Posted on 03/08/2026 6:14:49 PM PDT by daniel1212
New documents show the crew on board the United States' newest aircraft carrier are growing increasingly frustrated by design flaws that lead to regular failures in the ship's toilet system.
The USS Gerald R. Ford has been deployed for seven months since it left Norfolk in June.
On board the carrier, the crew is battling a toilet system that the General Accountability Office reported in 2020 was undersized and poorly designed. The system continues to fail during deployment, forcing the crew of 4,600 sailors to live with a system that randomly breaks down during their months at sea.
NPR has obtained documents that include a series of emails that detail the ship's effort to grapple with the breakdowns. Problems with the Vacuum Collection, Holding and Transfer (VCHT) system increased in 2025. The vacuum system was adopted in part from the cruise ship industry. It uses less water, but the system used by USS Ford is more complex. Breakdowns have been reported since the $13 billion carrier first deployed in 2023....
The crew has been reaching out to the A1B Propulsion Plant Planning Yard at Newport News Shipbuilding in Virginia for answers, ..the only shipyard in the world that builds Ford Class aircraft carriers...
The Navy has known the system is undersized and riddled with issues for more than a decade. A similar vacuum system was installed on the last Nimitz-Class carrier USS George HW Bush. In 2013, the carrier experienced similar problems, with toilets going off line...
Without providing details, Carter said the problems with the toilets have gotten better as the deployment continues. The average outage is between half an hour and two hours and the problems have had "no operational impact," he said.
The carrier has called for help outside the ship 42 times since 2023. The rate of calls is increasing, with 32 calls happening in 2025;12 calls were made after the carrier started its recent deployment in June...
"Our sewage system is being mistreated and destroyed by Sailors on a daily basis. My HT's are currently working 19 hours a day right now trying to keep up with the demand," according to the email.
The average age on the USS Ford is similar to a college campus. For many of the sailors, this is their first extended time away from home. At times the emails almost evoke a floating dorm room, revealing that everything from t-shirts to a four-foot piece of rope have been removed from the system. The vacuum pipes are narrow. Brown paper towels and even commercial toilet paper also cause breakdowns. The most common problem is a valve at the back of the toilets that can be knocked loose and cause all of the toilets (which the Navy calls heads) in one of 10 zones to lose suction.
"FYI, if you need to use the head, go now. At 13:30, expect the system to come down for about two hours. We are looking for a vacuum leak in zone 6," reads a March 18 email from the chief engineer on USS Ford...
The most expensive problem is calcium build-ups, which clog narrow pipes, especially in the lower decks of the ship. The 2020 GAO report said the Navy spends $400,000 for an acid flush to restore the system. A document showed the ship has been acid flushed at least 10 times since 2023. The work can only be done in port. A month after USS Ford left Norfolk, the engineering department was struggling to explain the problem to leadership....
"That's just the nature of VCHT. It's a closed system and thousands of components ship-wide that fail daily. With one commode control valve failure, depending on the location brings down the entire zone," according to an Aug. 15, 2025 email from the engineering department.
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I think its “the more they over think the plumbing the easier it is to stop up the drain”
Y’all know this was not a problem in WW II.
What is the difference?
Love boats do OK. I think they
have women on board.
What is the difference?
Perhaps Democrat Congress people, designing
the ship while in sitting in a conference
room, funding the ship?
Nah! National defense would never be
compromised for the whims of emotional
Democrat Ecologists.
DEI and the migrant invasion, plus environment BS...
The Iranians, chicoms, and American communists have been very busy for several decades...
Even in my most drunken states as a young man, I never ever thought to flush my tshirt in the toilet. WTH?
Simple fix is creating a new deck extension with a hole in it to practice bombing runs while feeding the fish. Simple.
HTs have a thankless job.
Salt water corrodes plumbing very quickly. There isn’t much that can be done about that except to use fresh water. Navy ships extract fresh water from salt water like gang-busters.
“the crew...are growing increasingly frustrated by design flaws that lead to regular failures in the ship’s toilet system.”
“Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets.”
-W. Edwards Deming
Every Halloween, the trees are filled with underwear. Every spring, the toilets explode.
A valve out of position. Ending the deployment because they hate the job they have and will do anything to get off the ship.
Congress voting for dollars-for-defense which too often translates to dollars-for-defense-contracts-carried-out-with-far-far-too-little-oversight.
An issue of the magnitude reported in the article demonstrates full failure of quality control during the construction contract. Such failures should demand claw backs of some portion of what was paid.
bttt
They could call it the poop deck.
January 17...?
Never flush a toilet you aren’t prepared to run away from. I believe is the saying in the navy
This design problem and others is in the same category as failures and increased cost of cars. Too much complexity leading to unreliability. The demand for complexity comes from green initiatives that accomplish very little.
Who dropped a whole truckload of fizzies into the swim meet? Who delivered the medical school cadavers to the alumni dinner?
Maybe they could have tried the new system on something a little smaller than a carrier
The Ford’s plumbing experiment does not end with vacuum pipes. It is also the first US carrier to sail with entirely gender neutral bathrooms, which means there are no urinals anywhere on the ship.
The root of the problem is not only what sailors flush. The system uses seawater for each flush, which then mixes with urine. In marine plumbing, that combination is notorious. It causes calcium compounds to precipitate and slowly coat the inside of pipes, shrinking their diameter and eventually choking the flow. To keep the pipes open, the Navy determined that it would have to perform full system acid flushes throughout the ships’ service lives. Each of those treatments costs about $400,000 and is classified as unplanned maintenance.
Navy emails cited by public radio reporters indicate that the Ford has already undergone at least ten of these acid cleanings since 2023. The process uses strong chemicals to dissolve calcium deposits and, according to officials quoted by regional public media, it can only be carried out in port for safety and environmental reasons. - https://featured.inquisitr.com/news/not-even-the-most-expensive-aircraft-carrier-is-spared-the-gerald-ford-has-such-a-basic-problem-that-it-seems-like-a-joke-but-its-a-real-headache/
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