Seems they arrived quickly to the Philippines. So, I assume they always carry supplies for emergencies. What’s the straight dope?
I don’t know about food, but I know that US carriers have large onboard desalination plants and can hence produce fresh water on demand.
US Navy aircraft carriers have, unsurprisingly, an airstrip and a large hangar deck, not to mention room for storage. While en route to or before departing to the disaster area, the ship will be stocked with emergency supplies. There are various ways of performing underway replenishment (known in the Navy as UNREP). Additionally, the ship can provide electricity to the local power grid.
even if they were not it would be be a very simple things to fly quite a bit of material into Japan, s korea or Guam. any of those places are within a couple of days sailing of the Philippines for a carrier group
Over the decades successful warfare has depended more on logistics and supplies then actual combat. These are systems that the US military has become very good at doing - moving large amounts of stuff & people great distances quickly.
I was reading up on the history of the carrier George Washington today (as it is in the disaster area). It’s a floating city of 6000 people, capable of creating 400,000 gallons of fresh water a day from sea water, and serve tens of thousands of meals. It’s fleet is based in Japan.
Since at the moment it is not needed for pounding the crap out of somebody it is an excellent tool for a humanitarian mission.
This may be true in theory but I doubt it is practical or that it would be tried. It is more practical to bring emergency generators which are better suited for the purpose.
Has been done atleast once, many years ago
That doesn’t mean it can be done today. That was 85 years ago and things were different. And that ship had turbo-electric propulsion which means it had huge generators for propulsion which I do not think is the case of any carriers today. In an emergency where nothing else was available it would make more sense to use diesel-electric locomotives because they have huge generators but you’d still have problems with voltage / frequency conversion. Again, today’s cargo capacity makes it more efficient to haul stuff from around the world than to jerry rig questionable solutions. They’re bringing in desalinization plants, generators and other supplies from around the world.
Indeed I think the problem after hurricanes/typhoons is not usually an out-of-commission power plant, but an out-of-commission distribution system - in which case another power source (i.e. the carrier) is not going to help. small gen sets lugged to remote locations where they can power a few devices is probably going to be more useful.
One of the things I’ve heard in the coverage of aid efforts is that there are major bottlenecks in the distribution of food and water that are already in the country. There’s lots of aid workers and supplies that have come into few international airports, but these are hundreds of miles away and on separate islands from where help is most needed. And in the worst-hit regions, there are only a handful of airports available to receive incoming aid.
In this case, the USS George Washington and its supporting fleet can do a lot of good as a distribution hub. They’ve got dozens of helicopters that can bypass the bottlenecks at the airports, and land practically anywhere.
That is, if I understand a friend of mine who is a marine engineer, the standard way in modern ships to get the propellers moving.
There was another case more recent IIRC that a blackout in the NE/NYC area had trouble restarting the power plants because the power plants needed electrical power to start, and that was provided by a navy ship to act as a jump start.
Some quotes from the news:
Can you get a cite? Fascinating.
I live across the street from the power plant in question. ::“Bad power plant. Bad bad power plant. So you’re on a river in a hurricane? Still bad bad power plant.”::
I cannot imagine any scenario where this would make any sense. I have a very hard time believing this. It sounds like an unlikely urban legend.
Carriers use steam turbines for propulsion.
It’s absolutely true for a nuclear plant. In the US, by law and engineering principle, external power must be brought in to the plant to run the reactor system in case of emergency, of which a blackout applies. The issue with Fukushima was that the tsunami destroyed the diesel generators they had to accomplish the same thing. They SCRAMed their reactors as intended, but without backup power to circulate the coolant, the residual heat melted the cores anyway.
For a non-nuke plant, I can’t think of a case where external power is needed, but I have been known to be wrong on rare occasion.
I think sailor was referring to kanicbird’s contention that a ship had ever been used to provide base load for the power plant to start up.
The issue is known as a black start and is very real. Generators use field coils to create the magnetic field needed to create electric current. If there is no available power, an off-line generator cannot make electricity. Thus there is a problem in bootstrapping a generator into use. Typically power can be drawn from the grid, and generators are taken off-line and brought on-line all the time. However in the face of a catastrophe this breaks down, and a generating plant can find itself incapable of bringing up its generators. Some plants maintain a local black-start capability, usually in the form of a diesel generator, with enough capability to energise at least one main generator. However not all plant have a black-start capability, and this can lead to problems. Bringing up an entire electricity grid isn’t trivial, and will require careful staging, and coordination, as plants are brought on-line and power is slowly made available across the grid, and other power stations are able to restart and be brought on-line.
It is quite conceivable that in the face of a major calamity that a ship could be used to provide power to enable a black-start. I can’t think of an occasion when it has been done, but the technical reality is quite clear.
ETA: During the five week power outage in the Auckland CBD, a container ship was used to provide some power. So there is definite precedence in ships providing mains power.
ISTR hearing somewhere (maybe during a tour of the Midway floating museum in San Diego?) that carrier groups maintain enough supplies on board for six months of operation, and that under normal circumstances they receive frequent supply deliveries at sea, meaning that they almost always have a huge stash of food and fuel onboard. The idea is that if a combat situation suddenly arises, they can continue to be functional/self-sufficient for a substantial length of time, even if resupply missions are delayed.
I would guess that in the event of a peacetime disaster like the most recent typhoon, they could head for the area immediately and start sharing what they have on board, with the expectation that resupply missions will be along shortly.
Can anyone confirm whether that’s the case?