The Patriots Point Naval & Maritime Museum in South Carolina has decided after years of debate to scrap USS Clamagore, a Cold War-era submarine, and save some of its artifacts for an exhibit.
“Unfortunately, we cannot financially sustain the maintenance of three historic vessels,” Rorie Cartier, executive director at Patriots Point, said in a statement after the vote. “The USS Yorktown and USS Laffey also need repair, and we are fighting a never-ending battle against the corrosion that comes from being submerged in saltwater.”
The $2 million cost to scrap the submarine will come from the museum’s operating budget, officials said.
For several years now, we have followed the discussion at the Patriots Point Naval & Maritime Museum about what to do with the World War II era, USS Clamagore. The 1945 built Balao-class submarine has been an exhibit at the museum in Charleston, SC since 1981, but had become too costly to maintain. In 2019, plans were to sink the submarine as an artificial reef. One 2019 assessment found it would cost “upwards of $9 million” to fully restore and repair the vessel, the museum said.
It seems like the place to start would be “get these poor things out of salt water.” No museum ship is going to last long in salt water except by having extreme quantities of money flung at it.
A few years ago congresspersons in Oregon wrestled congresspersons in Washington, and “won.” The upshot is that NOAA vessels previously moored in fresh water (Lake Union and Lake Washington) ended up to Newport, Oregon, where NOAA’s assets are more swiftly and efficiently corroded. Here the decision process is presumably a bit more streamlined and easier to manage.
The submarines that I have visited and walked through have been chocked up ashore.
I refer to those at the museums in Gosport and Den Helder. Both are excellent museums.
Gosport is just a short ferry ride from the historic Navy ships (Victory and Warrior) at Portsmouth, in the south of England and Den Helder is on the coast of The Netherlands.