The Coast Guard Cutter Healy (WAGB 20) returns to Seattle following a two-month Arctic patrol, Aug. 16, 2024. The Healy is the United States’ largest Polar icebreaker and was commissioned in 2000. (U.S. Coast Guard photo by Petty Officer 2nd Class Taylor Tracy)
“WASHINGTON – U.S. Coast Guard Cutter (CGC) Healy experienced a significant engineering casualty while operating northwest of Port Angeles, Washington. There were no reported injuries. On July 13th, tugs safely towed CGC Healy back to homeport for an investigation into the incident and to undergo major repairs.”
Sounds like they already know this was a major casualty.
Chuck Hill's CG Blog 
Chuck, did you read the whole release? We are getting pretty good at propaganda.
That is why I did not include the entire news release. Everything after the first paragraph was just political BS unrelated to the report.
Good decision.
I try to keep the blog apolitical, so we stay on topic.
I was taught the military was supposed to be apolitical.
The news release talks about Trump’s vision as if more ice breakers was exclusively his idea when we have been saying we need more Icebreakers for at least a decade and the ICE Pact was completed during the previous administration.
The USCGC Healy (WAGB-20) utilizes an AC/AC cycloconverter diesel-electric propulsion system delivering up to 30,000 maximum shaft horsepower.
Power Generation and Drive System
Propellers and Performance
Two engine rooms with independent shafts and screws. HUMM?!
Nice edits, I was also appalled at much of the release
However it is disturbing the lack of information, and a ship that is designed to reduce single point failures to need to be towed home is not a good sign.
The crews on these ships are pretty sharp and have access to shore-side engineering resources, this does not sound good to me.
In a world where the Chinese are literally waiting to pounce, we SHOULD NOT BE telling the world what’s going on with our ships. If this were the good days of the ‘peace dividend’ era, I’d agree that more information is required. Right now, we should basically be considering ourselves at war. The Chinese already are.
True a lot of competition going on and we are not doing so well – an engineering failure on an old design is the least of our worries
Subject: Exclusive | China lures away at least 105 American scientific minds
Date: 2026-07-26
https://nypost.com/2026/07/25/world-news/china-lures-away-at-least-105-american-scientific-minds/?utm_source=smartnews&utm_campaign=nypost&utm_medium=referral [1] —
There is no way to hide the fact it is broken when it is towed back into port.
There’s ‘hey, we had a problem’, and there’s ‘it caught fire, and we barely stopped it from burning to the water line’. “Hey, we had a problem,” is potentially fixable at short notice. “Caught fire and we barely stopped it from burning to the water line.” is another story. That case means drydocking and cutting a hole in the side of the boat. Ie days to weeks of repair vs months to years of repairs.
There is value in not letting a foe know just how badly damaged a ship is, even if they can literally see it being towed.
Soon we will be advertising for a shipyard to do the repairs. That will include scope of work. We currently don’t know what that is, but the fact that they were not able to make way on even one shaft makes it pretty clear the casualty is severe.
Now if we had a Coast Guard Yard on the West Coast we might be able to keep the scope of work private but I don’t really think we gain or loose anything.
If China wants to know when the ship is in the yard and when they come out, they will know. Really I doubt if they are that interested, since it will not change anything they do.
Buried in a gCaptain story from a couple of weeks ago was that is was a crankcase explosion while running at about 20kts, i.e. full speed, full power. The article said that crankcase explosions can range from just clean up the oil splattered all over the engine room and go to a complete new engine, no speculation on how much damage. The engines are designed the article said to withstand a crankcase explosion unless it is big. There will be a complete investigation on why it happened.
https://gcaptain.com/exclusive-uscg-icebreaker-healy-towed-back-to-seattle-following-significant-engineering-casualty/
Yes I saw that but I did not see how loosing one engine could stop the ship, so just waiting for more info.
Yes the one engine stopping the Healy is odd, they lost a drive motor a few years ago and made it home just fine, admittedly at slow speed.
Maybe just super cautious?
But sometimes separate systems can have an inner connection that the original designers missed or a modification done later that produced a dependency that was missed.
As a retired engineer I would really like to see the final report on what happened.
Only a small number of people involved so I would think that the media might not have many sources, after-al when was the last time we heard of a reporter taking someone from the engine room out to dinner?
Glad nobody seems to have been injured.