July 12, 2002--It may be the "great-grandmother of all modern warships" but right now the USS Monitor is a dirty, coal and coral covered mess, divers working on the project discovered as they began to prepare to raise the turret of the famed ironclad vessel.
The recovery project is being financed in large part by funds from the Navy, which is spending $6.5 million this year to send its divers to use the project for training for other salvage dives.
Because of the depth at which the Monitor sits, 240 feet below the ocean surface, and because of the history, the Monitor expedition is considered the premier diving assignment in the service, the Hampton Roads Virginian-Pilot reported.
Preliminary dives in a four-passenger research submarine showed that the Monitor is half buried in silt and serves as a home for sponges and coral that live at those depths. When the Monitor sank in a storm Dec. 31, 1862, its revolutionary revolving gun turret landed first, with the hull of the ship atop it.
Divers will first have to clear away the silt and debris and cut away wood and steel of the hull where it blocks access to the turret. That phase of the operation is expected to last six weeks.
The divers will use special techniques that allow them to work at the 240-foot depth for hours instead of minutes. Divers in four-hour shifts will tear away debris that fell from the steamship's coal bunker when it slid to the bottom. They will remove rotten wood and steel plates, cutting a 25-by-45-foot section of the hull away to expose the turret.
Once it has been made accessible, the 20-foot diameter turret will be attached to a claw-like grappling device and hoisted carefully to the surface by a crane on a work barge. While the turret and guns inside are estimated to weigh 120 tons, the total the barge will have to hoist is estimated at about 200 tons because of the sand and debris inside as well as an attached lifting frame.
Although many of the crew of the Monitor were rescued by the ship that was towing them, sixteen are known to have died. Three perished on the ocean surface, but how many may have gone down with the ship, and whether any remains will be found inside, is unknown.
"The turret was the only way out and all the other hatches were sealed tight. If there were any remains to be found on the Monitor, the turret would be the logical place," said John Broadwater, manager of the Monitor National Marine Sanctuary.
"This was the first revolving gun turret, not just in the United States, but the world," said Jeff Johnston, the principal researcher with the sanctuary.
"The one thing everyone has wanted to see since day one was the gun turret. It's worth saving. It's the great-grandmother of modern warships."
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has been working since 1975 to retrieve the remains of the Monitor, discovered in 1971 by Duke University marine archaeologists. NOAA, which owns the wreck, is paying $600,000 towards the turret recovery project.
On the Net:
NOAA's Monitor site: http://monitor.nos.noaa.gov/
Mariners' Museum site: http://www.mariner.org/monitor/
