The icebreaker Aiviq is a gas guzzler with a troubled history. The ship was built to operate in the Arctic, but it has a type of propulsion system susceptible to failure in ice. Its waste and discharge systems weren’t designed to meet polar code, its helicopter pad is in the wrong place to launch rescue operations and its rear deck is easily swamped by big waves.
On its maiden voyage to Alaska in 2012, the 360-foot vessel lost control of the Shell Oil drill rig it was towing, and Coast Guard helicopter crews braved a storm to pluck 18 men off the wildly lurching deck of the rig before it crashed into a rocky beach. An eventual Coast Guard investigation faulted bad decision-making by people in charge but also flagged problems with the Aiviq’s design.
But for all this, the same Coast Guard bought the Aiviq for $125 million late last year.
The United States urgently needs new icebreakers in an era when climate change is bringing increased traffic to the Arctic, including military patrols near U.S. waters by Russia and China. That the first of the revamped U.S. fleet is a secondhand vessel a top Coast Guard admiral once said “may, at best, marginally meet our requirements” is a sign of how long the country has tried and failed to build new ones.
It’s also a sign of how much sway political donors can have over Congress.
Edison Chouest, the Louisiana company that built the icebreaker, has contributed more than $7 million to state and national parties, to political action committees and super PACS, and to members of key House and Senate committees since 2012. Chouest spent most of that period looking to unload the vessel after Shell, its intended user, walked away.
Members who received money from Chouest pressured the Coast Guard to rent or buy the Aiviq from the company. One U.S. representative from Alaska, where the ship will be stationed, told an admiral in a 2016 hearing that his service’s objections were “bullshit.”
And there would be even tougher pressures to come.
It’s now been a dozen years since the Aiviq set out on its first mission to Alaska, long enough for its troubles to fade from public memory.
The ship, though owned and operated by Chouest, was part of Shell’s Arctic fleet, designed for a specific role: as a tugboat that could tow Shell’s 250-foot-tall polar drill rig, the Kulluk, around the coast of Alaska and help anchor it in the waters of the Far North. At its christening ceremony in Louisiana, attended by Shell executives, U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and U.S. Rep. Steve Scalise of Louisiana, it was named after the Iñupiaq word for walrus.
As a journalist, I’d been following the oil company’s multibillion-dollar play in the warming Arctic with interest. One June morning in 2012, I got word that Shell was on the move near my Seattle home, so I sped to a narrow point in Puget Sound with a good view of passing traffic. It was sunny, the water calm. The Aiviq bobbed past with Kulluk in tow. The icebreaker’s paint — blue at the time — was fresh, its hull shiny. It looked capable.
The problems began once the Aiviq was out of view. A Coast Guard report said that while the ship towed the Kulluk northward through an Arctic storm, waves crashed over its rear deck and poured into interior spaces, which investigators determined may have caused it to list up to 20 degrees to one side. The water damaged cranes, heaters and firefighting equipment, and the vents to the fuel system were submerged.
On its way back from Alaska’s Beaufort Sea two months later, the Aiviq suffered an electrical blackout, and one of its engines failed, necessitating a repair in Dutch Harbor in Alaska’s Aleutian Islands.
Then the Aiviq and Kulluk set out on a wintertime voyage back to Seattle. The National Weather Service issued a gale warning predicting 15-foot seas and 40-knot winds. The sailors aboard the Aiviq and Kulluk exchanged worried messages.
The cable with which the Aiviq was towing the Kulluk came free two days later when a shackle broke. The icebreaker’s captain made a U-turn in heavy swells to hook up an emergency tow line, and water again poured over its deck and into the fuel vents. The Aiviq’s four diesel engines soon began to fail, one after another.
Although a Chouest engineer later testified that an unknown fuel additive must have caused the failures, Coast Guard investigators believe the likely cause was “fuel contamination by seawater.” They said the fuel system’s design, which they described as substandard, made contamination more likely.
The Aiviq and Kulluk were reattached — but now, and for the next two days, adrift. Storms pushed them ever closer toward land.
By the time the engines were repaired, it was too late. The Kulluk ran aground at an uninhabited island off Kodiak, Alaska, on New Year’s Eve. Shell’s Arctic dreams began to unravel. The oil company sold its drill rig off for scrap. (It did not respond to a request for comment.)
And the Aiviq? A month after the accident, I visited Kodiak to report on what went wrong. I saw it anchored in the safety of a protected bay, an expensive, purpose-built ship now stripped of its purpose.
Shell formally abandoned its Arctic efforts in 2015, after failing to find oil. The Aiviq eventually steamed back south. Chouest began looking around for someone to take the troubled icebreaker off its hands. The Coast Guard, which had criticized the ship’s role in the Kulluk accident, now became a potential customer.
Traffic in the warming Arctic has surged as countries eye the region’s natural resources, and it will grow all the more if the storied Northwest Passage melts enough to become a viable route for freight in the decades ahead. The number of ships in the High North increased by 37% from 2013 to 2023.
It’s the U.S. Coast Guard’s job to patrol these waters as part of an agreement with the Navy, projecting military strength while monitoring maritime traffic, enforcing fishing laws and rescuing vessels in distress. Although surface ice in the Arctic Ocean is shrinking on average, it can still form and move about the ocean unpredictably. A Coast Guard vessel needs to be able to cut through it to be a reliable presence.
But the U.S. icebreaker fleet is deteriorating. The Coast Guard began raising alarms about the problem decades ago, starting with a study published in 1984. Russia, with its extensive northern coastline, now has over 40 large icebreakers, and more under construction. The United States has barely been able to keep two or three in service.
An urgent Coast Guard report to Congress in 2010 highlighted what has become known as the “icebreaker gap”: If we didn’t quickly start building new ships, our existing icebreakers could go out of commission before replacements were ready. The study called for at least six new icebreakers. Subsequent Coast Guard analysis has called for eight or nine. To date, the United States has built zero.
Congress dragged its feet for years on funding icebreaker construction. But the Coast Guard also slowed progress with overly optimistic timelines, fuzzy cost estimates and a tendency to keep fiddling with new designs, according to a 2023 Government Accountability Office report. More than a decade in, construction on the first of the new ships has finally just begun. The latest estimated cost is $1 billion per icebreaker.
Icebreakers have “been the penultimate studied-to-death subject for 40 years,” said Lawson Brigham, a former Coast Guard heavy icebreaker commander who has a doctorate from Cambridge University and has researched polar shipping since the 1980s.
The longer the Coast Guard failed to build the ships it did want, the more pressure it faced to settle for one it didn’t. Chouest seized the opportunity. The company invited Coast Guard officers to tour the Aiviq as early as 2016 and soon sent over a lease proposal.
Canada rejected similar overtures that year. A middleman for Chouest promised Canadian lawmakers a “fast-track polar icebreaker” — the Aiviq — “at less than one-third of the price of the permanent replacement.” Also on offer were three smaller, Norwegian-built icebreakers. Canada bought those instead.
The U.S. Coast Guard’s problem with the Aiviq, retired officers told ProPublica, was the ship’s design. Originally built for oil operations, it had a low, wet deck and a helipad near its bow, where it would be ill suited for launching rescue operations. Its direct-drive propulsion system was both less efficient and more likely to get jammed up in ice than the diesel-electric systems the Coast Guard used.
“I mean, on paper it’s an icebreaker,” Adm. Paul Zukunft, the then-commandant of the Coast Guard, told Congress in 2017. “But it hasn’t demonstrated an ability to break ice.” (Years later, in 2022 and 2023, the Aiviq would make two successful icebreaking trips to Antarctica under contract with the Australian government.)
The service estimated it would take years and hundreds of millions of dollars to upgrade the Aiviq’s features to near-standard for a Coast Guard icebreaker. Even then, it wouldn’t be able to move forward through ice thicker than about 4.5 feet. The Coast Guard’s most immediate need was for heavy icebreakers, burlier ships that can handle missions in the Arctic as well as supply runs to the U.S. research station at McMurdo Sound, Antarctica.
So how would the U.S. Coast Guard use the Aiviq beyond flag-waving and general presence in the near Arctic? According to Brigham, the former icebreaker captain and polar-shipping expert, “No one that I know, no study that I’ve seen, no one I’ve talked to really knows.”
But it wasn’t for the Coast Guard alone to turn down Chouest’s bargain offer. Members of Congress had their own ideas.
The late U.S. Rep. Don Young represented Alaska, a state thousands of miles from Chouest’s home base in Louisiana. But as of 2016, when Chouest was looking to sell the Aiviq, Young had taken in hundreds of thousands of dollars in political contributions from the company — so many donations in one year that he had once faced a congressional ethics investigation concerning Chouest money. (He was cleared.)
Young became the most vocal of many congressional critics to publicly dress down the Coast Guard for resisting Chouest’s offering of the Aiviq.
At a House hearing that July, he began grilling the Coast Guard’s second-in-command, Adm. Charles Michel, about a “privately owned ship” with a “tremendous capability of icebreaking power.”
“I know you have the proposal on your desk,” he scolded Michel. “It is an automatic ‘no.’ Why?”
“Sir,” the admiral said, “that vessel is not suitable for military service without substantial refit.”
Michel’s response sparked derision from Young.
“That is what I call,” Young muttered, “a bullshit answer.”
Michel, now retired, declined to comment on his exchange with Young.
According to the representative’s former chief of staff Alex Ortiz, Young’s frustration stemmed from the fact that the Coast Guard lacked the money to build an icebreaker from scratch but showed “an unwillingness to accept the realities of that.” Young and many other lawmakers also supported getting new icebreakers, but perfect had become the enemy of the good the Aiviq had to offer right away. “I genuinely don’t think that he was advocating for leasing the vessel just because of Chouest’s support,” Ortiz said.
Chouest, Young’s benefactor, is based in Cut Off, Louisiana. It’s led by its founder’s billionaire son and has long provided ships for the oil and gas industry. At the time of the 2016 hearing, Chouest was relatively new to Coast Guard contracts. One of the company’s affiliates would later take over the contract to build new heavy icebreakers, in 2022, making Chouest the supplier of both a ship the Coast Guard desired and the one it resisted.
Chouest did not respond to questions for this article.
More than 95% of Chouest’s $7 million in political contributions since 2012 has gone to Republicans, according to OpenSecrets, a nonprofit that tracks money from family members, employees and corporate affiliates.
But when it comes to lawmakers who oversee the Coast Guard, Democrats also have been major recipients. The late Rep. Elijah Cummings of Maryland, head of the House Subcommittee on Coast Guard and Maritime Transportation for five years, received $94,700 in the decade before his 2019 death. Rep. John Garamendi of California, a longtime committee member, started taking Chouest donations in 2021 and has since received a total of $40,500.
(Garamendi’s office acknowledged the recent donations but issued a statement saying he has for many years “pushed the Coast Guard to build icebreakers expeditiously, particularly given the aging fleet and the national security imperative.”)
Alaska politicians are particular beneficiaries of Chouest’s largesse, second only to those from Louisiana. Chouest’s interests in the 49th state, beyond icebreakers, have included a 10-year contract to escort oil tankers through Alaska’s Prince William Sound. Federal Elections Commission records show that Young, before his death in 2022, collected a career total of almost $300,000 from the company. Sen. Dan Sullivan has taken in at least $31,500, Sen. Lisa Murkowski $84,400.
The year after Young swore at the Coast Guard admiral in public, Rep. Duncan D. Hunter of California brought up the issue once more at a different House hearing featuring a different admiral, Zukunft. Hunter’s total from Chouest would be $58,800 before he pleaded guilty to stealing campaign funds and stepped down in 2020.
“Icebreakers,” Hunter said. “Let’s talk icebreakers.”
Hunter was backed up by Rep. Garret Graves of Louisiana, whose Chouest contributions now total $240,500. “Admiral, I think every time you’ve come before this committee, this issue has come up,” Graves said. “We need to see some substantial progress.”
Weeks later at yet another hearing, Rep. John Carter of Texas, whose single biggest donor the previous election cycle was Edison Chouest at $33,700, pressed Zukunft again. “There’s this commercial ship that has been offered …” Carter began.
In the end, the advocates for Chouest’s ship prevailed. The Alaskans played a particular role.
In 2022, after Young’s death, Sullivan helped author the Don Young Coast Guard Authorization Act, which included an approval for the service to buy a “United States built available icebreaker.”
Sullivan, who would later be praised for leading a revolt against his Senate colleague Tommy Tuberville’s blockade on promotions of military officers, also engaged in some quiet hardball. Until the country can complete a long-delayed near-Arctic port, icebreakers have been based in Seattle, where there are working shipyards and experienced contractors to do maintenance. But as a recent press release describes it, Sullivan “put a hold on certain USCG promotions until the Coast Guard produced a long promised study on the homeporting of an icebreaker in Alaska.”
Last year, Sullivan, Murkowski and former Rep. Mary Peltola of Alaska announced that Congress had finally appropriated $125 million for the Aiviq. The Coast Guard took possession of the ship last month. (Murkowski and Peltola, along with Hunter, Graves and Carter, did not respond to requests for comment.)
In a statement to ProPublica, a Sullivan spokesperson wrote that the senator “has long advocated for the purchase of a commercially available icebreaker of the Coast Guard’s choosing but has never advocated for the purchase of the Aiviq specifically.” The way Congress wrote the specifications for a “United States built” icebreaker, however, ensured there was only one the Coast Guard could choose: the Aiviq.
The icebreaker’s new home — based on the findings of the Coast Guard’s urgently completed port study — will be Alaska’s capital, Juneau. The city is facing what the Juneau Empire has called “a crisis-level housing shortage,” and it remains unclear how it will manage an influx of hundreds of sailors and family members. Juneau also lacks a shipyard. For repairs and upgrades, the Aiviq will have to travel hundreds or thousands of miles out of state.
Former Coast Guard icebreaker captains were reluctant to criticize the purchase of the Aiviq when contacted by ProPublica, in part because it has taken impossibly long for the service to build the new heavy icebreakers it says it needs.
“Is the Coast Guard getting the Aiviq a bad thing? No,” said Rear Adm. Jeff Garrett, a former captain of the Healy icebreaker. But “is it the ideal resource? No.”
To reach the Arctic from Juneau, Garrett noted, the Aiviq will have to regularly cross the same storm-swept stretch of the Gulf of Alaska where it once lost the Kulluk.
Lawson Brigham said he had questions about the Aiviq “since it’s our tax dollars at work,” but he granted that “it’s bringing some capability into the Coast Guard at a time when we’re awaiting whenever the shipbuilder can get the first ship out, which is still unknown.”
Zukunft, who retired in 2018, stands by his past opposition to the Aiviq.
“I remain unconvinced,” he wrote in response to questions from ProPublica, that it “meets the operational requirements and design of a polar icebreaker that have been thoroughly documented by the Coast Guard.” By acquiring the Aiviq, “the Coast Guard runs the risk that those requirements can be compromised.”
In a statement, the Coast Guard described the purchase of the Aiviq as a “bridging strategy” and said the ship “will be capable of projecting U.S. sovereignty in the Arctic and conducting select Coast Guard missions.”
The fuel vents that flooded during the Kulluk accident have since been raised, a Chouest engineer has testified. The Coast Guard did not respond to questions about the Aiviq’s fuel consumption or whether its waste systems will comply with polar code. It did not say whether its helicopter deck will be moved aft for safer search-and-rescue operations. It confirmed that there will be no changes to the propulsion system. “Initial modifications to the vessel will be minimal,” the statement reads. The Aiviq will be put into service more or less as is.
Last month, an amateur photographer spotted the Aiviq at a Chouest-owned shipyard in Tampa, Florida, and posted images online. It had been repainted, its hull now a gleaming Coast Guard icebreaker red.
New lettering revealed that the ship has been renamed the Storis, after a celebrated World War II vessel that patrolled for 60 years in the Bering Sea and beyond. From a distance, the icebreaker looked ready to serve.
“The question is,” said Brigham, “What is this ship going to be used for? That’s been the question from Day 1. What the hell are we going to use it for?”
