LCS Montgomery suffers two engineering casualties in one day

By Justin Doubleday / September 19, 2016 at 10:12 AM

Just three days after it was commissioned, the Littoral Combat Ship Montgomery (LCS-8) suffered two engineering casualties in a period of 24 hours as it traveled from Mobile, AL, to its home port in San Diego, CA.

Naval Surface Forces spokesman Cmdr. John Perkins said the pair of casualties suffered by the Montgomery on Sept. 13 were “unrelated.” The first occurred when the crew detected a seawater leak in the hydraulic cooling system, and later in the day, one of the ship's gas turbines failed, Perkins wrote in a Sept. 16 email to Inside Defense. The casualties were first reported by USNI News.

The ship will sail to Mayport, FL, to undergo repairs before continuing on to San Diego, according to Perkins. The Montgomery, an Independence-variant LCS and built by Austal USA, was commissioned in Mobile on Sept. 10.

“The built-in redundancy of the ship's propulsion plant allows these ships to operate with multiple engine configurations,” he wrote. “However, with the two casualties resulting in the loss of both port shafts, it was determined that the best course of action would be to send the ship to Mayport to conduct both repairs.”

The casualties suffered by the Montgomery are the latest in a string of bad incidents for the LCS program over the past month. In late August, Commander of Naval Surface Forces Vice Adm. Thomas Rowden ordered an engineering stand-down after one of the diesel engines on the the Freedom (LCS-1) failed.

Shortly after Rowden ordered the stand-down, the Coronado (LCS-4) suffered a casualty to one of its flexible coupling assemblies as it traveled to the Western Pacific for its maiden deployment, forcing the ship to turn back to Hawaii for repairs.

The problems come after the Navy had appeared to overcome casualties to two separate LCSs, the Milwaukee (LCS-5) and the Fort Worth (LCS-3), that had occurred over the past year.

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