PASCAGOULA - The bomb-damaged section of the USS Cole has been removed and an assessment of the ship's systems is nearly complete, but a final price tag on the work will not be available for a few months.
"If you were to look at the Cole today, you wouldn't be able to tell that the ship was damaged by a blast," Navy Comm. Steve Metz, who is overseeing repairs of the vessel at Litton Ingalls Shipbuilding, said Tuesday.
The Cole, a $1 billion Navy destroyer, was attacked during a refueling stop in Yemen's Aden harbor on Oct. 12. The bomb blew a hole 40 feet wide and 40 feet high in the ship's hull. Seventeen U.S. sailors were killed in the attack.
Damage was so extensive to the destroyer's port side that it had to be returned to the United States aboard the Norwegian-owned heavy-lift ship Blue Marlin. It arrived Dec. 13 at Ingalls, where it was christened in 1995.
A few hundred Ingalls workers have been removing the damaged section of the ship and building replacement sections.
Ingalls received a $105 million contract from the Navy earlier this month for repairs, but the final amount will be larger, Metz said.
"That was just so we could get started," he said.
Work on the Cole is taking place in a secured area not far from where it was built six years ago. Ingalls officials would not comment on the specifics of the job.
Metz said the repairs "were going pretty good," although the project was anything but normal.
Typically, when a Navy ship is scheduled for repairs or maintenance, the planning, budgeting and ordering begins 18 months in advance.
"We're compressing that into a few months," Metz said.
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