Fire-damaged HMCS Protecteur will return to CFB Esquimalt by late May, ship Cmdr. Julian Elbourne said Friday.
“We’re aiming to leave by the end of April,” Elbourne said from Pearl Harbor, where the Royal Canadian Navy supply ship is being prepared for the journey.
“Everyone is keen to get home.”
The date of departure is yet to be determined.
Protecteur is being emptied and secured to be towed back to Canada by the ocean tug USNS Salvor. It will be unmanned for the tow, attached with steel-wire cables. Valuables from the ship, including a helicopter, have been or will be shipped back to Esquimalt. The journey, about 4,300 kilometres, is expected to take three to four weeks.
Elbourne said the last of the crew will fly home a few days after Protecteur leaves the U.S. port. The ship was towed there a week after a Feb. 27 fire left it dead in the water about 630 kilometres from Pearl Harbor in the North Pacific.
There are 179 of the 279 ship’s crew alongside Protecteur in Hawaii, living in floating barracks while they prepare the ship for travel.
The rest of the crew and civilians who were on board Protecteur at the time of the fire were flown home. Elbourne said another batch of crew will fly home soon.
“There was an enormous amount of preparation to do in the aftermath of a situation like this,” he said, reflecting on what he called the most harrowing experience of his 24 years in the navy. “But I couldn’t be more proud of this crew. I saw incredible bravery and courage and willingness to fight for our ship and themselves, to keep everyone safe.”
It was just after 7 p.m. on steak night and Elbourne was on the ship’s bridge when a six-bell alarm sounded, signalling an emergency in the engine room.
“Early in the fire, 10 or 11 minutes in, we completely blacked out and lost power,” he said. The backup generator couldn’t take the load, so the crew was battling the blaze in the dark — not knowing when the diesel pump pushing water through the hoses would run out.
“It took every member of that ship to fight to gain control of that fire,” he said. The civilians, mostly family, were kept safe, he said. One of them, the father of a sailor, also happened to be a retired vice-admiral and helped to keep everyone calm and informed.
It took 17 attack teams more than seven hours to put out the main fire and several hotspots. Several crew members suffered smoke inhalation injuries.
The next morning, Elbourne went to the engine room to assess the damage.
“It was shocking,” he said. Smoke was everywhere and the metal was still soft from intense heat. Not only was the engine room damaged “but I lost 160 living spaces,” he said.
A few days later, there was another small fire in the engine room when a crew member tried to get an emergency generator going with damaged power cables. It was quickly put out.
Elbourne said how the crew came together to endure days on rough seas with almost no power, cramped quarters and one toilet for more than 200 people was admirable and at times ingenious.
“People were lined up all day. A few days later, some of the sailors built outhouses with plywood on a deck with water supply,” he said, giving a nod to the two sailors who built a resister for an electrical switchboard with a dryer belt and a toaster.
“That was pretty impressive. It was like seven days of rough camping.”
Elbourne said all the crew, including him, will take a well-deserved break when they return to Victoria. Protecteur was originally scheduled to return home from a two-month mission the first week of March.
An investigation into the cause of the fire and an assessment of the damage will be done when the vessel arrives in Esquimalt.
The navy has not commented on the future of the ship, whether it will be repaired or scrapped. It is set to retire along with East Coast sister supply ship HMCS Preserver in 2017. Replacement ships are not expected to be completed until 2019-20.
