Military

The Army staff sergeant who Monday afternoon will receive the Medal of Honor at a White House ceremony has mixed emotions.

The 341st Missile Wing at the Malmstrom Airforce Base in Montana handles one-third of the United States’ land-based nuclear missiles.

The number of ships through the Bering Strait grew 118 percent between 2008 and 2012, according to the U.S. Coast Guard.

As nations attempt to stake claims for rich Arctic resources, the U.S. currently has little presence there.   The Coast Guard has two ice breakers capable of operating in the region.  That’s four short of the six required to fulfill the agency’s mission in both the Arctic and Antarctic.

One of those cutters, the Polar Star, is back in service after a major rebuild.

Here’s a look as part of our occasional series on Coast Guard cutters that visit Juneau.

Several staggered metal ladders aft the bridge go straight up to a perch called the Aloft Conning Station.

“We have a 360 degree view.  That allows us to pick a good way through the ice.”

Kenneth Boda is Executive Officer aboard the Coast Guard heavy ice breaker Polar Star.  It’s his third ice breaker tour.

“Typically when you are an ice breaker, you don’t want to break ice. You want to avoid ice as much as possible.  So you look for the open water leads and being up there allows you to pick the path of least resistance.”

The Aloft Con is 110 feet above waterline on  the Polar Star, under the command of Capt. George Pellissier.

“Most of the time in the ice you’re driving from there,” he explained during a recent interview when the ship stopped in Juneau after Arctic ice trials.

Pellissier will command the ship to Antarctica this winter.

The ice breaker’s primary mission there is to resupply McMurdo Station, the largest U.S. research station at the South Pole and the logistics center for other Antarctic facilities.  Pellissier said two-thirds of the job is transit time. Then there’s the ice.

“You have to break a channel through the fast ice, which is ice that’s attached to the land, and then you  have to make a channel straight enough and wide enough to get a container ship and a tanker in,” he said.

 “I’ve seen it as much as 85 miles of ice and as little as 12.”

The upcoming Antarctic trip – called the Deep Freeze mission — will be the first in recent years for a U.S. ice breaker.  The Coast Guard has had to lease Swedish and Russian ice breakers.

With only one heavy and one medium ice breaker in the Coast Guard fleet,  “there’s no bench strength,” Pellissier said.

The latest study prepared for the Coast Guard indicates the need for three medium and three heavy ice breakers to fulfill U.S. statutory duties in the polar  regions.

The Arctic poses the most immediate challenge.

The Coast Guard is responsible for law enforcement, search and rescue, security, and environmental protection where many nations want to drill, mine, fish, and tour.  The ice breakers are also scientific research platforms.  U.S.  Homeland Security predicts a million adventure tourists could visit the Arctic this year.

Other nations have government and commercial ice breakers operating in the region year around.  Commander Pellissier points to the region on a large map in his Polar Star office.

“As we come up the Bering Strait and then we head off to the west, all along the North coast of Russia, that’s already a viable route,” he said.  “And that’s where you find a large number of Russia’s ice breakers plying that route to keep it open.”

The  window is narrow now, but as the ice diminishes ships could go through the Chukchi and Beaufort seas to the Northwest Passage, linking the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans.

“If the ice continues to recede, which most scientists are predicting it will, then that route will also become much more viable in the future, pretty much cutting through all the small  islands up in the northern part of Canada, and then down through the Labrador Sea and down the East Coast,” Pellissier said.

The new National Security Cutters are the core of the Coast Guard fleet.  Despite their versatility,  they can’t cut ice.

“They have a very limited window of time they can operate, particularly up in the North Bering and beyond.  The ice breakers, particularly our heavy ice breakers, can stay up there year around,”  Pellissier said.

Multiple studies indicate the U.S. needs a year-round presence in the Arctic. Existing ice breaker capacity is not enough, even with additional non-ice cutters and aircraft, more operating locations and improved communication  and navigation systems.

The Arctic ice cap reached a new low in September 2012.  In just six months last year, 4.5 million square miles of Arctic Ocean ice melted, according to a report by the United Nations.

While that may be hard to imagine, the commanding officer of the U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Polar Star says Arctic ice was the lowest he’s ever seen in all his ice breaking trips to the region.

After three years in a Seattle shipyard and a $90 million makeover, the Coast Guard’s heavy ice breaker just returned from trials in the Beaufort Sea and made a brief stop in Juneau.

“It’s capable of breaking over 21 feet of solid ice, with an inch and a quarter thick steel hull, and a design that allows it to ride up on the ice and crush it with its weight,” said MST1 Brian Carr, at the start of a Polar Star tour.

He is one of the 150 crew members and officers aboard the rebuilt ice breaker, 115 of them making their first trip to the Arctic.

Their commanding officer has spent much of his 30 years in the Coast Guard breaking ice.

“Pretty much the most fun job on the planet.”

Captain George Pellissier started his Coast Guard career as a naval engineer on an ice breaker.

“We pretty much get to live the Discovery Channel. I mean where they send us and where we get to go, most people only get to see watching TV or reading about it in a magazine.”

That includes deployments to both the Arctic and the Antarctic.  It’s a toss-up as to which Pellissier likes best, though the trip south from the Polar Star’s Seattle home port is more diverse; such as crossing the tropics.

“Pulling an ice breaker into, say, Tahiti is always interesting,” he said.

Penguins greet the ship at the South Pole; polar bears and walrus at the North.

“Even the ice that you’re actually going through is a little bit different,” Pellissier said.

On this shakedown trip to the Arctic, the Polar Star found heavier ice than the captain anticipated.

“What we found was essentially first year ice where we went, although in the vicinity of Barrow it was all rafted together and piled on top of each other, so it was fairly tough ice,” he said.

The ship reached Barrow’s ice-choked shore on July 2nd.

“We did find that a couple weeks into the trip the ice was breaking up and receding rapidly,” he said.  “So this trip there was less ice that we encountered than I’ve seen in years past.”

The Polar Star spent most of the time in the Beaufort Sea, reaching 78 degrees north latitude, “not terribly far, but enough to find some nice good ice to play around in for a while and do all of our testing.”

The rafted ice is some of the hardest to break, a good test for the ship’s rebuilt engine, propeller and navigation systems.

The propellers are driven by a diesel-electric or gas turbine power plant.

The diesel generators are capable of 18,000 horsepower, and the three turbines, more than 75,000 horsepower. The thickness of the ice determines which system to use.

Pellissier gets a real twinkle in his eye when he talks about testing his “new” ship on the piled-up ice.

“We kind of tested the full power by nosing up to a large pressure ridge and running the turbines one at a time and just running them all the way up through the whole horse power range, which was kind of neat,” he said.

So what does it feel like when the 13,000 ton Polar Star is breaking a mound of ice?

“We are one of the few ships on the planet that intentionally runs into things. It makes a fair bit of noise and everything shakes.”

The entire ship is an ice breaker.  The trials also tested the Polar Star crew; some  fresh out of basic training.

“You’ll be going through the ice and making good progress, if you hit a pressure ridge, or a little bit of thicker ice,  all of a sudden the ship will lurch off to one side or the other with not a lot of warning for the folks.  So they learn right quick to close or latch open the doors and hold on,” he said.

Pellissier said backing up in the ice is one of the more dangerous things to do. The ship draws 31 feet; the three propellers are 16 feet in diameter and sit about 15 feet below the water line.

“You know the spinning propeller will kind of knock the pieces of ice aside. You’ll feel it; it’s what we call milling ice and it does feel like all of a sudden your ship becomes a giant blender.”

The bigger concern is the rudder, so the key, he said, is taking it slow to make sure the rudder remains centered “so that it’s going directly back into the ice and not getting knocked over to the side and potentially wedged over to the side.”

He said backing up is always a bit tense.   “You just take it nice and slow for the back and then you get a running start at the ice again.”

The newly rebuilt Polar Star is the only operating heavy ice breaker in the Coast Guard fleet.  Pellissier says the Arctic ice trials show she’s a better ice breaker now than when commissioned in 1976.

He has a list of work to be done in home port over the next four months then the ship will head south to Antarctica.

 

Check out this footage from one of the Polar Star’s early journeys to Antarctica in 1998

The U.S. Coast Guard is 223 years old.  The maritime service was created on Aug. 4, 1790 as the Revenue Cutter Service under the U.S. Department of Treasury.

Juneau is headquarters of the 17^th Coast Guard District, which includes the Arctic.

Part of Juneau’s weekend celebration included a visit by the heavy ice breaker Polar Star, on its way to its Seattle home port after conducting ice tests in the Bering Sea.

The ship has been rebuilt and is the Coast Guard’s only heavy ice breaker in operation.   The Polar Star was open to visitors on Saturday.

Polar Star Executive Officer Kenneth Boda was one of the tour guides and offered a Coast Guard history lesson without prompting.

“We were built to basically collect customs and taxes, collect tariffs of vessels coming into port.  Over the years, we absorbed the Lighthouse service and the Life Saving Service, the Bureau of Steamboat Inspections as well.  Along the way along we were part of the armed forces,” he said.

The modern Coast Guard was created in 1915 as the fifth military uniformed service.

“Our vessels are fully compatible with all the Navy standards so we can operate in conjunction with the Navy,” Boda said, “but we also have the law enforcement side, the Homeland Security side, as well.”  

Boda called the Coast Guard a unique entity of the federal government. Its presence is local, regional, national and international, from the North Pole to the South Pole.

Most coastal Alaskans are familiar with the Coast Guard missions of safety, security and stewardship.

“Saving people’s lives is one of the big responsibilities of the Coast Guard,” Boda said. “Making sure that the ships that leave port are safe, we do vessel inspections.  Making sure that foreign ships that arrive have been inspected and have cleared all the U.S. regulations before they come into U.S. ports.” 

In 2012, according to the Coast Guard website, more than 436,000 vessels and their 29 and a half-million crewmembers and passengers were screened prior to arrival in U.S. ports.

The Coast Guard is the only military organization within the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.  Boda said that means it is responsible for ensuring U.S. harbors and ports are secure from any kind of threat.

“When I say threats, people think terrorist threats, but it’s not always terrorism that’s a threat, sometimes just a hazard to navigation.  For instance, a vessel that might wander out of the shipping lane and lose situational awareness.  In some other ports like Valdez, for instance, we have a vessel traffic service, you know that basically monitors ships as they come in and out and make sure everyone’s safe,” he said.

While enforcing U.S. fisheries laws is one of the most visible roles of the Coast Guard in Alaska, stewardship is protecting the oceans.

“Stewardship is environmental pollution response, so that the Coast Guard is called out to an Exxon Valdez or a Deep Water Horizon as well,” Boda said.

The Coast Guard is still investigating Royal Dutch Shell’s 2012 Alaska drilling operations after some vessels failed inspections, the oil rig Kulluk ran aground, and the company had other safety and environmental violations.

During the Polar Star’s brief stop in Juneau, KTOO had the opportunity to speak with Commanding Officer George Pellissier about its Arctic and Antarctic missions.  Check back for those stories.

The only heavy ice breaker in the Coast Guard’s fleet will be in Juneau this weekend and open for tours.

The Polar Star is returning from its first trip to the Arctic Ocean since a four-year, $57 million overhaul of the ship.  It was reactivated in December in Seattle then tested in the open ocean before heading to the Arctic.

Coast Guard Petty Officer Kip Wadlow says the ship and crew have been conducting ice tests.

“The ice tests allowed the crew of the Polar Star to travel back up into the Arctic, test the ship’s capabilities going through the ice and also train their crew up so that they’re going to be ready to meet the Coast Guard’s Arctic and Antarctic missions in the future,” Wadlow says.

The Polar Star is returning to its home port in Seattle.  It was commissioned in 1976 and is one of two active Coast Guard ice breakers.

The smaller Healy paid a port call to Juneau in November.

Tours of the 399-foot Polar Star are Saturday from 1 to 4 p.m. at the AJ Dock.

Children must be accompanied by an adult.  Pets are not allowed on board.