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Divers raise USS Monitor's gun turret after 139 ye
Josey1
Member Posts: 9,598 ✭✭
A $6.5 million expedition raised the gun turret Monday of the USS Monitor, a Union ship that sailed during the Civil War. The rest of the ship is too fragile to recover.
Divers raise USS Monitor's gun turret after 139 years
By Michael D. Shear / The Washington Post
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OFF CAPE HATTERAS, N.C. -- Picture a 9-foot-tall top hat, but with no brim, and with sides made of iron eight inches thick. Then poke two holes halfway up for a pair of cannons and leave room inside for ammo and a few sailors from the Union navy.
Now turn the entire thing upside down, drop it to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean and fill it with sand, dirt and close to 50 tons of coal from a ship's massive engines. Leave it there, in 240 feet of seawater, for 139 years.
On Monday, the turret once again saw daylight as cheering and whistling salvage crews hoisted the coral-encrusted relic from the floor of the Atlantic.
A heavy cable attached to a crane swung the turret onto a 300-foot barge in an operation that was scuttled Saturday due to bad weather.
The turret was raised during a $6.5 million expedition by the Navy and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which controls the underwater sanctuary where the wreckage sits. The mission was to recover the largest and last retrievable artifact from the wreckage, which will remain on the ocean floor because it is too delicate to pull up.
The gun turret will now begin its final voyage. The destination: a new museum in Newport News, Va., being built to house the thousands of recovered pieces from the Monitor. For the next decade -- and it will likely take that long -- scientists will painstakingly restore the turret, a process they will invite the public to watch.
"We'll be taking it apart, piece by piece, bolt by bolt," said Curtiss Peterson, the chief conservator for the Mariners' Museum, which will open a Monitor wing in 2007. Eventually, when cleaned of rust, marine encrustations and corrosive salt, the turret will be pieced back together. "But we've got to keep this stuff on display. It's a national treasure."
That treasure sank Dec. 31, 1862, when gale winds and huge waves overwhelmed the deck of the Union's greatest naval achievement. The ship foundered, flipped over and sank. At least 16 crewmen died. The Monitor was being towed south on its way to help in a blockade.
The Monitor is famous for more than its battles; there was only one, a four-hour clash March 9, 1862, with the USS Merrimack, burned by the U.S. Navy when it evacuated Norfolk and rebuilt by the Confederates as the ironclad CSS Virginia. That battle ended in a draw.
The Union ship is also remembered for its design: a flat deck with the first-ever revolving turret, allowing it to aim at targets without moving the ship. Nearly every fighting ship since uses a variation on that theme.
Discovered in 1973, the ship's remains have been brought up in pieces -- propeller, anchor, steam engine, condenser, plus thousands of humdrum items, including steps of a ladder, a leather book cover, condiment bottles, still-working thermometers, wood paneling from the captain's quarters and a piece of porcelain with the still-legible word "push." It is thought to be something sailors pressed to flush their toilets.
The turret, though, is regarded as the singular achievement of the Monitor's designer, Swedish American engineer John Ericsson.
Capt. Chris Murray is the supervisor of diving for the Navy and the project manager for the grueling, month-long effort to recover the turret. Underwater, he said, his divers approach their target with reverence.
"It starts to take shape and it's beautiful," Murray said. "I grew up reading about the Monitor and the Merrimack, and building the models. To think that you would get to dive on something like that is unbelievable."
Surface divers such as Shaun Baker, 29, a Kentucky native with the Mobile Diving Salvage Unit Two, descend for 40 minutes at a time, armed with high-power hoses to blast away sand and silt.
"It's a different world down there," Baker said after making his seventh dive to the Monitor. "The water is crystal clear, until you hit the bottom. Then, when you are in the sand and silt, it kind of mucks up and you can go from 15 feet visibility to zero feet visibility in a matter of seconds."
"It's like stepping back in history," he added.
The bulk of the underwater work is performed by what the Navy calls "saturation divers," who work on the ocean floor for up to six hours at a time and live in pressurized bubbles on the barge for more than a week at a time.
The "sat divers" descend in a diving bell, the air around them pressing at 100 pounds per square inch -- six times as great as the Earth's atmosphere at sea level. They use a fiberglass helmet called an MK-17 instead of the once ubiquitous copper helmet. Their bodies, saturated with helium-oxygen, can withstand the depths for long periods.
They dive in pairs, one diver staying in the bell to monitor air hoses and pressure gauges, and to perform rescue functions if needed. After six hours, they switch roles, then ascend to their pressurized quarters for 12 hours of sleep.
After about a week, they depressurize -- 66 hours of doing nothing inside a trailer-size box. Navy divers refer to decompression as the three M's -- nothing to do but meals, mattress and movies.
"Those were the 66 longest hours of my life," Murray says.
In the battle to restore the turret, salt is the enemy.
"I don't even put it on my tomatoes," Peterson says. "If you don't get the salt out from the hidden places, it will rust forever."
Peterson and his crew will take apart the turret. Its iron wall is made up of eight curved panels, each an inch thick. If their curvature changes, even slightly, it won't go back together.
Meanwhile, the turret will sit in an octagonal tank filled with slightly electrified water. That, combined with such chemicals as sodium hydroxide and sodium carbonate to keep the pH of the water between 9.5 and 13.5, will eventually eat away at the rust.
The ultimate goal: to display the first-ever revolving turret, restored as close as possible to its condition when it sank, complete with dents from cannonballs from the Virginia.
http://www.detnews.com/2002/nation/0208/06/nation-554406.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
Divers raise USS Monitor's gun turret after 139 years
By Michael D. Shear / The Washington Post
Comment on this story
Send this story to a friend
Get Home Delivery
OFF CAPE HATTERAS, N.C. -- Picture a 9-foot-tall top hat, but with no brim, and with sides made of iron eight inches thick. Then poke two holes halfway up for a pair of cannons and leave room inside for ammo and a few sailors from the Union navy.
Now turn the entire thing upside down, drop it to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean and fill it with sand, dirt and close to 50 tons of coal from a ship's massive engines. Leave it there, in 240 feet of seawater, for 139 years.
On Monday, the turret once again saw daylight as cheering and whistling salvage crews hoisted the coral-encrusted relic from the floor of the Atlantic.
A heavy cable attached to a crane swung the turret onto a 300-foot barge in an operation that was scuttled Saturday due to bad weather.
The turret was raised during a $6.5 million expedition by the Navy and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which controls the underwater sanctuary where the wreckage sits. The mission was to recover the largest and last retrievable artifact from the wreckage, which will remain on the ocean floor because it is too delicate to pull up.
The gun turret will now begin its final voyage. The destination: a new museum in Newport News, Va., being built to house the thousands of recovered pieces from the Monitor. For the next decade -- and it will likely take that long -- scientists will painstakingly restore the turret, a process they will invite the public to watch.
"We'll be taking it apart, piece by piece, bolt by bolt," said Curtiss Peterson, the chief conservator for the Mariners' Museum, which will open a Monitor wing in 2007. Eventually, when cleaned of rust, marine encrustations and corrosive salt, the turret will be pieced back together. "But we've got to keep this stuff on display. It's a national treasure."
That treasure sank Dec. 31, 1862, when gale winds and huge waves overwhelmed the deck of the Union's greatest naval achievement. The ship foundered, flipped over and sank. At least 16 crewmen died. The Monitor was being towed south on its way to help in a blockade.
The Monitor is famous for more than its battles; there was only one, a four-hour clash March 9, 1862, with the USS Merrimack, burned by the U.S. Navy when it evacuated Norfolk and rebuilt by the Confederates as the ironclad CSS Virginia. That battle ended in a draw.
The Union ship is also remembered for its design: a flat deck with the first-ever revolving turret, allowing it to aim at targets without moving the ship. Nearly every fighting ship since uses a variation on that theme.
Discovered in 1973, the ship's remains have been brought up in pieces -- propeller, anchor, steam engine, condenser, plus thousands of humdrum items, including steps of a ladder, a leather book cover, condiment bottles, still-working thermometers, wood paneling from the captain's quarters and a piece of porcelain with the still-legible word "push." It is thought to be something sailors pressed to flush their toilets.
The turret, though, is regarded as the singular achievement of the Monitor's designer, Swedish American engineer John Ericsson.
Capt. Chris Murray is the supervisor of diving for the Navy and the project manager for the grueling, month-long effort to recover the turret. Underwater, he said, his divers approach their target with reverence.
"It starts to take shape and it's beautiful," Murray said. "I grew up reading about the Monitor and the Merrimack, and building the models. To think that you would get to dive on something like that is unbelievable."
Surface divers such as Shaun Baker, 29, a Kentucky native with the Mobile Diving Salvage Unit Two, descend for 40 minutes at a time, armed with high-power hoses to blast away sand and silt.
"It's a different world down there," Baker said after making his seventh dive to the Monitor. "The water is crystal clear, until you hit the bottom. Then, when you are in the sand and silt, it kind of mucks up and you can go from 15 feet visibility to zero feet visibility in a matter of seconds."
"It's like stepping back in history," he added.
The bulk of the underwater work is performed by what the Navy calls "saturation divers," who work on the ocean floor for up to six hours at a time and live in pressurized bubbles on the barge for more than a week at a time.
The "sat divers" descend in a diving bell, the air around them pressing at 100 pounds per square inch -- six times as great as the Earth's atmosphere at sea level. They use a fiberglass helmet called an MK-17 instead of the once ubiquitous copper helmet. Their bodies, saturated with helium-oxygen, can withstand the depths for long periods.
They dive in pairs, one diver staying in the bell to monitor air hoses and pressure gauges, and to perform rescue functions if needed. After six hours, they switch roles, then ascend to their pressurized quarters for 12 hours of sleep.
After about a week, they depressurize -- 66 hours of doing nothing inside a trailer-size box. Navy divers refer to decompression as the three M's -- nothing to do but meals, mattress and movies.
"Those were the 66 longest hours of my life," Murray says.
In the battle to restore the turret, salt is the enemy.
"I don't even put it on my tomatoes," Peterson says. "If you don't get the salt out from the hidden places, it will rust forever."
Peterson and his crew will take apart the turret. Its iron wall is made up of eight curved panels, each an inch thick. If their curvature changes, even slightly, it won't go back together.
Meanwhile, the turret will sit in an octagonal tank filled with slightly electrified water. That, combined with such chemicals as sodium hydroxide and sodium carbonate to keep the pH of the water between 9.5 and 13.5, will eventually eat away at the rust.
The ultimate goal: to display the first-ever revolving turret, restored as close as possible to its condition when it sank, complete with dents from cannonballs from the Virginia.
http://www.detnews.com/2002/nation/0208/06/nation-554406.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
was examined they found many personal articles and skeletal remains, but I am told that the best preserved item aboard the Nunnley was a "Vote for Jesse Helms" poster.