The Coast Guard is in the opening stages of what promises to be a long, complex and expensive repair of its largest icebreaker, which suffered a crippling engine fire in August.

The service should know in the coming days where the repair work on the USCGC Healy will take place, but the effort promises to be mammoth, involving cutting the ship open to remove its 106-ton engine, and floating a new engine by barge from Baltimore through the Panama Canal to the West Coast.

The fire occurred just after Healy picked up a group of 11 scientists in Seward, Alaska to run experiments on ice flow patterns in the Arctic. The ship eventually sailed home to Washington State under its own power. As a result of the incident, the Coast Guard canceled all Arctic operations at sea.

On Tuesday, a 23-year-old replacement engine was hauled out of a building at the Coast Guard’s facility in Baltimore to begin the long trip to the West Coast.

The engine is so large a structure built around it had to first be dismantled. Once it was moved to the barge, it was covered by a custom-fabricated steel enclosure welded to the barge’s deck, because, as Lt. Cmdr. Stephen Brickey, a Coast Guard spokesman said, “the sensitivity of the motor requires extensive protection in order to make the VIP barge transit around and through the Panama Canal.”

The logistics of the Healy work, from the barge trip onward, promise to be immense.

“The cutter will need to replace the starboard propulsion motor, which presents unique challenges,” Brickey said. “When the cutter was originally built, it was basically built around these motors.”

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