Apparently her hull is in good enough shape now that theoretically the USN could refloat her and even return her to service, effectively “bringing her back to life”. Of course they won’t do that but it’s something to think about. This was from some analysis they did some time ago.
Apparently her hull is in good enough shape now that theoretically the USN could refloat her and even return her to service, effectively “bringing her back to life”. Of course they won’t do that but it’s something to think about. This was from some analysis they did some time ago.
According to this Time's article from 2019 that the hull is currently structurally sound and is being protected by marine life growing on the hull creating a protective coating. Unfortunately this only helps to resist corrosion and it is inevitable that it will corrode away and that parts of it have begun corroding. They estimate they have well over 50 years before any serious action would be needed to protect the structure from collapse.
An additional note from the Time's article, which is referenced in this image, are the "black tears of the Arizona." The ship sank with an estimated 1.5 million gallons of fuel onboard with an estimated 500 thousand still remaining today that is gradually leaking from ship. The leaking fuel oil is referred by some as the tears of the Arizona with some folklore stating that those tears will continue to come from the Arizona until the last her of survivors passes away.
Apparently her hull is in good enough shape now that theoretically the USN could refloat her and even return her to service, effectively “bringing her back to life”. Of course they won’t do that but it’s something to think about. This was from some analysis they did some time ago.
It will never happen, Arizona is a war grave now, has nothing to do with costs or what have you.
According to this Time's article from 2019 that the hull is currently structurally sound and is being protected by marine life growing on the hull creating a protective coating. Unfortunately this only helps to resist corrosion and it is inevitable that it will corrode away and that parts of it have begun corroding. They estimate they have well over 50 years before any serious action would be needed to protect the structure from collapse.
Thus hull is structurally sound aft of the foremast, but that's it. And that is far FAR from enough to make restoration even remotely possible, outside of the most fantastically optimistic fiction. The most probable time period it could have been seriously considered viable was in the 1940s, and only bureaucrats in the Bureau of Ships isolated in DC were entertaining the idea. Everyone else, especially the guys in Pearl looking at the wreck, had given up on Dec. 8th on the idea of refloating her beyond enabling her to be towed to the mainland for scraping like what they did with Oklahoma, which was a ship in MUCH better condition than Arizona.
The soundness they were talking about was more geared towards her not collapsing and spilling her millions of gallons of oil into the harbor.
Amusingly, this video on examining the damage done to the Arizona the same day K9's post brought this image to my attention. Drachnifel's a bit dry, but if you're interested in WW1/2 naval warfare, he's a deep well of historical knowledge. (... A dry well... look, it's not a metaphor, so it's not mixing metaphors, OK?)
But yeah, the only way that the Arizona could be floated was by cutting off everything forward of the stack and building a new makeshift front half of the ship to get it into a dock before rebuilding the ship. There would be no reason to bother, since the cost of replacing what is damaged AND THEN needing to modernize would be greater than just building a whole new ship from scratch, and it's not like we haven't built battleships in decades because we can't, we haven't built battleships in decades because ship class names have no meaning anymore and "destroyers" are larger than "cruisers", and you can call a carrier an "aviation destroyer" nowadays because guns with a range of 50 miles while wildly inaccurate at long ranges are vastly less effective than cruise missiles that can home in on their target from hundreds of miles away with near-perfect accuracy. Plus, while battleships have enough armor to blunt current guided missiles, it would take more time and money to build a battleship than it would to rebuild cruise missiles to penetrate over a foot of armor. Then, increasing automation over the past century means that a ship that needs thousands of crew to operate is going to cost vastly more to keep sailing than a more modern design, no matter what your purpose. Plus there's the sheer value as a museum/tourist trap, as Armathos said. There's just no angle where it would make sense.