Posted on 11/06/2006 8:57:44 AM PST by SmoothTalker
"NEW YORK - The legendary aircraft carrier USS Intrepid got stuck in the deep Hudson River mud Monday as powerful tugboats fought to pull it free to tow the floating museum downriver for a $60 million overhaul."
" After 24 years at the same pier on Manhattan’s West Side, the Intrepid began inching backward out of its berth, but the tugs moved it only a few feet before its giant propellers jammed in the thick accumulation of mud. The decommissioned war ship no longer has engines of its own."
"The Intrepid, launched in 1943, is one of four Essex-class carriers still afloat six decades after spearheading the naval defeat of Japan in the Pacific. It survived five kamikaze suicide attacks and lost 270 crewmen in battle.
Doomed to the scrap heap, it was purchased in 1981 by real estate developer Zachary Fisher, who realized his dream of turning the ship into the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum a year later.
It became one of New York’s major tourist attractions, drawing some 700,000 visitors a year. It also supports a Fallen Heroes Fund that has provided $14 million to aid families of service members killed and wounded in the line of duty and built a $35 million advanced training facility for disabled veterans."
(Excerpt) Read more at msnbc.msn.com ...
Odd. Good question, and I don't know.
Usually, planes are flown off before even routine (short) in-port periods.
Could be emergency upkeep, so they keep everything on board, but that would imply fuel and explosives too! (NOT something anybody in the yard wants in a work environment!)
The planes can get lifted off by crane once the carrier docks - sometimes to adjacent barges even, but from a drydock area that creates a hassle moving them through the drydock craneways and shipyard railroad tracks: bumpy and rough job.
Besides, nobody wants to waste a crane moving airplanes when scaffolding and piping and service lines are getting taken care of.
In the 80's, I was at a convention and we held our reception there one evening...great experience running around on that piece of history.
I wish California politicians would say the same thing about the USS Iowa. They even point to the costs of maintaining the USS Hornet at Alameda as an excuse to refuse the Iowa.
-PJ
This pig doesn't deserve to mention the carrier's name.
Oh, sure! Blame the river.
Not from a technical perspective, but from an AP Style Guide approach. Any journalist on the military beat worth his/her salt (Argh, argh, argh) know it.
Those "little" tugboats are amazing . . . from looking at them, one doesn't realize that they are basically plate-metal surrounding one big engine, or engines. When you see one working at capacity (or close), it's quite impressive.
Intrepid mission scrubbed in New York City after ship gets stuck in the Hudson River mud...Snip...
Monday's departure was timed to take advantage of the yearly high tide so the tugs could pull the 27,000-ton ship out of the slip where it has rested in up to 17 feet of mud. Removal of 600 tons of water from the Intrepid's ballast tanks gave the ship added buoyancy, and dredges removed 15,000 cubic yards of mud to create a channel from dockside to deeper water.
For the all time Granddaddy of groundings, it has to be the USS Missouri in 1950 when she got stuck in the mud near Norfolk VA. I read a book about it, and her brand spanking new Captain was on the bridge, taking her out of Norfolk.
They were doing 15 knots in that area in a 55,000 ton battleship, way faster than they should have been going, but the Captain apparently wanted to impress the crew.
As they approached Thimble Shoals, the Captain put her on a heading to take her across Thimble Shoals to the port, instead of to the starboard side of the navigation buoy.
The Coxswain, a low rated enlisted man who had been through the area dozens of times before, knew that was wrong, and informed the Captain they should pass to the starboard side, which the Captain ignored. He tried to tell him again, no result. On the third try, the Captain bit his head off in an exceptionally nasty way. When asked later why he did not persist in trying to inform the Captain, he said, "I tried three times and got chewed out for it. I bit my tongue from then on."
Down below in the map room, the Navigation Officer and an associate saw the marker buoy go by their porthole on the starboard side of the ship, and did a collective "Huh?" They furiously attacked the maps to be sure, then tried to call the bridge, to no avail. At this point, the condenser temperature began to rise as mud was sucked into the inlets, and sailors on the fantail saw mud being kicked up. But the ship did not slow down for a while, since the mud was so slick and the slope so shallow, that when the ship did become stuck, it happened so gradually that most of the crew had no idea.
Worse yet, it happened at an unusually high tide...so the ship rode seven feet out of the water within view of a major highway. She had gone nearly a half mile inland on the shoal.
It took two weeks to pull her off. They had to unload all fuel, water, supplies and munitions, and it took 12 tugboats, four on each side rocking her back and forth, and 4 astern pulling. They also had Navy divers over the sides with waterhoses underwater spraying the sides of the hull to break the grip of the mud.
Exactly the kind of engineering problem that can be solved by duct tape, nylon tarpaulins, an old Kirby and a few million ping pong balls.
hehe, spoken like a true geek engineer...:)
I was on the pier next to the stern (bow was facing the river) and when the stern tug was pushing full on (guessing it was trying to loosen up the ship) it created an incredible vortex of water between the Intrepid and the pier to the south. This was one of the smaller tugs.
While on board,I approached an elderly man in a wheelchair who was sporting a Marine Corps cap and asked him if he had been assigned to the Intrepid.He told me he hadn't but that he had been at Bougainville.
It was a memorable day for me and,I suspect,for my nephew,whose Dad had served in the Navy during the Vietnam era.
I knew something was wrong. I watched the tug near me cycle a couple times, some times pushing on the stern, sometimes pulling on the line, all the two massive bow tugs were pulling on the bow.
They tried, but they're held on by right wing nuts.
Any word on what happened to the Captain and the other senior officers?
One has to wonder about the engineers who were set to work on that.
From the captions on the other photos in the gallery, the Hancock was in drydock for repairs to the screws. It's possible she couldn't maintain sufficient speed to launch her aircraft.
It would fail upon filing an environmental impact statement.
BTW FYI
The Intrepid is being moved primarily so the pier can be repaired and modernized. While in drydock, they will scrap and paint the hull as a bonus.
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