The USNS Comfort, which deployed from Baltimore on Saturday morning, only 3 1/2 days after the earthquake hit Haiti, and which will arrive off Port-au-Prince midweek, will be operating at full strength for the first time since the Navy acquired it in 1987, according to a report in today's Baltimore Sun.
On its previous deployments, to the Persian Gulf during Operation Desert Storm, to New Orleans after Katrina, and on various "routine" humanitarian missions, including two to Haiti since 2007, it has deployed with only a partial complement of staff, and was therefore able to use only a fraction of its full supply of operating rooms and beds.
It also sailed from Baltimore this time with less than a full staff (enough to staff a 250 bed hospital and 4 operating rooms), presumably because they couldn't all reach Baltimore by the time it sailed (the Navy's plans call for it to be deployed in five days, but it sailed only 3 days after receiving orders to deploy), but 350 additional medical personnel will board it upon its arrival in Haiti. This will permit its full 1,000 bed hospital and 12 operating rooms, each with two operating tables, to be in use, although the Navy doesn't realistically expect More than about 500 beds and 10 operating rooms to be in use at the same time.
In addition to the Comfort, and the limited hospital facilities on the USS Carl Vinson (already off Haiti) and the USS Bataan (which I gather is expected to arrive late tonight or early tomorrow), the military is setting up a 150 bed surgical hospital at Guantanamo Bay.
It's been no secret that the top brass of the Navy have wanted to get rid of the Comfort, and its identical sister ship the UNSNS Mercy, homeported in Los Angeles, for a long time. As the article points out:
[Cmdr. Tim] Donahue [the chief of surgery on board the Comfort] remembers treating a Navy admiral as part of his normal practice in Bethesda when the man noticed his USNS Comfort belt buckle, acquired on an earlier mission. "He said 'That's going to be a collector's item soon,'" Donahue recalled. "I said 'Why?' and he said 'We're getting rid of that thing.' "
This determination of the Navy brass to get rid of the Comfort and its sister ship the Mercy has always struck me as monumentally stupid and short-sighted, and I hope this deployment will prove that point to the top levels of our government. I regularly visit ships on behalf of the local international seafarers center, where we frequently take crew members to our center or out shopping. Most seafarers are from the developing world, since there aren't too many people in the developed world who are willing to be away from home for months at a time, over the course of their entire career, and to do it for low pay. On many, many occasions, when we've driven past the Comfort, these guys will point out that they saw it after the earthquake in Indoensia (actually, it was the identical Mercy that was deployed there) or on some other humanitarian mission at some port in the developing world. Even on "routine" humanitarian deployments, we get incalculable good will from the availability of these ships, and also do a lot of good for people who have no medical care (and little else). And in a crisis such as this, we're going to see the real value of these ships.
More from the article about what's going on on the Comfort, and its capabilities:
In addition to its medical facilities, the vessel can make 300,000 gallons of fresh water and 7,000 meals a day, and is stocked with prepackaged food and water to distribute to disaster victims.
Many of the voyage's challenges so far -- establishing communications and Internet access, counting and stowing pallets of supplies -- are common to any hurried departure. The Comfort left the pier in Canton [the Baltimore neighborhood where it is normally berthed] with just three days notice, which its officers call a record.
The ship has only a handful of native Haitians onboard, but will need as many as 100 translators if a full load of patients arrives. As the ship’s leaders arranged for more, translators onboard were working with doctors to build a list of common questions -- "Where does it hurt?" -- that could be practiced in Creole.
But the rhythm of the ship, and the intensity of the crew, is different than it was on preplanned missions. Crew members left their dress uniforms at home this time. There will be no liberty port. There’s no room onboard for the Navy band. "Now the script is different -- we don't have one -- but we will improvise," Donahue said.
Despite the Comfort's history in Haiti, more than 80 percent of the crew members have never served on the ship and a handful have never been to sea. Ware said one of his greatest concerns is preparing the crew for a scene that could be vastly different -- more dangerous, more disturbing -- than anything they've seen.
Thank you to the crew of the Comfort and to their family members. Thank you to the Obama administration for recognizing the critical need to fully mobilize our resources to meet this challenge. And thank you to the terribly weakened Baltimore Sun (at least compared to what it was several years ago) for assigning a reporter to cover the Comfort's work in Haiti. I hope this mission will convince the Navy that the Comfort and the Mercy are valuable national resources that we need to retain.
The entire article, of whch the above quotes are only a small sample, is well worth reading:
http://www.baltimoresun.com/...