Monday, October 28, 2013

I’d Buy That for a Penny, Too!

It was one of those headlines that catches your eye from the corner of the page: “Carrier Sells for a Penny!” Obviously, this is one of those outrageous cases of governmental waste in action! We must leap to arms, write to our Congresspersons, demand action, and speak loudly in public – or at least put our caps lock key on and leave it there! Unfortunately, once you actually call up the story and read it most of the fanfare drains away relatively quickly; the carrier in question is the former U.S.S. Forrestal (CV-59), commissioned in 1955 and decommissioned thirty-eight years later in 1993. For the past twenty years she’s been more of a political and ecological football than anything you could call a ship, and it’s actually past time somebody did something with her hulk.

From a historical standpoint, Forrestal was a significant development; the largest carrier constructed by that point in history and the first ship to include innovations such as an angled flight deck, a steam-powered launch catapult, or an optical landing control system during her construction. Like the later and somewhat larger nuclear-powered super carriers, Forrestal served both as a symbol of American military power and as an instrument of force projection all over the world. With the end of the Cold War and the gradual drawdown in Navy requirements, however, the need for the older carriers began to decline following the first Gulf War, and several of these ships were decommissioned and offered for use as monuments or museums, much like the U.S.S. Midway (museum ship in San Diego, California) or the U.S.S. Intrepid (museum ship in New York City). In the event, however, Forrestal became a more difficult issue…

It should come as no surprise to anyone that it is an expensive proposition to maintain an 81,000-ton ship in readiness to sail and fight; what continues to surprise many people is that it is also expensive to maintain one as a floating museum. Of course, anything made of metal that is floating in salt water is going to have to deal with corrosion, and a museum (of any kind) also has to deal with maintaining displays and exhibits and with keeping the interiors clean and safe enough so that the tourists won’t accidentally hurt themselves. This isn’t necessarily easy to do inside the hull of a warship, which (in fairness) was never designed for small children, idiots, or members of Congress. And even assuming you can raise the money to acquire and convert the hull, tow it to its final resting place, and maintain both the hull and its contents, there’s still the issue of where to put the museum…

In the end, Forrestal was on the donation list for over a decade while various groups tried to raise the money to buy her, but ultimately those efforts fell short. There are, after all, only so many carrier enthusiasts, and only so many ports that can both house and afford a museum ship of that size. There was a second effort in the early 2000s to use the ship as an artificial reef; a number of former American warships have been utilized in this fashion, but these efforts fell through as well. All that was left at that point was to sell the ship for reclamation, to be broken apart and scrapped. Oddly enough, this also proved difficult…

Despite the desire to view an aircraft carrier – or any other large vessel – as just an ocean-going collection of metal, such a ship is actually better described as a floating waste dump, containing forty years worth of petroleum waste, battery acid, asbestos, heavy metals, lead-based paints and other toxic chemicals. Cleaning one up enough to use it as an artificial reef is a massive undertaking, and highly expensive; breaking one up for parts is even harder, and requires more OSHA and EPA clearances than the average person would believe. It is still possible to make money on such a salvage operation, given enough time and the right facilities, but it isn’t easy and it’s almost always something that our government would be better advised to outsource than try to do in-house. So if you were thinking about trying to by one of the other decommissioned pre-nuclear super carriers for a penny, I’d have to advise against it. It’s more fun to blog about anyway…

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