A US Navy warship lost power and propulsion for several hours in the Indo-Pacific on Tuesday, a US defense official said, after suffering what a Navy statement called an “engineering failure” in its electrical system.
This type of situation leaves the ship, the guided missile destroyer USS Higgins, and its crew of about 300 people “defenseless” in the water, a naval analyst told CNN. There were no injuries among those on board, the Navy said.
The USS Higgins “experienced a ship-wide loss of power,” said Commander Matthew Comer, spokesman for the US 7th Fleet, in Friday’s statement (1).
“Initial reports indicate an electrical malfunction, which may have produced sparks or smoke that ceased when the power was turned off,” Comer said.
Power and propulsion have been restored aboard the Arleigh Burke-class destroyer, Comer said.
But a defense official told CNN that the power and propulsion outage lasted “several hours”.
It is a significant amount of time for the ship to lose the ability to control its movements at sea, with electrically operated radars and combat defenses inoperative, experts told CNN.
“The ship is defenseless, electronically blind and immobile,” said Carl Schuster, a former U.S. Navy captain.
Emergency diesel generators would only power communications and air conditioning, he said.
The Navy statement did not say where the incident occurred in the Indo-Pacific Command’s area of responsibility — which stretches from waters off the U.S. West Coast to India’s western border, and from the North Pole to Antarctica.
The cause of the problem is under investigation, the Navy said.
The , like the Higgins, are the mainstay of the U.S. Navy’s surface fleet, with more than 70 in service.
The Higgins, commissioned in 1999, carries a crew of about 300 and is transported to Yokosuka, Japan.
At 150 meters long and displacing more than 8,200 tons, it carries the Aegis combat system and has vertical launch tubes for a range of missiles, including Tomahawk land attack missiles.
A fire broke out on another US Navy ship, the , in the ship’s service area last month, the US Navy reported. CNN previously.
The was not combat-related, the U.S. military said at the time. Two sailors were treated for non-life-threatening injuries and were in stable condition.
