Aircraft-style toilets clog sustainability for US Navy carriers

The US Navy’s newest carrier’s, the first-in-class USS Gerald R. Ford, suite of new technology and its development has been plagued by cost overruns and delays — its delivery to the Navy in May 2017 was two years late — though work on it is progressing.

According to Business Insider, among other issues, the last Nimitz-class aircraft carrier, USS George H.W. Bush, and the Ford were built with new toilet and sewage systems, like those on commercial airliners but scaled up for a crew of 5,000.

According to a recent Government Accountability Office (GOA) report, the Navy has found it needs to ‘acid flush’ those sewage systems ‘on a regular basis’ to ‘address unexpected and frequent clogging’.

Each acid flush costs about $400,000, and, the report says, “the Navy has yet to determine how often and for how many ships this action will need to be repeated.”

Bloomberg News was the first to notice the Navy’s costly clogged toilets, which illustrate how ships being delivered can end up costing more to sustain than was anticipated.

“The Navy has delivered warships-such as aircraft carriers, destroyers, and submarines to its fleet over the past 10 years that require more effort to sustain than initially planned,” the GAO says, revealing that it has assessed that the Navy initially underestimated sustainment costs for a handful of shipbuilding programs by $130 billion.

The watchdog notes that while the toilet issue was an excellent example of the problem the Navy faces, “we generally did not include these types of ongoing costs in our calculation.”