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Hospital Ship Comfort to Support FEMA Hurricane Relief Efforts

Navy NewsStand

Story Number: NNS050901-23
Release Date: 9/1/2005 5:20:00 PM

From Military Sealift Command Public Affairs

BALTIMORE (NNS) -- The U.S. Navy's Military Sealift Command hospital ship USNS Comfort (T-AH 20), based here, was activated Aug. 31 in support of Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) efforts to provide medical support in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

Comfort, one of the largest trauma facilities in the United States, is being readied quickly for her mission and is expected to get underway for the Gulf Coast by September 3.

Comfort is normally kept at Baltimore's Canton Pier in reduced operating status with a cadre crew of 18 civil service mariners who maintain the vessel, as well as a hospital support staff of 58 military personnel who care for the ship’s hospital facilities, equipment and supplies. When called to action, the ship is designed to be activated, crewed, mission-ready and able to sail in five days.

Additional crew members and medical personnel are now arriving on board, specific medical supplies are being procured and ship systems are being readied to expedite the ship's departure.

It will take the 894-foot hospital ship about seven days to reach the U.S. Gulf Coast region, with a stop in Mayport, Fla. Comfort will stop in Mayport en route to the Gulf Coast to load additional medical supplies, as well as additional hospital personnel, mostly from the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md.

The ship will get underway with about 270 military personnel who operate the ship's on-board Medical Treatment Facility and a crew of 63 civil service mariners from Military Sealift Command who operate the ship. The ship will be initially staffed to support 250 patient beds.

Comfort is one of two Navy hospital ships. Her sister ship, USNS Mercy (T-AH 19), is berthed in San Diego and has not been ordered to activate. Mercy deployed to Southeast Asia in January in response to the Dec. 26 tsunami for a six-month humanitarian relief mission, during which Mercy treated more than 100,000 patients in Indonesia, East Timor and Papua New Guinea.

Comfort was last called to duty for Operation Iraqi Freedom. In January 2003, the ship sailed from Baltimore to the Persian Gulf to provide medical care to U.S. military personnel, Iraqi civilians and enemy prisoners of war. The ship also activated on Sept. 12, 2001, and spent three weeks in New York City providing support to relief workers in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.