enters the hull.
Karraker determined flooding through the shaft tube, which had gone undetected by the vessel operator, had contributed to half of the flooding. In response, Dilmore entered the water to construct a temporary plug on the shaft tube which curtailed flooding long enough for the initial layer of concrete to set. The following day, the engineers installed a special underwater epoxy as a permanent solution to the shaft flooding, and proceeded to completely remove water from the vessel.
While the vessel is no longer seaworthy, it is now available to be repurposed as a bombing target for fixed-wing pilot training at MCAS Cherry Point, and the pair of expensive engines were spared from additional flood-related damage.
Rice said the repair mission gave the divers an opportunity to practice several of the unit's mission essential task list requirements, and served as validation that the Soldiers are prepared to execute their missions when called upon.
"We are mandated to be able to deploy globally within a 96-hour response time, and we were diving within 24 working hours of mission receipt at an objective 250 miles away from our home station," said Rice. "This mission proved that we can quickly deploy and be productive in a short period of time."