(March 2011) Whenever a disaster happens somewhere, the US Navy is frequently a first-responder.  Recent deployments include  the 2010 Haitian earthquake, the 2004 tsunami, and the September 2010 flooding in Pakistan. As I revise this page, the US Navy is preparing to help respond to the March 2011 Japanese megaquake.

The military is frequently the first responder to a disaster because they have the equipment, manpower, and resources to respond to anything that happens anywhere in the world.

The US Navy currently has 11 nuclear-powered aircraft carriers, at least 10 smaller amphibious assault ships, and support vessels of all types.

One of these 11 active carriers is the USS Enterprise. This ship was the US Navy’s very first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier. 24 months and $662 million were just spent to maintain and renovate the ship. Now it’s basically as-good-as-new.

The Navy is planning to send the Enterprise on two 6-month cruises before throwing it away. They’ll have to cut it up to extract the nuclear reactors, so there’s no prospect for turning it into a museum. The Enterprise’s replacement, the USS Gerald R. Ford, is specifically designed to reduce operating costs. The Enterprise is just too expensive for the Navy to keep as an active warship.

Instead of throwing away a perfectly functional ship, I propose the USS Enterprise (CVN-65) be dedicated to disaster response.

Disasters happen all the time. Sometimes these take the form of severe weather – hurricanes and tornadoes, blizzards and flooding. Other types of natural disasters include earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanic eruptions. Whenever part of the planet is affected, humans organize to help our neighbors survive and recover.

But pulling together a relief effort can be problematic. Sometimes we humans are able to respond quickly. Chileans handled the aftermath of their 2010 magnitude 8.8 earthquake very well. Responding to other crises is more of a challenge. Haitians had real problems responding to their Jan. 12, 2010, magnitude 7.0 quake:

Nineteen days [after the earthquake], only 32 percent of Haitians in need had received any food (even if just a single meal), three-quarters were without clean water, the government had received only two percent of the tents it had requested and hospitals in the capital reported they were running “dangerously low” on basic medical supplies like antibiotics and painkillers. On Feb. 9, the Washington Post reported that food aid was little more than rice, and “Every day, tens of thousands of Haitians face a grueling quest to find food, any food. A nutritious diet is out of the question.” (src)

One of the differences in our ability to respond to a disaster lies in the development level of a country – Chile is politically stable, while Haiti has been a political basket case for the last few decades. But sometimes developed nations also respond poorly when the unexpected happens.

Environmental Catastrophy Causes Mass Confusion

When BP’s Macondo well was flowing freely, company and government officials didn’t know what to do. People everywhere were running around in a state of confusion. The oil gushed for months, and there was no strategy to contain or mitigate the effects of the oil on the environment. Neither BP nor anyone else was prepared for the magnitude of the gusher. One of the few tools available was spraying chemical dispersants to keep the oil from floating in slicks on the surface, but these chemicals were quite toxic as well.

Crude oil slowly seeps into the Gulf of Mexico at a thousand different locations every day. Bacteria consumes the oil when it reaches the water, which prevents seeped oil from ever reaching shore. I thought, “if there are bacteria in the gulf that eat crude oil, and those bacteria need oxygen to consume the oil, wouldn’t adding oxygen to the water help the gulf clean itself?”

I typed up a brief proposal with supporting links, gave it a catchy title, and put it up on a few sites. Feedback was generally positive. To give a short summary, To Save the Gulf, Send the Enterprise advocated using the USS Enterprise’s nuclear reactors to power air compressors for oxygenating the ocean. These air bubblers would have provided oxygen for the oil-eating bacteria, thereby mitigating the damage done by BP’s blowout.

One of the readers suggested that perhaps pumping air down to the depths of the ocean wouldn’t work like I thought it would, and that a better strategy would be to oxygenate the water and pump warm oxygen-rich water to the plumes of oil instead.

While I got a few thousand people to look at my idea, thousands of competing ideas were being floated at the same t