US Coast Guard adds icebreaker to fleet for first time in 25 years

Federal officials see the refurbished ship Storis as the first of many new additions and a statement of sovereignty in the Arctic under the Trump administration

The U.S. Coast Guard commissioned its first additional polar icebreaker in 25 years in Juneau on Sunday, marking what officials called a new era in Arctic activity for the United States.

The newly rechristened Storis, formerly the oilfield supply ship Aiviq, is the first in a series of icebreakers expected to join the Coast Guard in coming years. The Storis and subsequent ships, officials said, are critical for the United States to maintain its sovereignty and control of its borders in and near the Arctic Ocean.

“What we’re doing here today is we’re really just preparing to build our Arctic fighting force,” said Troy Edgar, deputy undersecretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, parent agency of the Coast Guard.

U.S. Sen. Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska, was one of several members of Congress who secured funding for the Coast Guard to purchase the Storis for $125 million under a special contract and operating arrangement during the Biden administration. The purchase deal passed Congress after years of lobbying and political donations by the ship’s former owners.

The Aiviq, built to support Royal Dutch Shell’s oil drilling operations in the Arctic Ocean off Alaska, was available because of a disaster that saw Shell’s drilling rig break loose from the Aiviq during a 2013 stormin the Gulf of Alaska. The rig ran aground in the Kodiak archipelago and Shell abandoned its drill plans for the Arctic.

The Aiviq was modified after post-disaster reviews found flaws in its design, and it went on to serve under contract with the Australian government in Antarctica. Then, the U.S. government became interested in the ship to fill a gap in Arctic coverage.

The U.S. Navy has no icebreakers, which leaves the Coast Guard as the agency in charge of icebreaking operations, critical for opening frozen seas to commerce, research and military missions. The agency currently has just one heavy icebreaker, and that ship is typically assigned to help operations in Antarctica. That leaves the medium icebreaker Healy as the only U.S. icebreaker available for general-purpose missions in the Arctic.

A 2023 analysis by the Coast Guard concluded that the service needs eight to nine polar icebreakers, including four or five heavy ships and four or five medium ones to perform its assigned missions.

“I think Singapore has more icebreaking capacity than we do,” Sullivan said. “That has left us far behind our adversaries. Russia has more than 50 operational icebreakers, many nuclear-powered, many weaponized. China, which has no Arctic territory, is building a polar fleet and is spending a lot of time off our shores, including this summer.”

As Sullivan spoke, China is operating at least five research icebreakers in international waters near Alaska.

Capt. Corey Kerns is the ship’s first commanding officer, fresh from an assignment in Japan as a liaison officer with the U.S. Navy’s Seventh Fleet.

“For the Coast Guard, the big strategic thing is to show that we can operate it, get it up north, show the flag,” Kerns said.

During his time in Japan, he became familiar with the disputes over the Senkaku Islands, whose ownership is disputed among China, Taiwan and Japan.

Ships from all three nations visit the waters around those islands.

“The ability to be present guarantees your ability to to maintain sovereignty. And that’s what we’re trying to get at here in the Arctic. We need more icebreakers to be present in our waters and be clear what is our waters,” he said.

First of many icebreakers planned for Coast Guard

In January, President Donald Trump said he would seek to acquire 40 Coast Guard icebreakers. The “Big Beautiful Bill” signed by Trump in July included almost $9 billion to build a series of heavy, medium and light ships.

Those include a series of heavy Arctic icebreakers larger than the Storis. The first of those, the Polar Sentinel, is expected to come from Bollinger Mississippi Shipbuilding in 2030, with additional ships every two years afterward.

“This is an amazing moment, because it doesn’t happen that often, but it’s going to be happening a lot more,” said acting Coast Guard Commandant Adm. Kevin E. Lunday.

The Storis is scheduled to be homeported in Juneau, where Sunday’s commissioning took place, but not for several years. For the time being, it will be homeported in Seattle, Washington.

Sullivan, speaking at the commissioning, said he would like to see the new ships homeported in Alaska as well — it’s where the ice is, he said to applause.

The Trump-signed budget measure includes $300 million for a new Coast Guard pier and other facilities in Juneau; construction has not begun, and no site has been finalized.

Both the Storis and the under-construction heavy icebreakers are too large to fit in the Coast Guard’s Kodiak base or in any port north of the Aleutian Islands. The Storis draws 34 feet, according to specifications published in 2013. The new heavy icebreakers are expected to have a similar draft. Either figure is deeper than what’s available in northern Alaska right now.

By the book, said Cmdr. Philip Baxa, chief of the Coast Guard’s aids to navigation and ice capabilities division, it takes the Coast Guard eight to 10 years to set up a new port from the time it’s chosen.

“We want to move much faster, but there’s a lot of work that has to be done to build out the pier and the shore infrastructure,” Lunday said.

He said things like housing and child care need to be available to accommodate Coast Guard personnel.

Currently, Juneau is experiencing major shortages of both.

“I chair the Coast Guard subcommittee,” Sullivan said, “so working with the Coast Guard, working with Juneau, working with the state, we’re going to press this. We’ve already made good progress on that.”

Additional work needed aboard Storis

The Storis, too, will need work and testing before it can fully perform its duties. During a pre-commissioning cruise on Saturday for members of the media and the families of the crew, one of the ship’s variable-pitch propellers malfunctioned, helping turn a planned five-hour excursion into an eight-hour one.

The malfunction was a minor one, but fixing it may have required turning off main power for a time, the ship’s captain said, and he didn’t want to do that while families were aboard.

The Storis has a helipad, but a Coast Guard helicopter has never landed there, tried a mid-air hoist, or refueled from the ship. Some labels throughout the ship still bear the name Aiviq, and the ship’s interior art includes photos from Louisiana bayous and New Orleans streets. In the ship’s mess hall are condiments bearing the names of southern grocery stores.

On Saturday’s cruise, employees from Edison Chouest Offshore, the company that formerly owned the Storis, stood alongside uniformed Coast Guard officers on the ship’s bridge.

“He’s my coach,” said Lt. j.g. Sophia Scott of chief mate Devin Keister, who wore civilian clothes next to her.

Since the spring, employees from Edison Chouest have been operating the Storis alongside enlisted Coast Guard members and officers, a unique setup for a Coast Guard ship.

Baxa, chief of the Coast Guard’s aids to navigation and ice capabilities division, helped organize the purchase of the Storis and the sprint to get it ready.

“I’ll never forget March 4 of 2025 when Admiral Lunday, our acting Commandant of the Coast Guard, directed me and my team to prepare Storis for operations and to sail away from Pascagoula, Mississippi, where the ship had been purchased and put into storage, no later than 1 June of 2025. I’m no mathematician, but that’s less than 60 days later, and at that point, zero crew members had reported aboard,” he said.

After sailing away, the ship spent another two weeks in Seattle for additional work, then arrived in Juneau during the first week of August.

Lunday said the Coast Guard’s partnership with Edison Chouest enabled the Coast Guard to put the Storis in service “much faster than we would have traditionally done.”

“The imperative,” Lunday said, “is that we build out the nation’s icebreaker fleet. When we see the potential adversaries that are moving to build their icebreakers, we’ve got to move faster as the United States, and we’re going to do that. … The original plan was not to have Storis up here for another year, but the national imperative was to move faster, and so that’s why it’s here.”

Storis has a mixed history

In 2012, while towing the circular drill rig Kulluk from the Arctic Ocean to Seattle, the Aiviq ran into a heavy storm south of Kodiak. The ship’s engines died, the tow line broke, and the Kulluk ran aground after the Aiviq’s crew was unable to re-establish the tow.

No oil spill resulted and no one was injured, but it contributed to Shell’s decision to abandon its Arctic drilling plans.

Two years later, the Coast Guard published a report on the accident, concluding that actions by the tow crew, management decisions and “design engineering deficiencies … relating to the Aiviq” contributed to the wreck.

Specifically, the report noted that vents allowed seawater to contaminate the ship’s fuel.

Since then, those vents have been modified, raised farther above the deck, and the ship went on to conduct two successful voyages to Antarctica. The ship is rated to break three feet of ice while moving at five knots, but during those trips, it was able to break between three and five feet while still moving forward, Baxa said.

After Shell discontinued its Alaska offshore drilling, Edison Chouest lobbied members of Congress and urged lawmakers to purchase the Aiviqfor use by the federal government.

The Coast Guard initially resisted. In a 2016 hearing of the U.S. House’s Coast Guard and Maritime Transportation Subcommittee, then-Coast Guard Vice Commandant Charles Michel told lawmakers that “our current opinion is that the ship is not suitable for military service, without substantial refit.”

Then-Rep. Don Young, R-Alaska, called Michel’s statement a “bulls**t answer” because the Aiviq would be asked to move ice, not perform military duties.

In 2022, after Young’s death in office, Congress passed the Don Young Coast Guard Authorization Act, which approved funding for the Coast Guard to buy a “United States built available icebreaker.”

The Coast Guard, which had been considering a Finland-built ship, switched to the Aiviq as the only available ship that met Congress’ qualifications.

Subsequent reporting by ProPublica showed an extensive history of political donations by Edison Chouest to members of Congress, including Alaska’s delegation.

“It is ready for Coast Guard service,” Lunday said of the Aiviq-turned-Storiswhen asked about the July 2016 hearing that labeled the Aiviq as unfit.

“We’ve learned a lot since then, and we’ve had great support from Congress to have the appropriations necessary last year to purchase the ship,” he said.

Sullivan, among the members of Congress who received contributions from Edison Chouest, denied that those donations contributed to the decision to purchase the Aiviq.

“It has nothing to do with it,” Sullivan said. “Zero. I’ve been pressing for more icebreakers any way possible for our country … and the Coast Guard was looking at the idea of a commercially available one.”

New ship carries relics of prior history

The new Storis is named after its predecessor, an icebreaker that was commissioned in 1942 and served until 2007, becoming the oldest commissioned Coast Guard cutter in the fleet at the time of its decommissioning and scrapping.

In 1957, it and several other ships sailed through the Northwest Passage, marking the first time an American ship had taken that route.

Thirty-two years after that historic voyage, the Storis assisted with the cleanup after the Exxon Valdez oil spill. Ed Sasser was a crewman on board at the time. On Saturday, he sailed aboard the new edition of his former ship.

“It’s pretty cushy compared to the old Storis,” he said, noting that both ships were and are unique vessels, not part of a larger class of ships.

If he were young again, he’d serve aboard the new ship “in a New York minute.”

“Time will tell how useful it is,” he said.

Remnants of the ship’s former life remain obvious throughout.

Belowdecks are large steel containers, intended to haul bulk dry concrete or other material to offshore oil fields. For now, they’re empty until the Coast Guard either removes them or finds a use for them.

Other pieces of the Storis’ original purpose could be useful to its new mission. Its stern holds heavy-duty towing gear, and large firefighting cannons jut from its superstructure.

The ship has no internal laboratory space, as does the Coast Guard’s other medium icebreaker, the Healy, but it does have deck attachments for container modules that could allow it to accommodate labs.

Already, one of those spaces was in use Sunday, holding the ship’s brand-new armory, including four .50-caliber machine guns.

“I’ve made this joke for many, many years … it’s that if you can imagine it, and you can put it into a standard 20-foot IMO container, I can embark it on board. … we had on board a very, very senior Marine Corps officer, and he asked, ‘hey, what if I put a Marine Raider team in a box?’ I said, ‘Yes, sir, I can embark that on board.’ It really does provide that flexibility for missions,” Baxa said.

The Coast Guard’s staffing contract with Edison Chouest is scheduled to run through November, and it could be extended for one year.

Both Baxa and the ship’s captain said they’ll be recommending that extension.

Lt. Cmdr. George Greendyk, the engineer officer on board the Storis, said he hasn’t had problems with the Edison Chouest civilian crew.

“Everywhere we go, we have people that have seen something like this before, and they’ve been certainly helpful answering questions for us and guiding us as we run the engineering plant,” he said.

“Right now, our primary mission is to just focus on learning the ship, training, preparing our policy and procedures,” said Lt. D.J. Corbett, the ship’s operations officer.

Corbett said that over the next two months, the Storis will head west, to Kodiak, then through the Bering Sea and north, through the Bering Strait. The ship’s port calls are still being finalized.

Corbett said being aboard an icebreaker means being able to see and do things that no other Coast Guard cutter experiences.

“I still remember the first time that I ever saw ice,” she said. “We were going down south. We had crossed the Antarctic Circle, and all of these massive icebergs just started flowing past us. And then we had right whales that were popping up and coming to see the ship. We had orcas. It was our last sunset. As we were heading south, it would be 24 hours of sunlight. So all of this was happening, the sun was setting, and then we saw a green flash that night. At first, we didn’t believe it. We were like, Did everyone see that? And so it was my moment of, I’m living in a National Geographic special. It was really amazing.”

The ship’s first captain looks ahead

Kearns, the ship’s first captain, is an officer who started as an enlisted man in 1996 and rose through the ranks, later earning degrees in ship design. He helped design a new class of icebreakers for the Great Lakes and served as the Coast Guard’s liaison to the U.S. Navy’s Seventh Fleet, which patrols the western Pacific.“Normally, you start off a ship designed by (the question): What capabilities are you trying to achieve? In this case, we need Arctic presence. That was the most important thing. So we’re willing to take some risk or we’re forced into it because our shipbuilding projects are so behind,” he said.

Critically for the ship’s future, he said, is to come up with the equivalent of the ship’s operating manual. Coast Guard officers are trained to run ships, but the Storis is unique.

“What are all the things you need to learn to do the same job on Storis? And then run all of our people through that. … I think success will be when we get all of that documentation done and then get all of our watchstanders what would be considered fully qualified,” he said.

Kerns acknowledged that there are some people who would prefer that the Storis jump quickly into law enforcement, fisheries patrols and search and rescue. He prefers a slower pace.

“We need to learn how to crawl. And that’s what we’re doing, Kerns said.

For example, the crew of the Storis hasn’t yet launched the ship’s small craft, which are stored in bays along the side of the hull, in open water.

“We’ve just started to gain proficiency in launching that in protected, calm seas. So next would be, what does it look like to launch that in open water? And then how do we need to drive the ship from the bridge to create the right conditions to safely launch that boat? And then that would help us build into, ‘Oh, this is how we would  perform Coast Guard mission sets.’”

Asked about the ship’s history, the critical 2014 report and whether he has safety concerns, he said no.

“I have no concerns. I feel totally safe on Storis,” Kerns said.

He said he’s familiar with reporting that analyzed what went wrong with the Aiviq and why it was unable to keep the Kulluk from running aground.

“It easily gets attributed to design flaws for the ship, which is a little bit misleading. In extreme weather, every ship has design flaws. There’s constraints on operations. Ships are designed to operate in certain conditions to a certain extent, and if you operate the ship past those constraints, you’re going to find out what’s going to fail first,” he said.

Some engineering changes were made after the Kulluk accident — the Aiviq’s fuel vents were raised, “which means you can take more water in the vicinity of them before it would down-flood. It’s not that it couldn’t possibly happen again, but it’s less likely.”

Kerns said the “creature comforts” aboard the ship are the most easily noticeable difference from a purpose-built Coast Guard ship.

The Storis has heated handrails, walkways and exterior stairs, a feature intended to eliminate the need for crew to beat ice away as it forms.

“There’s a lot of automation in places that we might not use it, because we use manpower instead,” he said.

Kerns said he’s also been impressed with the ship’s multiple redundancies.

“Almost every system has backups to the backups. They really thought about this thing being in the Arctic and independent and away from logistical support. There’s different ways to make water. There’s ways to handle sewage. I actually feel very comfortable with what the capabilities are,” he said.

“I’m definitely looking forward to doing ice breaking on this thing. It’s a lot of fun to drive,” Kerns said.

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