Tugs to Try Budging Intrepid Again, With Less Pomp

NY Times ^ | December 2, 2006 | PATRICK McGEEHAN

[neverdem]

A month after failing to budge the aircraft carrier Intrepid from its muddy berth, a team of tugboats will try again on Tuesday morning to tow it across the Hudson River to New Jersey for repairs and refurbishment.

The next attempt to move the Intrepid, which has housed a military museum on the West Side of Manhattan since 1982, is scheduled to begin between 7:30 and 9:30 a.m., during high tide, Bill White, the president of the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum, said yesterday.

The five-mile voyage to a dry dock in Bayonne, N.J., will take several hours, but it will not be accompanied by the pomp and ceremony that were arranged for the first attempt on Nov. 6, he said.

That morning, the day before Election Day, two senators and two former mayors gathered on a pier next to the Intrepid’s longtime home to praise the ship and see it off.

“We had the party last time,” Mr. White said. “It will be a celebratory day, but without the fanfare and the bands.”

How celebratory depends, of course, on whether the ship leaves this time. Last time, despite nearly 30,000 horsepower from the twin engines of seven tugboats, the Intrepid moved only a few feet before its four giant propellers were snagged in a mound of mud on the river bottom.

Officials for the Intrepid had hired a dredging crew to dig a path that would serve as a driveway to the shipping channel. But when the tugs started heaving, the ship’s hull plowed the mud into a barrier that engineers dubbed the “speed bump.”

After that, the Navy sent a salvage team to oversee the second round of dredging. Workers cleared the mud from around the propellers and dug a trench 40 feet wide and 35 feet...

[neverdem]

Good Luck!
New attempt planned to move USS Intrepid

A clam-shelled bucket drops mud from the Hudson River into a barge near the stern of the USS Intrepid, in this Tuesday, Nov. 14, 2006 file photo, in New York where a "military style" dredging expedition is underway to get the stuck World War II aircraft carrier out of the mud. A Navy-backed dredging operation to clear bottom mud from around the USS Intrepid is complete and the high-powered tugboats were ready, but officials were silent on a possible second try to move the historic aircraft carrier to a New Jersey dry dock for a two-year overhaul. (AP Photo/Kathy Willens)

Don Hogan Charles/The New York Times
The survey boat Michele Jeanne at the stern of the aircraft carrier Intrepid earlier this week. A new effort to move the carrier is planned Tuesday.

[highball]

Take care of her, boys. She's priceless.

[Disambiguator]

Is the Navy planning to put the ship back into service?

[GSlob]

Maybe they need to stitch to it some large inflatable pontoons and simply lift the whole thing a bit.

[Fierce Allegiance]

Todays moon tides should help.

[highball]

Is the Navy planning to put the ship back into service?

Nope - the pier is being rebuilt and the ship overhauled to improve the museum. It'll be great when it's done.

[SunTzuWu]

Is the Navy planning to put the ship back into service?

The ship must be moved because Pier 86, which is controlled by the Hudson River Park Trust, a state authority, is crumbling and needs to be replaced. As for the ship, its hull will be sandblasted and repainted and its exhibition spaces and some other sections of the interior will be refurbished.

The cost of the entire project, including rebuilding the pier, will exceed $60 million, and will be financed by federal, state and city agencies.

Mr. White said the ship would stay in Bayonne until May, then be moved to Staten Island until the fall of 2008. It will be absent from Manhattan for the Navy’s Fleet Week celebration next May, but Mr. White said he was trying to persuade the Navy to reschedule Fleet Week in 2008 to coincide with the Intrepid’s return to Pier 86.

[Vaquero]

give her a little gas and my intrepid goes....

all kidding aside..... the original 'Intrepid' in the Hudson is a beautiful girl...and I hope she can be moved, refurbished, and restored to the spot so she can continue to inspire us all

[Mike Darancette]

Global warming should take care of it.

[Lx]

My thoughts exactly.

[conservativehusker]

Those windows on the bottom picture look like house windows..did they install apartments for the staff???

[neverdem]

Those windows on the bottom picture look like house windows..did they install apartments for the staff???

I have no idea. But the ship is now a museum. I wouldn't be surprised to find offices.

[Ditto]

The Intrepid's been in tighter spots than this.

April 16, 1945 USS Intrepid CV-11 on fire off Okinawa after being hit by a Kamikaze. The attack killed 8 crewmen. (Intrepid was also hit by Kamikaze aircraft Oct. 30, 1944 which left 10 crewmen dead.)

[NicknamedBob]

I'm just puzzled why they don't use water-injection into the mud to plasticize it while they're moving the ship.

It would stir up the water quite a bit, but it should unstick the ship.

[Liebenator]

You don't want to stir up to much sediment in the Hudson. Everything from Jimmy Hoffa to PCP's from Pittsfield are in that muck....

[oyez]

With the Intrepid's weak catapults, they will have to bring these guys back

The last I heard her generators ,boilers and turbines are pretty bad shape. Sitting around inactive in active for thirty some years hasn't helped any.

I would think the renovation is for corrosion repair.

[Nailbiter]

pung

[the invisib1e hand]

there's something poetic and maybe prophetic about a warship being stuck in the mud when Hillary Clinton is around.

Gee, the one week I don't go in to work, and this happens right outside...