A brand new Canadian warship that was dispatched to Hawaii for the biennial Rim of the Pacific exercise has been sidelined by a major cooling water leak, according to the Canadian Press. It is the latest in a series of setbacks for Canada's Arctic and Offshore Patrol Ship (AOPS) program.
The HMCS Max Bernays is the third and newest of the AOPS series of patrol vessels. She was delivered in 2022, spent a year in post-delivery refit, and was just commissioned in May.
Bernays arrived at Pearl Harbor on June 26 on a voyage from British Columbia. She departed on July 9, bound for sea for a force integration exercise with other allied navies in the RIMPAC gathering. On July 12, the ship sustained a serious leak related to a valve and a pump in one of the vessel's two seawater cooling systems. The leak released an estimated 5,000 gallons of water inside the ship, and it took the crew half an hour to shut it off, a defense spokesperson confirmed to the Canadian Press. It is not yet known whether Bernays' second seawater cooling system might be affected by the same issue, and the casualty remains under investigation. The timeline for repairs is indeterminate, and for now Bernays remains sidelined at the pier.
"The impact on HMCS Max Bernays’ participation in RIMPAC 2024 or its future program is currently unknown," National Defence spokesperson Kened Sadiku told the Ottawa Citizen.
The AOPS class has run into public difficulties before, and has its share of critics in Canadian defense circles. The first three vessels in the class (including Bernays) were delivered with high-lead-brass fittings and valves in their freshwater piping systems, resulting in higher than normal accumulations of lead in water. Bottled water and lead-level monitoring have been implemented to prevent health issues. Since the problem was discovered after the expiry of the shipbuilder's one-year warranty, the Canadian government will be paying for a portion of the cost of repair.
Other past issues with the AOPS class include generator problems aboard first-in-class HMCS Harry DeWolf; broken deck cranes; water ingress in the enclosed foc'sle; challenges in integrating helicopter flight operations into the ships' layout, solved for the first time aboard the Bernays this past month; and an inability to conduct a rescue-tow mission as designed.
