Taking on the Navy
Kristin Shott knows a thing or two about the hot seat. She's a whistle-blower, a gutsy, no-nonsense Navy employee whose persistent complaints about faulty welding on several U.S. aircraft carriers triggered a Navy investigation three years ago. In the end, investigators substantiated Shott's allegations that unqualified welders had performed "critical" welds on the catapult hydraulic piping systems used to help launch fighter jets on the USS Abraham Lincoln, the USS Nimitz, and two other carriers. The Navy also found welding flaws on a fifth carrier, the USS Carl Vinson. For most folks, that would have been vindication enough, but Shott wasn't satisfied. The safety of sailors and aviators was at stake, she says, and she pressed her complaint about welding flaws on a sixth carrier, the USS Kitty Hawk. That carrier was deployed to the Persian Gulf in the early days of the Iraq war two years ago. This week, the U.S. Office of Special Counsel, the government outfit in Washington that handles whistle-blower complaints, is set to disclose that the Navy has also substantiated Shott's claims about inferior welds on some of the Kitty Hawk's catapult piping systems. The Navy rejected other complaints Shott filed about pipefitting and soldering work on Navy ships and aircraft. The Office of Special Counsel is also scheduled to report, in a letter to President Bush, that the Navy has repaired all the defective welds on the Kitty Hawk. "Our brave service members depend on the integrity and safety of their equipment in ongoing operations around the world," says Scott Bloch, the special counsel. "Ms. Shott's decision to blow the whistle averted a potential catastrophic loss of life and equipment."
The life of a whistle-blower isn't easy, however. Shott, 38, a Navy welder based at the North Island Naval Air Depot in San Diego, has also filed a reprisal complaint against the Navy. She was demoted and denied a supervisory promotion, she says, after filing her initial complaints in 1999. "My career has been destroyed," she says. "I am no longer doing critical welds." The Navy insists that it did not punish her, but the Office of Special Counsel doesn't agree. "Because of her whistle-blowing," it said last month in a letter to her attorney, Navy officials "improperly" removed her from an elite repair team and denied her a promotion.
This story appears in the May 16, 2005 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.
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