Sorry but according to NAVSEA there are no naval ships in US service
that burn HFO or bunker oil. Haven't been since the early 1980s. "

palmtreedreamer wrote:
sorry indeed. You must know every medical boat there is then and all of
them must be navy.

Sigh. How to begin, when it's clear that you know so very little about
the subject?

Maybe from this angle... how many hospital ships do you suppose the U.S.
has? Sure, we've got a big Navy, but how many? A thousand? A hundred? Ten?

http://www.chinfo.navy.mil/navpalib/.../ship-hos.html

The answer is two. Both are operated under Navy authority by civilian
contractors. So it isn't hard to guess what ship they're talking about
and what kind of propulsion plant it has.


You're trying to tell me that a mothballed ship can go from nothing to
underway in 30 hours? Get real!

Second, there is a big difference between "mothballed" and an active
duty ship that doesn't happen to be underway at the moment. The web site
cited above says that the ships can be "fully activated" in five days
and from my own experience, that seems likely to be a contracted
maximum. In other words, Uncle Sam knows that we might need these ships
on short notice, and so they pay contractors (like me, except that I'm
not in that particular type of engineering any more... too many nights
away from home) to keep the ships maintained, do repairs when needed,
and keep a small crew active.

Third, that's five days from the time orders are cut.

Now, a question of judgement: when is the time to order a hospital ship
to active status & to begin steaming towards a disaster area? When the
disaster is a hurricane which gives perhaps a week's warning, maybe the
time to get these things in motion is *before* it actually hits, hmmm?
Or do you think it's better to wait 4 or 6 days after it hits, just to
be sure?

... I think you are missing something

Think what you like. I've been there, done that, and you obviouosly
don't have a clue.

Bye.

Oh wait, one last bit of advice... better google these things in the
future, it's very easy to get a few basic facts before you plunge off
the deep end.

DSK