In order to participate in the GunBroker Member forums, you must be logged in with your GunBroker.com account. Click the sign-in button at the top right of the forums page to get connected.
Monitor's Gun Turret Set to Surface
Josey1
Member Posts: 9,598 ✭✭
Monitor's Gun Turret Set to Surface
Thursday, July 25, 2002
BY TIM FRIEND
USA TODAY
Dec. 31, 1862: The Union Navy's first ironclad warship, the USS Monitor, is under tow from Hampton Roads, Va., to do battle at the port of Wilmington, N.C. The calm seas that greeted the Monitor's crew at daybreak have become a roiling nightmare 16 miles off the coast of Cape Hatteras. Frigid water crashes over the low-lying deck and floods into the Monitor's hull faster than the steam-driven pumps can expel it.
At 10:30 p.m., Cdr. Bankhead of the Monitor sends a distress signal via lantern to the tow vessel, the USS Rhode Island. The Rhode Island's captain orders the towline cut and sends lifeboats to rescue the Monitor's crew. Some of the men are saved, but shortly after midnight the lantern disappears. The Monitor plunges stern first toward the bottom, rolling upside down along the way. It slams into the seafloor at a depth of 240 feet. The impact sends the 150-ton impenetrable gun turret -- made famous in the March 9 battle against the CSS Virginia -- sliding down the deck where it comes to rest upside down beneath the hull. Sixteen crewmen are missing.
July 18, 2002: A 300-foot barge, the Wotan, is moored over the wreck site of the Monitor. The seas are deceptively calm in this area known as the Graveyard of the Atlantic. Rapidly changing and sometimes-bizarre weather patterns have caused dozens of ships to sink in this region during the past four centuries.
On the barge, nearly 150 personnel from the U.S. Navy and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) are in the thick of difficult operations to recover the Monitor's turret. Teams of elite divers, marine archaeologists and scientists are bustling all over the noisy and jam-packed deck.
At 10:30 a.m., Cdr. Bobbie Scholley issues orders to lower a massive eight-legged steel claw, or "spider," from the Wotan's deck down to the sunken Monitor. On the seafloor, divers begin attaching the 50-ton structure to the turret. In the next week or two, Scholley will issue another order to raise the turret, enclosed in the spider, to the surface -- and the modern Navy will raise the remains of the first ancestor of the modern battleship.
"We are three weeks into the expedition," Scholley says over the roar of diesel generators that power the life support systems for the dive teams. "The divers and everyone else are working 24 hours a day until the job is complete."
Recovery of the turret will cap a five-year effort to rescue the most important features of the ironclad before they deteriorate into an unrecognizable clump of rust, says John Broadwater, director of the Monitor National Marine Sanctuary, designated in 1975 to protect the wreck.
"The initial goal was to study the Monitor in place on the seabed," Broadwater says. "But after 1990 it became clear that the Monitor was no longer stable. Recovery of the entire vessel was determined impossible, so we began planning ways to recover the most important parts."
Broadwater was one of the first people to dive to the wreck in the early 1970s and to begin efforts to preserve the Monitor. In 1977, the research submersible Johnson Sea Link was used to study the Monitor and retrieve artifacts.
During the past five years, NOAA, the U.S. Navy and the Mariner's Museum at Newport News, Va., have worked in a partnership recovering and preserving the Monitor's steam engine, skeg assembly and propeller shaft. For the Navy, it's a chance to give Navy divers from SEALs to reservists valuable technical field training. The Mariner's Museum, headed by John Hightower, is conserving the artifacts for the public to see firsthand. The museum already has the engine, skeg, propeller shaft, and its prize -- the red-glass lantern used as the Monitor's distress signal.
July 18, 2002, 4:30 p.m.: The Johnson Sea Link II submersible slips beneath the surface in a cloud of bubbles and stops inches above the seafloor. Pilot Phil Santos finesses a toggle on the console and glides the submersible toward the Monitor.
As the sub approaches, a black grouper emerges from beneath the Monitor's bow and charges at the acrylic sphere that houses the pilot and a reporter. Broadwater, aboard in the sub's rear compartment, says the grouper has adopted the Monitor as its home and tends to be territorial.
At last, the turret comes into view, covered by the spider. A Navy diver from the same team that retrieved bodies from the submerged TWA Flight 800 is at work on the spider. Broadwater sighs. The spider is sitting at an awkward angle. The base of one leg of the spider has caught on a section of hull plate next to the turret. Now the divers must work quickly to get the spider into correct position.
"Murphy's Law," says Broadwater.
Every operation this huge has glitches. This is one of them. Divers work through the night to free the leg from the plate. On the ship, Navy personnel huddle around video monitors as divers prepare to cut the deck plate from beneath the uncooperative leg.
"Make it hot," says diver Terry Pace from the seafloor. A technician sends a current of electricity to Pace's cutting torch. A burst of bright light comes into view of the camera on Pace's dive helmet.
Marine archaeologist Jeff Johnston watches on a screen at the other end of the barge in NOAA's air-conditioned but cramped trailer. All on board are shaking their heads about the glitch. Three inches of deck plate holds the 50-ton spider askew.
Johnston, who hasn't slept for nearly 50 hours, is crossing his fingers that nothing else goes wrong.
"There's something about this part of the ocean. Murphy's ZIP code is here." %% U.S. Navy divers working on the Monitor are divided into two units.
The "surface air" unit members breathe a mixture of helium (84.5 percent) and oxygen (15.5 percent) and adhere to strict guidelines governing the amount of time at bottom. At a depth of 240 feet, the divers have only 30 minutes to reach the bottom, get their job done and return to the surface without suffering serious complications. They also must undergo about two hours in a decompression chamber to get all the nitrogen out of their tissues. Nitrogen is the diver's devil. It can make divers feel drunk -- not good in a high-risk environment -- and it causes the bends by making the blood bubble if a diver surfaces too fast or fails to undergo proper decompression.
To speed up the mission by getting more work time at the bottom, the Navy is using a second "saturation" dive unit that allows divers to stay underwater at great depths safely for about two weeks. Saturation refers to the physiological fact that after a couple of hours, a body will absorb all the nitrogen it can take and the pressure in the lungs will equal the pressure at depth.
While a small number of Navy divers do saturation dives in a chamber, Capt. Chris Murray says he hopes the Monitor expedition will convince the government to train and establish a full-time saturation diving unit. Such a unit would enable the Navy to perform the type of rescue that could have saved the lives of the Russian sailors trapped in the Kursk submarine that sank in August 2000 in the Berents Sea.
"Right now, if the same thing happened to us, we couldn't do any more than the Russians did," Murray says. %%
http://www.sltrib.com/07252002/thursday/756228.htm
"If cowardly and dishonorable men sometimes shoot unarmed men with army pistols or guns, the evil must be prevented by the penitentiary and gallows, and not by a general deprivation of a constitutional privilege." - Arkansas Supreme Court, 1878
Thursday, July 25, 2002
BY TIM FRIEND
USA TODAY
Dec. 31, 1862: The Union Navy's first ironclad warship, the USS Monitor, is under tow from Hampton Roads, Va., to do battle at the port of Wilmington, N.C. The calm seas that greeted the Monitor's crew at daybreak have become a roiling nightmare 16 miles off the coast of Cape Hatteras. Frigid water crashes over the low-lying deck and floods into the Monitor's hull faster than the steam-driven pumps can expel it.
At 10:30 p.m., Cdr. Bankhead of the Monitor sends a distress signal via lantern to the tow vessel, the USS Rhode Island. The Rhode Island's captain orders the towline cut and sends lifeboats to rescue the Monitor's crew. Some of the men are saved, but shortly after midnight the lantern disappears. The Monitor plunges stern first toward the bottom, rolling upside down along the way. It slams into the seafloor at a depth of 240 feet. The impact sends the 150-ton impenetrable gun turret -- made famous in the March 9 battle against the CSS Virginia -- sliding down the deck where it comes to rest upside down beneath the hull. Sixteen crewmen are missing.
July 18, 2002: A 300-foot barge, the Wotan, is moored over the wreck site of the Monitor. The seas are deceptively calm in this area known as the Graveyard of the Atlantic. Rapidly changing and sometimes-bizarre weather patterns have caused dozens of ships to sink in this region during the past four centuries.
On the barge, nearly 150 personnel from the U.S. Navy and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) are in the thick of difficult operations to recover the Monitor's turret. Teams of elite divers, marine archaeologists and scientists are bustling all over the noisy and jam-packed deck.
At 10:30 a.m., Cdr. Bobbie Scholley issues orders to lower a massive eight-legged steel claw, or "spider," from the Wotan's deck down to the sunken Monitor. On the seafloor, divers begin attaching the 50-ton structure to the turret. In the next week or two, Scholley will issue another order to raise the turret, enclosed in the spider, to the surface -- and the modern Navy will raise the remains of the first ancestor of the modern battleship.
"We are three weeks into the expedition," Scholley says over the roar of diesel generators that power the life support systems for the dive teams. "The divers and everyone else are working 24 hours a day until the job is complete."
Recovery of the turret will cap a five-year effort to rescue the most important features of the ironclad before they deteriorate into an unrecognizable clump of rust, says John Broadwater, director of the Monitor National Marine Sanctuary, designated in 1975 to protect the wreck.
"The initial goal was to study the Monitor in place on the seabed," Broadwater says. "But after 1990 it became clear that the Monitor was no longer stable. Recovery of the entire vessel was determined impossible, so we began planning ways to recover the most important parts."
Broadwater was one of the first people to dive to the wreck in the early 1970s and to begin efforts to preserve the Monitor. In 1977, the research submersible Johnson Sea Link was used to study the Monitor and retrieve artifacts.
During the past five years, NOAA, the U.S. Navy and the Mariner's Museum at Newport News, Va., have worked in a partnership recovering and preserving the Monitor's steam engine, skeg assembly and propeller shaft. For the Navy, it's a chance to give Navy divers from SEALs to reservists valuable technical field training. The Mariner's Museum, headed by John Hightower, is conserving the artifacts for the public to see firsthand. The museum already has the engine, skeg, propeller shaft, and its prize -- the red-glass lantern used as the Monitor's distress signal.
July 18, 2002, 4:30 p.m.: The Johnson Sea Link II submersible slips beneath the surface in a cloud of bubbles and stops inches above the seafloor. Pilot Phil Santos finesses a toggle on the console and glides the submersible toward the Monitor.
As the sub approaches, a black grouper emerges from beneath the Monitor's bow and charges at the acrylic sphere that houses the pilot and a reporter. Broadwater, aboard in the sub's rear compartment, says the grouper has adopted the Monitor as its home and tends to be territorial.
At last, the turret comes into view, covered by the spider. A Navy diver from the same team that retrieved bodies from the submerged TWA Flight 800 is at work on the spider. Broadwater sighs. The spider is sitting at an awkward angle. The base of one leg of the spider has caught on a section of hull plate next to the turret. Now the divers must work quickly to get the spider into correct position.
"Murphy's Law," says Broadwater.
Every operation this huge has glitches. This is one of them. Divers work through the night to free the leg from the plate. On the ship, Navy personnel huddle around video monitors as divers prepare to cut the deck plate from beneath the uncooperative leg.
"Make it hot," says diver Terry Pace from the seafloor. A technician sends a current of electricity to Pace's cutting torch. A burst of bright light comes into view of the camera on Pace's dive helmet.
Marine archaeologist Jeff Johnston watches on a screen at the other end of the barge in NOAA's air-conditioned but cramped trailer. All on board are shaking their heads about the glitch. Three inches of deck plate holds the 50-ton spider askew.
Johnston, who hasn't slept for nearly 50 hours, is crossing his fingers that nothing else goes wrong.
"There's something about this part of the ocean. Murphy's ZIP code is here." %% U.S. Navy divers working on the Monitor are divided into two units.
The "surface air" unit members breathe a mixture of helium (84.5 percent) and oxygen (15.5 percent) and adhere to strict guidelines governing the amount of time at bottom. At a depth of 240 feet, the divers have only 30 minutes to reach the bottom, get their job done and return to the surface without suffering serious complications. They also must undergo about two hours in a decompression chamber to get all the nitrogen out of their tissues. Nitrogen is the diver's devil. It can make divers feel drunk -- not good in a high-risk environment -- and it causes the bends by making the blood bubble if a diver surfaces too fast or fails to undergo proper decompression.
To speed up the mission by getting more work time at the bottom, the Navy is using a second "saturation" dive unit that allows divers to stay underwater at great depths safely for about two weeks. Saturation refers to the physiological fact that after a couple of hours, a body will absorb all the nitrogen it can take and the pressure in the lungs will equal the pressure at depth.
While a small number of Navy divers do saturation dives in a chamber, Capt. Chris Murray says he hopes the Monitor expedition will convince the government to train and establish a full-time saturation diving unit. Such a unit would enable the Navy to perform the type of rescue that could have saved the lives of the Russian sailors trapped in the Kursk submarine that sank in August 2000 in the Berents Sea.
"Right now, if the same thing happened to us, we couldn't do any more than the Russians did," Murray says. %%
http://www.sltrib.com/07252002/thursday/756228.htm
"If cowardly and dishonorable men sometimes shoot unarmed men with army pistols or guns, the evil must be prevented by the penitentiary and gallows, and not by a general deprivation of a constitutional privilege." - Arkansas Supreme Court, 1878
Comments
If I'm wrong please correct me, I won't be offended.
The sound of a 12 gauge pump clears a house fatser than Rosie O eats a Big Mac !