ADM Clark: Carrier retirement would pose problems

By Rick Maze
NavyTimes staff writer
11 February 2005

The proposed retirement of the conventionally powered aircraft carrier John F. Kennedy complicates a number of basing decisions facing the Navy in the future, Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Vern Clark told the Senate Armed Services Committee.

At a hearing Thursday on the 2006 defense budget, Clark acknowledged that the Navy would not have proposed retiring the Mayport, Fla., - based carrier if the White House’s Office of Management and Budget had not demanded in December that the defense budget be reduced.

Clark said eliminating one of the current 12 carriers from the fleet would pose “some risk” to the nation by creating future situations in which the Navy is unable to provide six operational carriers to sail under presidential orders in a crisis.

However, when weighed against other options — Clark said there were 24, but did not provide details — eliminating the carrier is considered the least harmful because the Navy has learned in the last year to get more performance out of the fleet.

Retiring a carrier that the Navy had intended to keep using until 2018 forces the service to make some big decisions, such as whether it wants to maintain two carrier-capable ports on each coast and whether it will be able to base a nuclear-powered carrier in Japan in the future.

Clark said he thinks it is important to have two carrier ports on each coast. However, Naval Air Station Mayport, Fla., the Kennedy’s home and the only other East Coast carrier port beside Norfolk, Va., is not currently capable of providing port services to a nuclear-powered carrier.

Before Mayport could become a nuclear carrier homeport, the Navy would have to conduct an environmental impact study that likely would take two or three years, and, if no environmental problems intrude, would need to build new facilities, which would take another two or three years.
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Oriskany sinking delayed

By Christopher Munsey
NavyTimes staff writer
11 February 2005

A decommissioned aircraft carrier slated for a second life as an artificial reef at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico will stay afloat for awhile longer, while Navy and civilian environmental scientists complete an environmental simulation that models the possible long-term decay of polychlorinated biphenyls, a material present in electrical insulation still aboard the ship.

The death of a civilian contractor on Jan. 7 who was the lead expert on the model has delayed the modeling effort, a Naval Sea Systems Command spokeswoman said.

The ex-Oriskany was towed to Pensacola, Fla., in December from Corpus Christi, Texas, where it underwent a comprehensive 11-month environmental cleanup last year.

The Navy needs approval from the Environmental Protection Agency to sink the ship at a site about 25 miles off Pensacola.

The Navy will install a hurricane mooring system securing Oriskany through the end of hurricane season this year.

Completed in 1945, the carrier saw action in Korea and Vietnam.
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Contributed,
YNCS Don Harribine, USN(ret)