Preserving history As the Arizona rusts, scientists work

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Subject: Preserving history As the Arizona rusts, scientists work........

http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20051207/news_1n7arizona.html



REMEMBERING PEARL HARBOR
As the Arizona rusts, scientists work to see if it can be saved

By Scott LaFee
STAFF WRITER
December 7, 2005

For decades, nobody looked to see what was happening to the battleship Arizona, sunk this day 64 years ago during the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.

At first, there simply wasn't time. There was fighting to be done and the Arizona was simply among the first catastrophic casualties of a second World War.

In time, though, the ship became a rallying point, a memorial and finally, an enduring symbol of sacrifice, loss and ultimate victory.


National Park Service photo

The USS Arizona Memorial was built in 1962 over the battleship's remains at the bottom of Pearl Harbor, in Hawaii. Nearly 1,200 officers and crew were killed when Japanese aircraft attacked Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941.

"The Arizona is now a sacred place," said James Delgado, an underwater archaeologist and executive director of the Vancouver Maritime Museum and co-author of the book "The USS Arizona." "I've worked on a lot of sunken vessels. When you add the element of sacrifice and loss, like you do with the Arizona, it transcends everything. The subject is no longer a twisted, scarred, battle-racked hulk of corroding steel. It's an icon."

An icon, nonetheless, made of corroding steel.

Which brings us to the present, to scenes earlier this year of scuba divers probing the wreck of the Arizona, drilling core samples from its hull, sending a remote-controlled submersible as deep as possible into the ship's collapsed innards.

Graphic:

Assessing Arizona

The Arizona is much more than the sum of its sunken, rusting parts, but it has become increasingly crucial to learn how those sunken, rusting parts are faring. How fast is the ship decaying? Is collapse imminent? In what condition are the fuel bunkers, which still contain an estimated 500,000 gallons of No. 6 oil?

More profoundly, can the Arizona be saved? Or will nature reclaim it, reducing the 608-foot vessel to a shapeless mound half buried in Pearl Harbor's fine gray silt, the remainder so encrusted with barnacles, oysters, corals and other marine life as to be unrecognizable?

Ship of fate

However slowly, the Arizona is falling apart and disappearing. Silt is filling the interior, 3 to 4 feet deep in some places. Scabs of encrusted hull occasionally fall off, exposing new steel to corrosive seawater.

Those entrusted with preserving the Arizona's memory face a conundrum: How much of that memory revolves around the actual ship?

"The Arizona memorial isn't a like a statue," said Paul Stillwell, a retired naval historian. "It's the actual thing itself, with the remains of hundreds of men inside."

As such, should the ship be preserved? Can it be?

The short answer to the latter question is no, not with existing technologies. Some observers have suggested using "sacrificial anodes," an idea first devised by Sir Humphrey Davy in 1824. Zinc anodes would be attached to the Arizona and connected to an electrical current.

The anodes would supply a steady stream of new electrons to the steel of the Arizona. The anodes would corrode, the ship's steel would not. The technology has been used successfully in floating ships and on oil platforms, but Russell doubts it would be effective on the Arizona. The battleship is too big and its architecture too complex. And it would be too expensive.

"The mission of the National Park Service is to preserve," said Douglas Lentz, superintendent of the Arizona Memorial. "If we can extend the life of the ship, we will. But you have to be realistic. If the solution costs $50 million, we can't do it. We don't have the money."

In any event, neither Lentz nor the scientists who have studied the Arizona think the issue is really about corroding steel.

"The slow disintegration of the ship is probably something most of us can live with," Lenihan said.

That's because the Arizona is no longer a ship. Or rather, it's something more than a ship.

"There will come a point when the Arizona Memorial will necessarily change," Delgado said. "The ship will have changed, the parts above water will have eroded away. The effect of seeing what's there will be different, particularly with the passing of the last people who were at Pearl Harbor or who remember what those times were like.

"But that doesn't mean the Arizona's significance will end. The ideals embodied in the death of that ship and the deaths of the men on her are timeless. There are memorials today that still draw people, even though they mark events that happened hundreds or thousands of years ago."

The emotions that fuel those memories, Delgado said, never corrode or disappear.
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Contributed,
YNCS Don Harribine, USN(ret)