Naval Station Everett

Naval Station Everett is a United States Navy installation on the Everett waterfront at the northeastern end of Puget Sound, Washington, 29 miles north of Seattle. It falls under Navy Region Northwest and was designed as a homeport for a carrier strike group. Roughly 6,000 sailors and civilian personnel are assigned to commands at the station, of whom about 350 belong to the installation itself.

The station homeports Arleigh Burke-class and Spruance-derived guided-missile destroyers, currently a group of seven Arleigh Burke-class hulls. No aircraft carrier is homeported there; USS Abraham Lincoln was based at Everett from 1994 until 2011, when it shifted to Naval Station Norfolk, and USS Nimitz was reassigned to Naval Base Kitsap in January 2015. United States Coast Guard units also operate from the base, including the Keeper-class coastal buoy tender USCGC Henry Blake, the Marine Protector-class patrol boat USCGC Blue Shark, and Port Security Unit 313.

The waterfront is built around a carrier pier 1,620 feet long and 120 feet wide, completed at a cost of $56.4 million and opened in June 1992. Support functions are separated from the operational waterfront: the Naval Support Complex at Smokey Point, 11 miles north of Everett near Marysville, occupies a 52-acre site built for $90 million from 1993 and contains a commissary, Navy Exchange, family service centre, education offices, bachelor officer quarters, chapel, a 50-room Navy Lodge and fleet parking for personnel of deployed Everett-based ships. It serves more than 30,000 personnel and dependents across Western Washington. The Marysville Armed Forces Reserve Center, opened in 2012 south of the support complex, houses the 364th Expeditionary Sustainment Command of the Army Reserve and Washington Army National Guard elements, with a 147,000-square-foot training centre.

The base originated in the Strategic Homeport concept advanced by Secretary of the Navy John Lehman in 1983, intended to disperse the fleet from its principal concentration areas. Everett was selected from thirteen candidate ports on 17 April 1984, Congress appropriated $43.5 million for construction on 2 October 1986, and ground was broken on 9 November 1987 on 143 acres purchased from the Port of Everett. Personnel from Naval Station Puget Sound transferred to the new fleet support and administration buildings in January 1994, and the station was dedicated on 8 April 1994. The first assigned ships, USS Ingraham and USS Ford, arrived on 3 September 1994.