Final Task
On December 7th, 1941, the American battleship USS Arizona (BB-39) was hit by a Japanese bomb and sunk at her moorings in Pearl Harbor. 1,177 of the 1,400 men aboard the ship perished in the attack. Most of those men's remains are still on board the sunken remains of the ship. The US Navy considers the fallen to be buried at sea and the wreck to be a tomb and therefore not to be disturbed. Years later, a memorial was built that spans the ship's midsection. Only the turret ring of one of the Arizona's (removed) gun turrets remain above the surface of Pearl Harbor. The ship had taken on a full load of fuel just the day before the attack that sank her. And that large amount of bunker C fuel oil is the problem right now.
For 65 years, the wreck of the USS Arizona has been leaking oil from its grave at the bottom of Pearl Harbor, staining the water, visitors often say, as if it were the ship's blood.
The leaks come from about 500,000 gallons of thick, bunker C fuel oil that remain trapped in the deteriorating hulk — oil whose "catastrophic" release experts now think is inevitable.
Today, on the anniversary of the attack that plunged the United States into World War II, scientists at a federal research center in Gaithersburg are trying to predict when that might happen. In five years? Or 50? And to do that, they are building a model of the ship: not of plastic and glue, but of data.
The experts at the National Institute of Standards and Technology think it is the first mathematical model to simulate the deterioration of a sunken ship and could be used to predict the deterioration of hundreds of wrecks around the country.
Similar models, which are run with ultra-powerful computers, are used to forecast the weather, design cars and simulate crashes.
"To my knowledge, nobody has published or spoken of modeling the deterioration of sunken ships," said Timothy J. Foecke, a metallurgist at the institute who is supervising the work.
"What we're trying to do is . . . predict stability of shipwrecks," Foecke said. "In particular, we're working on the Arizona, but it also has application to hazardous wrecks . . . all around the coast, dating back to World War I. There's ships with munitions, with hazardous cargoes, with all kinds of different things."
What they are trying to do is fascinating. A final mission for the Arizona as a test bed for this new technology to predict the failure of the wreck's integrity. They are constrained in what they can try to do in advance of the release - which will come - by the designation of the ship as a tomb for the men still aboard her. That is , I think, as it should be. They have extensive plans in place to deal with a sudden release and have dealt with a severe release of oil in Pearl Harbor not related to Arizona in past years.
A great deal more can be found at the National Park website for the Arizona, as well as at the USS Arizona Preservation Project website. Here is a page of photos of the Arizona.
Other Links to this Post
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Doug Ross @ Journal — Thursday, 7 December , 2006 @ 5:18 am
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Right Truth — Thursday, 7 December , 2006 @ 9:18 am
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bRight & Early — Thursday, 7 December , 2006 @ 2:58 pm
