Founded in 1767, Norfolk Naval Shipyard is the oldest of the four public shipyards. In a new report, the General Accountability Office says the shipyard has to balance spending money to upgrade old infrastructure that may have to be bulldozed in the future.
The Navy expects to spend more than $200 billion during the next 50 years to upgrade its four public shipyards. The plan began under the first Trump administration in 2018 and was greatly expanded under the Biden administration.
The GAO says Congress and the Navy need to do a better job of tracking progress. Some projects have been delayed for years, while others are over budget. The Navy concurred with the report’s findings that it should provide annual updates on all of the projects.
The Navy’s other shipyards are Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, Portsmouth, Maine and Puget Sound, Washington. All of the shipyards are at least 100 years old and the average dry dock is 107-years-old, according to the report.
Norfolk is working on an expansion to handle Ford Class carriers and Virginia Class submarines. The shipyard is handling the first maintenance availability for USS Gerald R. Ford, which suffered a fire in the laundry room during its 11-month deployment to the Middle East as well as problems with its sewage system.
Ford-class carriers are larger than the older Nimitz-class and place greater demands on the power and electrical systems at the shipyards. In March, Norfolk became one of two shipyards to complete a masterplan. The shipyard has $1.26 billion of projects underway and another $2.6 billion in the design phase.
