Decommissioned Aircraft Carriers

What prompted me to start this thread -
Former Navy carrier on final voyage

A snippet from that article:
The former USS Saratoga (CV-60), a part of the Navy's carrier fleet from 1956 to 1994, is being towed down the Atlantic Seaboard by tugboat at about 7 mph, according to a report from the Maritime Executive. The voyage is expected to take about 16 days, the Navy says.
The Navy in May announced it was paying ESCO Marine of Brownsville, Texas, one cent to take the carrier off its hands for dismantling and recycling. The company makes money by selling the metal it salvages from the ship.
Saratoga veterans were among the crowds of people who gathered on Narragansett Bay on Thursday as the ship left Naval Station Newport on its final journey.
"A ship like this shouldn't be taken apart piece by piece," Mitchell Abood, who served aboard the Saratoga from 1985 to 1987, said in an article from the U.

S. Naval War College.

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I realise that most people on this board have little if any experience on an aircraft carrier, and may mostly skip this thread, but I have a more personal connection and this does really irritate me. Yes I understand the scope of the work and the sheer cost off turning these old warships into museums but seeing them sold for scrap just rubs me the wrong way.

What can happen if the museum idea is done properly - The Intrepid Museum. I have seen this ship but frankly it was "nothing special" despite being a WWII era ship after living and working on an operating carrier for something like 3 years at that point. I highly recommend visiting if you are ever in NYC/live in or near/etc. Most people will not have the admittedly jaded perspective I had at the time.
When the America (CV-66) decommed in 1996 my workshop (Oil Lab: kept the service tanks for the boilers clean and full, tested lube oil, etc) on the JFK (CV-67) received most of her BTs/MMs as we were the next available conventional carrier and certainly needed the help.

I have read there are still attempts to turn the Kennedy into a museum and I sincerely hope they can succeed on this one.I would love to visit the ship again as a museum and get permission to visit my old haunts which are all below the hangar bay (many below the waterline), and would no doubt be off limits to the regular tourists.

Anywho, my main point of thread - these carriers were the last of the Conventional carriers and the last that can be preserved as museums. Seeing them sold for scrap sounds damned shortsighted and deprives future generations of an opportunity to see what helped defend our freedoms for so many years.

For those that may not realise it or have read about it, you cannot save a nuclear carrier (or any ship with a reactor for that matter) in this fashion. The reactor is removed when they are decommissioned and the process of doing so rips them open like a tin can, which speeds up the scrapping process greatly.

 

even if they weren't sold for scrap, the memories that you have in that hulk will be lost on people coming to fantasize with their hoards of slobbering children and angsty teens what it was like to have a dayjob there

 

Here is an alternative, good or bad I can't tell
USS Oriskany

 

That would be the case with the Intrepid for me if I did not have the experience with the Kennedy. She was decommed before I was born and I have no personal experiences at all with her as an active ship, just the one visit that showed almost nothing as it is confined to the hangar bay and flight deck. It looked "wrong" seeing the Intrepid with a permanent gift shop and touristy crap everywhere when I could picture what she looked like in the active days easily enough without having been there.

Thought of that when I wrote the first post. I saw the special where they showed the ship John McCain served on during his younger years being turned into a reef. I would say better personally, they take great pains to remove anything that could contaminate the water and sink those ships in a precise fashion.
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I was just reading on Wikipedia about the Intrepid's on again, off again journey through the fleet over the years and this part never changes.
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"1965–1974

This was the final Fleet Rehabilitation and Modernization job performed by the New York Naval Shipyard, Brooklyn, New York, which was scheduled to close. In September 1965, Intrepid, with her work approximately 75% completed, ........"
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This happened to the Kennedy not long before I joined the crew when they closed the shipyard in Philly and kicked her out with far less than %75 repairs complete. Many of those repairs were "small items" like the fuel storage tanks (next to waste tanks) my workcenter dealt with every day. They had dividing walls so decayed with rust the contractors that eventually fixed them a few years later said they could push their finger through them without any real effort. These were the tanks we had to strip water and other junk out of on a fairly routine basis to keep the fuel clean enough for the boilers to burn.

 

I thought John McCain served on the Merrimac? Or was it the Monitor?

 

I think you mean the Constitution. He served on the maiden voyage working the sails I believe.
That was back when Strom Thurmond was still considered "middle aged" and overseeing the family plantation.

 

He's definitely talking about the Diversity. That old, old, wooden ship used in the civil war era

 

I see you are being generous. I was going back another 80 years or so to Old Ironsides (which is still in commission).

 

Two similar exhibits like this are
- the HMS Belfast in London (my wife and kids did this while I was working and really enjoyed clambering all over it - it doesn't hurt that it also provides a fairly good vantage for tower bridge.
- Sydney's maritime museum has 2 vessels, the HMAS Vampire and a submarine (can't remember the name). I remember visiting these with my parents and dad (who was an artillery radio operator) remembers firing the guns on the Vampire during the Vietnam war. Both were pretty interesting.

My question is there enough interest to convert more ships into museums? I'm not sure it is worth the (probably sizeable) cost to do so.

 

Very likely not. People always try with these ships and they invariably get turned into scrap*. The article on wikipedia said they recently spent something like 60 million on the Intrepid to upgrade the museum portion alone, and that was not counting the 55 milion to upgrade the pier.


edit: especially the carriers. That cost is obviously lower for a destroyer, frigate, etc, but still daunting no doubt.

 

The closest I came to carriers was touring the Texas and the Lexington. I'm not tall, but I'm a bit wide; I learned that being short & thin was an asset if one served aboard a ship. My (X)BIL was moving around with ease, he's about 5'5" and maybe 110 pounds on a good day, & he had served in the merchant marines. He's also a total gearhead, I learned more about engine function and maintenance than I ever wanted to know.

I can't imagine what it was like, namely the heat & the odor, working in the engine area while the engines were running.

 

An old U.S. aircraft carrier plays a role in the Neil Stephenson novel Snow Crash (which you should read, if you haven't yet).

I'm an historic preservationist and probably more sentimental than average, but old metal ships are constantly rusting. They're a nightmare to maintain, operate safely, or dispose of.

The most common fate for any old freighter or ocean liner is to be run up onto a beach in Bangladesh and taken apart by hand, a filthy and dangerous process. To scrap a vessel "properly," with First World safety and environmental precautions, costs far more than the value of all the metal, so nobody does it anymore.

You can't just run a ship through a shredder. The disassembly is extraordinary labor-intensive, and besides the scrap, it generates a mountain of useless waste.

The US military is very conscious of how bad it would look for its vessels to end up fouling the Indian Ocean, so it spends billions of dollars patching up and maintaining a "mothball" fleet of old ships that don't actually go anywhere.

The only real way out of this conundrum would be to create a hugely subsidized domestic military-ship-scrapping industry. Maybe this is a step in that direction.

Even getting the Saratoga for free, I can't imagine that ESCO Marine will make a profit just by selling scrap. I'm guessing there's a back-end subsidy, where the Navy will quietly make up the company's losses later on.

 

I just reread Snow Crash, for about the fifth time. Big time Neal Stephenson fan. Thanks for the information. I was wondering about selling a ship for only a penny. I had assumed it was worth more than that to the company.

 

The Kennedy was costing an average of one million dollars per day to operate back in the 90's when I was onboard. When a ship uses a mean 100,000-200,000 gallons of DFM daily just for the boilers it adds up quicky. (the 200k figure was pushing the ship on a flank bell all day, much like driving your car with the gas petal to the floor for an entire day) We inventoried and transferred that, no idea how much JP-5 the Grapes were using on the flight deck during flight ops keeping the thirsty F-14s full.
She was supposed to be in operation for a full 50 years until 2018 but those exorbitant operating costs helped cut 15 years off of that number.
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Speaking 0f rust, that reminded me of an amusing incident when we visited Ireland in '96. They brought out a scow to moor next to the ship as we could not anchor at a pier, to serve as a "pier" for the throng of locals that toured the ship and the off-going crewmemners; I suspect we were too large for what they could handle there but never specifically asked. In short order this punched a nice hole in the side of the ship just from normal water movement. You could see the some of the 10 feet of dead space/buffer zone that sits right next to the hull. (What would have saved a ship like the Titanic, but not the damage the Lusitania sustained)
The higher ups in command did the "walmart fix" and covered it in duct tape, and of course painted that standard grey so it almost blended in.

 

One of my former bosses served in the US Navy. Once aboard ship his first assignment was being part of a repair/maintenance crew. One of the guys dropped a wrench, not even a large one, which punched a hole through the hull. He and the other newbies exchanged some serious WTF?! looks.
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An old joke that doesn't really belong in this thread. It sucks, but has become an inside joke with my wife & I.

A young soldier arrives at his new base, and somehow finds himself with no work assigment. Not wanting to be discovered and possibly receiving an unpleasant assignment, he takes to walking around the base carrying a clipboard & papers. This works for about a week, until one day a superior officer stops him and asks him what he's doing. He replies, "Sir, I'm examining the BRTs, sir." The officer looks at him for a few seconds, then says, "Carry on."

After the officer leaves, an older soldier standing nearby says to the young soldier, "I've never heard of a BRT." The youngster replies, "They're right here, the Big Round Things."

 

Quoting this again because a different thought just crossed my mind.
The Constitution/ Old Ironsides (Link for those that can't picture her) is far older than these more modern naval vessels (217 years currently) and I suspect in far better condition to survive than metal vessels like the Big Sara that age badly during their active years and even worse when they do just sit there and wait for the end. I would pay a reasonable to go on a day cruise on the Constitution, that would be an experience most people just don't get anymore now unless you are in a film/programme filming onboard one of these vessels.
If it was one of those "you fall through a time portal and are trapped in this time period" things you see in various types of fiction, then I would say hell no. I would greatly prefer the Quantum Leap holographic observer type of thing for that experience.

 

i wonder what the minimum crew for a carrier is just to travel from port to port? how cool would that be to live on a decommissioned carrier (just for grins, not even talking about zombo-apoc) and travel the world?

 

Speaking as a former engineer - if you are talking about a conventional carrier moving under its own power, a major part of your crew is the BT/MMs working below decks tending to the boilers, keeping the fuel clean and service tanks ready to go with active transferring from storage tanks, and a million other things that the folks in the pretty dungarees working in the higher areas never think about. When we were underway it was common for me to not see the sunlight for 3-4 days at a time.
Even a "skeleton crew" is not that small for a carrier, and as I mentioned earlier in this thread the fuel costs/requirements alone are steep and require frequent unreps (underway replenishments) for fuel alone, never mind food.
These ships are not like the NCC-1701 D in science fiction where one or two people with command codes could run the entire ship if the computers were online and the warp engines in stable condition.

 

we have a few around here...Bremerton shipyard...xoxoxoo
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tours available (limited access)...but you can drive right up to the front of them...xoxoxoo
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public highway at left of screen,not even in the base...xoxoxoo

 

what about the nuclear ones?