The US Navy offloaded fuel, water and personnel from a grounded US$1 billion guided missile cruiser so tugboats and a salvage ship could try again early yesterday morning to free it from a rock and sand shoal.
The USS Port Royal ran aground on Thursday evening, about 1km south of the Honolulu airport where it was visible from several vantage points on Oahu.
No one was injured and no oil or other contaminants have leaked, said representatives of the Navy and Coast Guard, as well as state officials.
At a press conference, Rear Admiral Joseph Walsh, deputy commander of the US Pacific Fleet, said the ship was structurally sound. But he added that a thick, underwater rubber encasement that surrounds sonar equipment at the bow has taken on seawater.
A barge received fuel and fresh water from the Port Royal on Saturday, which Walsh said should make the grounded vessel approximately 180 tonnes lighter. The 9,700-tonne warship would also be an additional 14 tonnes lighter because half the crew of 360 was on shore.
Another reason for moving half the crew was that the ship’s air conditioning was not functioning because the vent through which seawater is drawn to cool the system is blocked as the ship sits on the shoal, Walsh said.
A lighter Port Royal, combined with a peak high tide and the pulling power of an oceangoing tug, some smaller harbor tugs and the salvage ship Salvor, should have done the trick when a third effort was made to free the ship at around 3:25am yesterday, Walsh said.
“The issue becomes one of how much weight is on the ship versus our ability to pull that weight off of the reef,” Walsh said.
Two previous efforts on Friday and Saturday mornings using harbor tugs that tried to pull the ship backward and away from the shoal were unsuccessful.
The 15-year-old Port Royal had just ended a four-month routine maintenance visit to Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard and was finishing the first day of sea trials when it ran aground at 8:30pm on Thursday.
“The ship was maneuvering to off-load some of the sailors and some of the contractors and shipyard personnel, and she was in her normal spot for doing those types of small-boat transfers,” Walsh said.
He said later that the shoal was known to the Navy.
“Clearly, the ship is not where the ship should have been. The investigation will determine exactly why the ship got to the point where she was in shoal water,” Walsh said.
The Port Royal is sitting in about 7m of water, aground along the length of her port side on a bed of sand and rock of the type that was used to construct one of the nearby airport’s runways, Walsh said.
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion