Juneau is set to house the Coast Guard’s Aiviq icebreaker soon. The vessel is the nation’s latest military vessel, despite a history of design problems and failure.
ProPublica reporter McKenzie Funk has covered icebreakers for almost two decades, and detailed the history of the Aiviq in his latest story. He says despite its flaws, the Coast Guard doesn’t have a lot of alternatives as icebreakers become more necessary to the nation.
Below is the transcript of an interview with Funk on Alaska News Nightly. It has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
McKenzie Funk: There is an increase in both traffic and interest in the High North. The possibility that there will be more commercial shipping, whether to and from natural resources, or maybe someday across through the Northwest Passage. That's been on the horizon as the reality of climate change has been seen by more people. And so the idea is both the need is growing because of growing shipping, but also the existing fleet is small and old, and so it needs to be replaced.
Wesley Early: So now the Coast Guard has an icebreaker called the Aiviq. But you note that the Aiviq has had a history of trouble, starting from its very first trip to Alaska. Can you walk me through what happened there?
MF: The Aiviq — it's just been renamed the Storis as it rejoins the service with the Coast Guard — but it was originally built for Shell Oil. As everyone may remember, Shell made a major play for oil in the Chukchi and Beaufort seas, paid billions and billions of dollars. And one of a number of reasons that they eventually pulled back from that was what happened with the Aiviq and the drill rig it was towing, called the Kulluk. And they went up in the summer of 2012 and had a cascading series of issues all throughout the summer. Both ships that were connected to the Aiviq and Kulluk and other ships in the fleet kept turning into trouble. There were breakdowns. There were fires. And the Aiviq itself — purpose-built and new — had a number of engine breakdowns. Not surprisingly, in the Gulf of Alaska they hit a very large series of storms. A couple years later, Shell, having not found oil in the Chukchi and Beaufort, decided to pull out of Alaska, pull out of the Arctic Ocean, and then this fancy ship was sitting there with nothing much to do.
WE: So if there were all of these challenges, why did the Coast Guard buy the Aiviq?
MF: The funny thing is that the Coast Guard had been asked to investigate this ship, and they did investigate it, and they found design problems with it. And then a couple years later, they are being pressured to buy this ship. And there are two ways to look at this decision. One is the vast amount of pressure from members of Congress who had taken a vast amount of money from Edison Chouest, the ship owner and builder. Since 2012 Chouest has donated about $7 million to candidates and PACs and super PACs and state and national parties. So they're a major political donor. That's certainly part of the equation. And some of the members of Congress who were pushing most loudly, vociferously, for the Aiviq were people who had taken money from Chouest. But it's not the entirety of the story. The other part, is what we talked about before, which is that the Coast Guard had still yet to build any of the new icebreakers they needed, and so that fleet that was already old when I started reporting on the Arctic has only become older.
WE: I imagine some of those members of Congress were Alaska members of Congress.
MF: Yes. Congressman Don Young was, I'd say, among the first and certainly the loudest in pushing for the Aiviq. He and the Chouest family have a long relationship. His lifetime total donations from the Chouest family was more than $300,000. Dan Sullivan also pushed for the Aiviq after Congressman Young's death. Senator Murkowski has certainly been an advocate of adding to the icebreaker fleet. And important to note that they are also very publicly in favor of building new heavy icebreakers, which the Coast Guard says we need. No one is saying that the Aiviq is the solution forever. It's more like we've kept on not solving the big problem we have. So let's do this as a stop gap.
WE: So where do things stand for the Aiviq now? Where's it going to be based, and what's it going to be doing?
MF: The Aiviq, you know, some of its design limitations mean that it can't do all of the 11 missions that the Coast Guard would have, not all of which it does in the Arctic. But it's also not going to be able to do what some of the heavy icebreakers we hope to build will do, which is, go through multi-year ice, go through ice thicker than about 4.5 feet. I don't think we could see the Aiviq going all the way to the North Pole, maybe not on its own. But I think the idea is, for the moment, with minimal refitting, to put it up in service. It'll be based out of Juneau. That was one thing that Senator Sullivan pushed for in particular. And so I think we can imagine it'll be just up there patrolling around. And there is some value to that. It's not the full ship that the Coast Guard wants or the country needs, but the hope is that it'll be good enough for now.
