Trouble at sea for an American warship. For hours, a US Navy destroyer was without electricity and propulsion.
The ship ran into trouble in the vast Indo-Pacific region on Tuesday, a US Defense Department official said, after suffering what an official Navy statement called a “technical failure” in its electrical system.
Such a situation would leave the ship, the guided-missile destroyer USS Higgins, and its crew of about 300 “helpless” on the water, a naval analyst told CNN. There were no injuries among those on board, the Navy said.
Higgins “suffered a ship-wide loss of electrical power,” Commander Matthew Comer, a spokesman for the US 7th Fleet, said in a statement Friday.
“Initial reports indicate an electrical fault, which may have produced sparks or smoke, which ceased with the power outage,” Comer said.
Power and propulsion have been restored aboard the Arleigh Burke-class destroyer, Comer said.
But a defense official told CNN that the power and propulsion outage lasted “several hours.”
The ship was left “helpless” and “blind”
That's a significant amount of time the ship loses the ability to control its movements at sea, with radar and electrically operated combat defense systems inoperable, experts told CNN.
“The ship is helpless, electronically blind and immobilized,” said Carl Schuster, a former US Navy captain.
The emergency diesel generators would only power the communications and air conditioning systems, Schuster said.
The US Navy did not specify in the official statement exactly where in the Indo-Pacific Command's area of responsibility, which stretches from waters off the US west coast to India's western border and from the North Pole to Antarctica, the incident occurred.
An investigation is underway to determine what caused the problem, the US Navy said.
Destroyers, the backbone of the US Navy
Arleigh Burke-class destroyers like the Higgins are the backbone of the US Navy's surface fleet, with more than 70 ships in service.
Higgins, commissioned in 1999, has a crew of about 300 and is homeported in Yokosuka, Japan.
The warship is equipped with the Aegis combat system and has vertical launch tubes for a number of missiles, including the Tomahawk land attack.
A fire broke out on another US Navy warship last month. It is the aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford, which is involved in the Gulf operation.
The March fire was unrelated to the fighting in the Middle East, the US military said at the time.
