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Cutter Storis to be decommissioned
Voyage comes to an end after six decade of service
By MEGAN HOLLAND
Anchorage Daily News
Published: November 27, 2005
Last Modified: November 27, 2005 at 07:35 AM
The Coast Guard cutter Storis is so old it was built with cork insulation instead of fiberglass. The tangle of pipes and wires wandering the 63-year-old vessel's hidden regions can pose a mystery to crewmen.
And if its engine were to break down, the only place to look for a replacement would be in a museum, the Coast Guard says.
The Kodiak-based Storis, the oldest ship in the service's fleet, will be decommissioned in 2007, the Coast Guard announced last week. The cutter Munro, currently homeported in Alameda, Calif., will fill in for it as a faster, better-equipped fisheries enforcement and search-and-rescue vessel until a new ship is built for Alaska waters, the Coast Guard said.
The upgrade is part of the Coast Guard's multiyear $19 billion to $24 billion modernization of its aircraft and cutters that began in 2002.
Retiring the Coast Guard's oldest ship does not come as a surprise to people who have served on it, including 71-year-old Gil Cragen, who was a gunner's mate on the Storis from 1954 to 1956 and who now lives in Anchorage. "A ship that old should be decommissioned," he said.
Cutters, which are what the Coast Guard calls its bigger vessels, have relatively long service lives compared to other military machinery and vehicles. According to a recent U.S. Government Accountability Office report, medium-endurance cutters like the Storis have average service lives of 30 to 49 years, depending on their size. But "The Queen of the Fleet," as the Storis is called, has been in service more than six decades.
No decision has been made as to what will happen to the 230-foot cutter after it is decommissioned, the Coast Guard said. The Storis could be mothballed, scrapped, sold or donated to become a museum.
In a press release, Vice Adm. Harvey Johnson, commander, Coast Guard Pacific Area, said, "Storis has been a gallant workhouse for the Coast Guard since World War II and has earned an honored place in Coast Guard history."
Launched in September 1942, the vessel played a role in World War II, and the stories accumulated in the decades since. Thousands of Coast Guardsmen have served on it.
"The Storis is one of a kind," said Cmdr. Jim McCauley, current captain of the ship, reached on phone while on patrol in the Bering Sea. "I've been on other boats built in the 1940s and '50s, but none like the Storis. Its rich history is unbelievable."
For nearly 50 years, the one-time icebreaker has patrolled thousands of miles from the Gulf of Alaska to the Bering Sea to the North Pacific Ocean.
"I sit around here and think, 'If only these walls could talk.' I'm sure there'd be some interesting stories," Ensign Andrew Munoz, currently serving on the Storis, said in a telephone interview from the vessel.
During World War II, the Storis guarded the coast of Greenland to keep the German military from establishing weather stations. In 1957, along with the Coast Guard cutters the Bramble and the Spar, it ended the 450-year search for a Northwest Passage, a route for large ships to cross the top of North America. Then, the Storis became the first U.S. vessel to circumnavigate the North American continent.
Cornelius Farley, 83, was an officer on the ship during the Northwest Passage trip. Now living near San Francisco, he said he remembers being stuck in ice near Canada for 2 1/2 days, cruising and sweltering through the tropics without a porthole in his cabin, and patrolling near the Arctic Circle to protect a radar system during the Cold War.
"If the Russkies flew a plane over, we'd know about it," Farley said.
But while the Spar was sunk off the coast of North Carolina to become an artificial reef and the Bramble became a museum in Michigan, the Storis has continued patrolling Alaska waters.
When the Storis is decommissioned, the Ketchikan-based Acushnet will be the oldest cutter in the fleet, having been in service since 1944.
But the GAO report notes that the Coast Guard fleet is aging. The service's cutters are approaching their maximum life expectancy, the report said.
The GAO report was in response to Coast Guard complaints over several years that the existing fleet, especially the cutters, has been failing at an unsustainable rate. In response, the report found, "cutters are generally declining" and "to help meet mission requirements, Coast Guard staff are performing more extensive maintenance between deployments, but even so, aircraft and cutters continue to lose mission capabilities."
On the Storis, replacement parts for the vintage equipment have been expensive and, sometimes, nonexistent, Munoz said.
"Sometimes, when things break, we have to fabricate it from scratch," he said. "Our engineers have to be a lot more resourceful in resolving problems, overcoming obstacles and finding spare parts."
Munoz said the technical manual used for the main motor is from 1941.
"You're holding a piece of history," he said. "For being 63 years old and being passed down by engineers, it is pretty clean and in good shape."
Munoz said parts of the motor are irreplaceable, except for parts that could be found in a museum.
"There would be no going out and getting a new one," he said.
The Coast Guard plans to save an estimated $4.7 million by decommissioning the Storis, it said.
While the Storis travels at top speeds of 14 knots, or about 16 mph, the Munro cruises at twice that, Munoz said. The Munro, with 20 officers and 150 enlisted people on board -- nearly double the personnel of the Storis -- also has a flight deck that can handle helicopters. The upgrades mean faster searches and rescues, Munoz said.
The Coast Guard said the Munro will be homeported in Kodiak until a new offshore patrol cutter in 2011 will replace it.
Both Farley and Cragen want to see the Storis turned into a museum.
"It would be nice if it was preserved someplace," Farley said.
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Daily News reporter Megan Holland can be reached at mrholland@adn.com.
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