The USS Healey arrived in Alaska today to perform its summer arctic mission. The Healey is the largest Ice Breaker in the Coast Guard. When I did the reading to write this post I was impressed with the versatility of the Coast Guard and felt that I should mention it here.
We think of the Coast Guard in terms of rescues at sea and drug interdictions but its functions go much farther than this. Our Coast Guard is a complicated and diverse organization as we see when we state the Healey’s mission capabilities. The Healey is capable of scientific support, search and rescue, ship escort, environmental protection, and law and treaty enforcement.
It is 420 feet long and has a permanent 80 man crew. Its mission this summer will be hydrological research and the mapping of the continental shelf. there will be some experiments done with NASA which will largely consist of the collecting of water and ice samples to learn more about the refractive properties of sunlight in an arctic environment. Now it seems to me that many of our Coast Guard ring customers must be real eggheads based on the type of work that they will be assisting with.
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