Battleship Texas taking on extraordinary amounts of water
The battleship USS Texas was launched 100 years ago on May 19th, 1912. She is the oldest remaining dreadnought battleship and only one of six surviving ships to have served in both World War I and World War II.
Right now, she is also taking on water fast. On Saturday, crews discovered what is described as “extraordinary amounts of water” flooding the ship’s engine room. They still have not been able to identify the source of the leak but have been attempting to manage the flooding with additional pumps. The ship is also beginning to list.
This is not the first time that the aged ship has sprung a leak. In June of 2010, the ship came close to sinking but was caught time. After that close call, a plan was developed to build a cofferdam around the ship, to create a dry berth. That was almost two years ago, but shortages of funds have postponed the construction.
For example, there are 100,000+ millionaires in Harris County, Texas (Houston area). If each would cough up just $10,000 it would save the sinking ship with a fund of $1,000,000,000 (one billion). Everybody wants to save the ship, but nobody wants to pay for it.
Hey, just haul the thing into drydock, make repairs, and give her a good cleaning and painting. That’s what the Picton Castle does.
I was talking about this with someone on another website, and they say the problems with moving the ship are legion.
Her rudder is frozen hard over, and in order to move her they would have to have several tugs pulling ahead and one pulling sideways to try and keep her on course. The fear is that the strain from the tugs could tear the ship in half.
My understanding is that Texas’ hull is so badly corroded now that she may not be able to survive the drydocking, and that even if they do get her in a drydock the hull plating may be so thin and the corrosion around the rivets so extensive as to prohibit any easy repairs. My friend was lamenting that five years after the project to permanently drydock her was approved there still is no plan to do so, and funds are still significantly short of what is needed.
A real shame, but these old hulls are terribly maintenance intensive, and that work is horribly expensive and tough to justify sometimes.
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