The largest and most expensive aircraft carrier the U.S. Navy has ever built has a problem. The toilets for the crew of 4,600 don’t work. The USS Gerald R. Ford is already on track for the longest aircraft carrier deployment in decades straining both people and equipment. The extension of what had been expected to be a 6-month cruise to possibly as long as 10 or 11 months by itself hurts morale, increases fatigue, and risks operational readiness, but compounding those problems is an onboard sewage system that has never worked properly since the ship was commissioned.
According to a January National Public Radio report, the Ford was built with a vacuum sewage system that the Navy had never fully tested before it was installed during construction of the carrier. A failure in the vacuum system can bring down all the toilets in a department and be very difficult to troubleshoot. According to internal emails obtained by NPR, ship maintenance specialists, called hull technicians, were working 19 hours a day to fix problems in the system and at one point reported 205 failures in four days. According to other reports, the average wait for crew member to use a toilet is 45 minutes.
