The aging Cutter Polar Star, the Coast Guard’s only heavy icebreaker, just reached Antarctica, cutting through ice up to 31 feet deep, but it ran into some problems along the way.
The 399-feet long, 42-year-old ship with a crew of 150, completed its mission, leading a support vessel with 400 containers to resupply McMurdo Station, the main U.S. logistics center in Antarctica. But the Polar Star developed a leak from the prop shaft, and it also experienced several electrical problems while in deep ice.
The crew had to halt icebreaking operations to send a scuba diver in the water to repair the seal around the prop shaft. The Polar Star has a hyperbaric chamber on loan from the Navy so Coast Guard divers can make external emergency repairs around the hull.
And the crew spent nine hours shutting down the power plant and rebooting the electrical system to remedy outages. In a separate incident, smoke from an electrical system damaged a switchboard, and one of the ship’s two evaporators used to make drinking water failed.
This was the Polar Star’s sixth deployment in six years to resupply McMurdo. The ship spends the winter breaking ice in Antarctica, and then returns to its home port in Seattle for repairs; it repeats the process the following year.
The Coast Guard has a second icebreaker, the Cutter Healy, working in the Arctic, but it is rated as a medium icebreaker. If a catastrophic event, such as getting stuck in the ice, occurred on either the Polar Star or the Healy, the Coast Guard has no self-rescuing capability. Read more:
https://www.maritime-executive.com/article/america-s-only-heavy-icebreaker-arrives-in-antarctica
