Navy: Forrestal to be scrapped or sunk

By Andrew Scutro
Staff Writer
Navy Times

Posted: Thursday Jun 25, 2009 15:27:22 EDT

The famous aircraft carrier Forrestal will be cut up for scrap or sunk
as an artificial reef, the Navy has determined.

"Right now, the two disposal options being considered are partial
dismantling and recycling, or full dismantling and recycling," said
Katie Roberts a spokeswoman at Naval Sea System Command.

A partial dismantling would result in the hulk of the ship sunk as an
artificial reef, as the carrier Oriskany was in 2006.

Forrestal, named for former Navy Secretary James Forrestal, was the site
of a horrific fire on July 29, 1967, off the coast of Vietnam that
killed 134 men and destroyed 21 aircraft.

Oriskany was one of the ships to come to Forrestal's aid during the
blaze, which started on the flight deck, but spread below.

Forrestal, which was commissioned in 1955, soon returned to sea and
operated until being decommissioned in 1993.

Requests for cost estimates and shipyard capability for the dismantling
work are due at NavSea's program for inactive ships on July 10.
Forrestal will be towed from its current home in Newport, R.I. to the
inactive ship storage site in Philadelphia by next spring, pending
transfer to the dismantler.

The last Navy surface ship to be scrapped was the former destroyer
tender Puget Sound, Roberts said. That work was completed in March 2009
at Esco Marine, a ship recycler in Brownsville, Texas.

Both Forrestal and the carrier Saratoga are now tied up at an aging pier
on Naval Station Newport, R.I., but due to deterioration of the
facility, both ships need to be relocated by the end of September 2010.

Roberts said Saratoga is "in the process" of being donated to that
ship's foundation, which wants to preserve it as a museum, likely in
Rhode Island.

Arfcom group buy?

I vote for artificial reef...

Sad to see Her go, got to go out on Her once.
I was a baby when the explosion took place in 67.  My grandfather was welding instructor at the Norfolk Naval Shipyard when they brought Her in for repair.
He cut out two circles of steel from the damaged flight deck, one for me, and one for my father.  He had them engraved with information about the accident and the lives that were lost.
The each were about 5" across and around 3" thick.



 

I would rather see it sunk as a reef than turned into razor blades and Government Motors products.  Having said that, I would still prefer it be kept as a museum somewhere like they are doing with the Saratoga.






-K

I wish they'd keep these old carriers in such a condition as to be able to be recommissioned in the event we get into a major conflict again and can't just build new replacements for the ones that we have now that may get sunk.  

How many years does it take to build a new carrier?  An old carrier would be better than no carrier at all, I would think.

The problem is that a ship not maintained doesn't stay seaworthy for very long,  to say nothing of being battleworthy.   Upkeep on a carrier on standby would still be very

expensive.  It's not like the US has a big budget surplus these days to maintain carriers that aren't in active service.   Plus we just don't have that many full extra

carrier crews just sitting around doing nothing.  





I agree with the sentiment but you know that the logistics are impractical.



CJ

BIG DITTO

Does this mean my lighter will be worth more now?

She is old and busted, the Navy and the US taxpayer got every cent out her and then some.  She was commissioned 1 Oct 1955, she sailed for 38 years until 1993.  She has spent the rest of the time in mothballs, it would have taken considerable time and effort to bring her back to sea worthiness, the amount of $$ to do this would be astronomical.

That's the ship they used to film the Sci Fi movie Silent Running.

RIP forestfire

You can't keep them forever.

I say send her down as a reef, so long as it's dive depth.

Agreed!





The Forrestal has been sitting in RI for years...





Summer 08




 

As a diver, I'm voting for another carrier to be used as an artificial reef...

Yup. I prefer old ships become reefs, too.

Of course, some torpedo training for Navy sub crews might be a good thing, too. If you're gonna make a reef why not get some training out of it, too?

I vote for a new place to dive

I have a buddy at work who was on the cruise after the fire.

He said he still remembers watching the movies made of the fire fighting.  He said a crew of men would grab a hose and run towards the fire.  There would be an explosion that would "white out" the film and when the effect of the explosion was over there was nothing left in front of the camera but a flopping piece of hose.  He said it was a real serious room, no talking, no sleeping, nothing but a bunch of guys thinking real hard about what happened to the crew before them.

Reef.  Off the TEXAS coast this time.   Florida has enough.

Tow her to Corpus Christi, scuttle her in the sand right next to the Lexington, and open her up for tours.

My Dad was on the cruise after the fire, he said you could smell the smell of dead cooked bodies coming out of the pores of the steel quite often.  The section of the ship RVAH-12 was located was right under the area of the explosions.

What new name will the DIs at OCS come up with for carrier runs if they move those things out of Newport






 

It'd make a hell of a floating casino.  






CJ

Counting cards? To the catapult with him!

I think they should make it into a museum. The USS Intrepid has been very popular in NYC as has been the USS New Jersey and  other ships.

Not to mock you..... but, well yeah to mock you. We should keep all the Fords and Chevys built in the 1950s in good condition also.

We should also spend whatever money needed to upgrade and store all the 1950s black and white tvs to digitial receivers and color picture.

And the Army should also keep all the flint lock rifles stored, "just in case."











 

I would support that. A safe full of original Revolutionary War rifles would be awesome.

Her anchors are on John C Stennis

ETA:  looked it up, worded as fact

Arfcom Somalia Cruise Ship!!!!!!

When I was a kid, I used to go to Vallejo with the folks to see the grandparents.  On the way up from San Jose, we'd cross the Carquinez bridge near Benicia.  If you looked to the right you'd see rows and rows and rows of ships from what is called the National Defense Reserve Fleet,  just tied up there in Suisun bay.  In fact, the USNS Glomar Explorer was out there too, but it was out in the middle of the bay away from the other ships.  As the years went by, the fleet kept getting smaller and smaller as I supppose the ships became more unservicable due to age.  I think some of the NDRF ships were re-activated during Desert Shield, but suffered from mechanical breakdowns while at sea.  

I have to wonder how much preventative maintenance was performed on those old ships between use.  I doubt if it was much but I have no idea.  

I assume the ships "work" when they are decommissioned, but it sounds like they just fall apart out of neglect-as if there is a finite amount of time they can be "recovered" for use once the Navy stops using them.  

I remember seeing the Mighty Mo in Bremerton as a kid back in '74 or so.  It was hermetically sealed against the elements and you couldn't go below deck.  I just have to wonder why it can't be done with a carrier.

Melt it down and use that steel on something where they need quality steel.

That old ship steel is good, good shit.

They should melt her down and use her steel in the next carrier we build.

I have a little over 1,000 flight hours on the KA-3B on board the USS Lexington. 138944.  

38 years of sailing takes it toll.  We have a couple members here involved in the building and repair/overhaul of Carriers, I am sure they can give many reasons why the Forrestal would cost a fortune to bring back to service.

If a 1950s era car could project power like an aircraft carrier, I'd be all for it.  

If the Army hadn't destroyed "old" M14s in the '90s, more would have been available for deploying units starting in 2002.  As it was government waste wins again.

Mock me all you want, but carriers can be sunk, and not having them is going to suck if we start losing them at the rapid rate in another high-intensity conflict.

One of the BB's is in the Suisun moth ball fleet now too  ––- Iowa or New Jersy, I think.  Actually groke here masts off comming under the Carquinez Bridge.

The reason the Glomar Explorer was moored so much farther out was that she needed so much more water, since she had a deeper draft for 'some' reason.

Be back in a couple to update which BB


ETA:  USS Iowa

Yup...

Scrapping it would be the most unceremonious end...

These retired carriers would make good decoys in the case of some unforseen event, like a Chinese blowup 20 years from now.
Outside of this, recovered steel > artificial reef

Yep.

At this point it would be cheaper (well, maybe not cheaper), easier, more practical, and make a hell of a lot more sense to just rush one of the up-and-comings through production than try to refit that old thing.

She served her purpose, but at the end of the day, she's an old boat that's outlived any possibility of usefulness. It's time.

I suppose if it was feasable it would be done.  38 years is alot of time for a ship to be sitting in a corrosive medium (salt water).  

Still, as a "last ditch" alternative....

It would be very interesting to hear from someone that actually did have some first-hand knowlege of what would be involved, and how much it would cost, compared to a new carrier.

I'm afraid the time of reffiting large ships that have been in storage, for a long time,  no matter how secure, may be over. It is simply  too expensive in the 21st century. Look how much the 4 Iowas cost in the 1980's. Granted they are sexy as hell, and some of the greatest warships in history, but money talks. I'm sure a carrier from the 1950s would be the same way.


Load  all the inmates from Gitmo in her and use her for guided missle cruiser practice.

I spent 5 years on USS Midway CV-41 and can speak from experience that ships are dynamic environments. You can't just put them in storage. It costs millions to keep a carrier in good enough shape to even attempt to bring her back to active service. A lot of people, me included, would LOVE to see the old battleships put back in active commission and used to show the flag. The sad truth is that it would cost billions to bring them up to date with new electronics and habitability upgrades. Old ships, and mine was very old, are not a lot of fun to serve on. The berthing spaces were in pretty rough shape. The ship wasn't built with A\C and the retrofit was designed to provide A\C to the radar\radio rooms, not crew comfort. The engineering plants are old steam turbine plants with huge oil-fired boilers. There aren't even many guys on active duty who know how to run a oil-fired boiler anymore. The power plants would need to be upgraded to handle all of the new electronics and other new electrical loads. You can only retrofit so much and the sad truth is that you still have a very old hull that will need a lot of very expensive dry dock upkeep to keep her going.

My ship was lucky and she was saved from the shipbreaker's torch and is now a museum in San Diego. It took about $20 million and several former skippers who retired as flag officers to pull the right strings at the pentagon to make that happen and  to get the ship donated. Not every ship is a good candidate to become a museum. The Navy decommissions ships in various conditions and when a ship has been run hard and put away wet, like the Forrestal, it would be a huge hurdle for a foundation to come up with the funds to keep the hull floating let alone make a go at it as a museum. I would love to see every capital ship saved but it's just not possible. I would rather see them used for target practice and then sunk as a reef than face the final indignity of the shipbreaker's torch and cut up for scrap. Nothing was worse than seeing how Midway's sister ship Coral Sea ended up being on public display for years in Baltimore as she was slowly cut up for scrap.

In all her glory and how she should be remembered:



And her very sad end:

Its expensive, the place that wants it has to pony up the money to prep it for the sinking (this is time consuming and expensive)... It took a big effort to get the "O" sunk off NW Florida. The shit they had to do to clean that carrier for sinking was a PITA.

Even shooting her up, they have to do all the environmental stuff, while keeping the ship somewhat intact. Economically, the best thing is to scrap her. I'd rather they turn her into a reef though.

Shoot her up with missiles, torpedoes and bombs and make note of their effectiveness.

Because a carrier that last had a plane on it 16 years ago will be very easy to bring up to a level of readiness and preparedness and safety. The electronics would have to be completely redone, the whole deck would need to be reinforced, the propulsion system would be a drag on the rest of the fleet as it would require fuel as opposed to the nukes we currently run. We also have a surplus of carrier crews, aircraft, pilots, and entire carrier fleets that just need old, finicky carriers to help them save the world.

Her time has come, it would cost as much time and money to restore, reinforce, update, and recrew her as it would to build a new carrier.

If we did have to resurrect a bunch of old carriers its not like we would have the extra aircraft to fill them up.  Sink her and let people dive on the site.

If I'm not mistaken, I used to see the USS Midway at NAS Alameda back in the '80s.  I never confirmed it, but someone mentioned it to me when we drove by one time.  

This. 50 miles due west of the Citrus/Hernando county line.

Meh, they are so outdated it wouldn't do any good to keep them around.  All nuclear carriers we have built are still in active service. We are the only nation that even has true supercarriers, let alone 11 operational at all times. The funny thing is, use them mentally to quantify government bills and waste spending at 6bl each(8b for the newest class being built now), and it puts a face on how much money is being thrown away every day now.  50 years service, refuel every 20, 85+ aircraft and 5000+ crew.  We just gave GM 9 nuclear aircraft carriers before letting it go bankrupt anyway....They want to waste another 100 this Friday alone.

She was placed into storage in Bremerton after decommissioning in 1992 until she was towed to San Diego in 2003, stopping in Oakland for a paint job.

The USS Midway was the forward deployed carrier (stationed in Yokosuka, Japan) from 1973 until 1991.

Carriers that called NAS Alameda home at one time included the USS Ranger, USS Midway, USS Coral Sea, USS Hancock, USS Enterprise and the USS Lincoln.


Aerial view of Naval Air Station Alameda, summer of 1974.
Left to right: USS Coral Sea (CVA-43), USS Hancock (CVA-19), USS Oriskany (CVA-34), and USS Enterprise (CVAN-65).