THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, March 5, 1995 TAG: 9503050073
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY ALEX MARSHALL, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: PHILADELPHIA LENGTH: Long : 214 lines
How badly do we want it?
Sure, we could bring the Iowa back to Norfolk. Just hitch a rope to it, tow it down to Norfolk, ease it in beside Nauticus, flick the lights on, drop a gangplank and watch the people file on at 5 or 10 bucks a head.
But - oh, yeah - the Nauticus pier probably won't handle a 58,000-ton displacement battleship. It could rip the pilings out in a high wind. Then, there's the ship's 38-foot draft. What environmental and safety rules apply to a public battleship? And, how about handicapped access for visitors?
Jeez, this is getting complicated.
How do the Navy and surrounding shipyards feel about a big ship sticking its behind into the main channel on the Elizabeth River? How many people does it take just to keep a coat of fresh paint on the ship and the teak decks in shape?
To figure all this out, let alone raise millions of dollars to do it, some people are going to have to do a lot of homework. And do Norfolk and its environs have enough want-to for it?
This was the question that hovered over the crew that journeyed to the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard to inspect the Iowa, whose home port was Norfolk from 1984 until 1990. They walked over the teak decks, gazed at the famous big guns and scrambled down ladders through narrow hatches. They talked about just what the region would be getting into during side trips to the tiny restaurants that punctuate the blockish brick row houses in South Philly near the shipyard.
The self-appointed committee that will report back to City Council consisted of Councilman Randy Wright; Rick Boesch, a manager at Planet Music and self-described waterfront advocate; John Eley, an appraiser with the city and a maritime enthusiast; and J. Douglas Forrest, a vice president at Colonna's Shipyard. Boesch lives in Virginia Beach, the others in Norfolk.
Forrest was the reality check. A big man with a bushy gray beard, he has a lifetime of experience around ships and has repaired them for a living. He alternated between comments like ``It is the craziest thing we could possibly do,'' to fairly enthusiastic endorsements of the proposal.
The consensus was that the Iowa fit the city's past and its present. Norfolk is a ship town, a Navy town. So is Hampton Roads. A battleship is not some grafted-on theme park, or the latest trend in designer museums.
``It's the best,'' said Forrest, as he shoveled in a cheese-steak sub at Jim's Steaks on South Street after a day of prowling around the Iowa. ``But can we do it? Are we physically capable of doing it? Are we fiscally capable of doing it?''
The Iowa is holed up within the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard. The place looks like a college campus or a 19th-century city with its elegant brick buildings on neat streets. Despite centuries of age, it's set to go out of business permanently by the end of the year.
The Iowa is one of about 40 ships mothballed at the yard. It sits next to the Wisconsin, a gangplank running between them.
The Iowa is in good condition. Mothballing the ship cost millions. Norfolk would get a ship drained of all water, sealed, and then carefully maintained at about 30 degree relative humidity to keep out rust, mildew or excessive dryness. It would get a ship ringed with electrodes in the water to prevent rust from forming.
The general agreement was that the Wisconsin was the prettier ship, but the Iowa was the more historic. The Iowa had the bathtub in which President Franklin Roosevelt bathed; it was the ship that sat in Tokyo Bay alongside the Missouri when the Japanese surrender was signed.
And, it was the ship whose 16-inch gun in turret No. 2 exploded in 1989, killing 47 men. That poses another question: How would the family of those men feel about the Iowa coming home?
The numbers. Or lack of them.
Cost was the question on everyone's mind. Firm answers weren't available, but Forrest gathered some firm questions. How much would it cost to:
Dock the ship? Mooring a 58,000-ton displacement, 209-foot high, 900-foot long ship to stay put is not an easy proposition. A heavy wind hitting the ship from its side could rip a pier from its socket. Only the piers at the Norfolk Naval Shipyard, Norfolk & Southern and at the Navy base could legally handle such a ship, Forrest said.
A new mooring system, Forrest added, would have to be built beside Nauticus, if that's where the ship would go.
Guesstimate: $1.5 million.
Make the ship operational? The ship won't be steered, nor its guns fired. But the lights have to work, the ventilation systems, the pumps, maybe the toilets.
Price tag pending.
Maintain the ship, year in, year out? Someone has to paint the ship, take care of its teak decks, and keep the various operating systems running.
Guesstimate: 15-20 person workforce.
How do you make such a ship accessible to the public? Climbing down tiny, narrow hatches with hard, metal elbows of every type all around you is not the easiest thing to do safely for anyone, let alone the varied ages and sizes of the general public.
Forrest believed that before it could be public, the interior steel wall might have to be opened up and modified to be more accessible.
Price tag pending.
Tow the Iowa or its sister ship to Norfolk? $750,000, said Forrest.
The grand total for start-up costs? Forrest said he hoped to have some better figures in a week, but in Philadelphia he was throwing numbers around like $10 million or $15 million.
Too, there were the non-monetary questions, no less important. For example, would the Navy permit the city to put a battleship where it would, Forrest estimated, poke 200 feet out into a 600-foot wide channel.
``It would be like blocking two lanes of a four-lane highway,'' Forrest said. ``They might not like it.''
If this thing happens, it will be because the people want it and work for it. The City Council and the city manager at first were vaguely amused but not terribly interested. It got on the agenda because regular folks pushed for it. The council then blessed an ad-hoc committee started by Wright.
``I get a sense that the skepticism is from the top down, and the optimism from the bottom up,'' Boesch said.
Shark-petting or big, cold guns?
A battleship isn't a user-friendly museum. It doesn't have interactive video display terminals or shark-petting tanks. It's a long, low, cold piece of gray metal. As they say about jazz, you have to come to it, not the other way around.
But a good guide can bring the ship to life. And we had such a guide in James Houk, a tall man with a red beard in a dark green jumpsuit. He had spent two years mothballing the ship as a foreman for Global Associates. He knew, it seemed, everything about the ship.
Houk led the party up to the control tower, down hatches, twisting and turning, into the engine rooms, the officers' mess and the captain's in-port quarters, where lay the famous bathtub fitted in for Roosevelt.
Looking up at the big guns, Houk informed that one barrel of the 16-inch gun weighed as much as two 737 airplanes. Really.
In the No. 4 engine room, he explained how steam churned through pipes as wide as a fat man to drive turbines to turn the 18-foot-diameter propellers.
Outside, on the port side of the ship, Houk pointed up at a small, round dent on the superstructure. It was about the size and shape of the cannonball imbedded in St. Paul's church in Norfolk. And it turned out, had a similar past.
In World War II, Japanese shore battery struck the Iowa with an armor-piercing shell, Houk said. It bounced off, leaving only the round dent.
In a windowless room, you saw where a man sat behind a large hunk of metal and computed gun trajectories for the 16-inch guns. With its swivel seat and mass of controls, it looked like the place Luke Skywalker sat in the first Star Wars movie and blasted away at the Empire's forces.
``It's all clockwork inside,'' Houk said, tapping the massive hunk of metal covered with knobs bearing labels like ``sight angle'' and ``sight deflection.''
``Today, it would be all computers and digital,'' he said.
The Navy kept the mechanical system for calculating the gun trajectories in 1984 when the Iowa was recommissioned. It was found to be just as accurate as any computer, Houk said.
Up in the conning station, you saw a war bridge built with steel walls 17.5 inches thick and doors like those from a bank vault. The place was designed to be one of the most secure places on board during an attack.
The famous teak decks look like an outdoor patio after a few decades. They are cracked, patched, weathered, splintered and swollen. They do, though, have character, which, like the beaten floors of an old house, can be beautiful.
The Wisconsin, next door, had all new decks installed during its modernization in the 1980s. The decks, Houk said, consumed 17 percent of Burma's teak production for one year.
A few hours with Houk made you realize that the Iowa's lack of immediate accessibility could be its strength. Someone could become obsessed with such an intricate, colossal piece of construction, and spend a month of Sundays visiting without boredom.
So how many people would such a ship draw? The optimists pointed out that the battleship North Carolina, parked in Wilmington, N.C., since 1961, draws 250,000 a year. And Norfolk, a bigger metropolitan area, should be able to draw twice that with a bigger, better, more historic battleship like the Iowa.
``If 500,000 visit the Iowa every year, and half visit Nauticus, then it's a win-win situation,'' Wright said.
The North Carolina also gives some maintenance numbers. It now costs $1.5 million a year to maintain. Visitors paying $6 a visit, plus spending at the gift shop, make the whole operation self supporting.
Why boats no longer have big guns.
The battleship has a chance of becoming a real icon of the waterfront because it draws on such a rich past.
As naval enthusiasts will tell you, the Iowa-class battleships culminated centuries of shipbuilding when military supremacy was about building big, fast ships with the big guns.
The substitutions in the 19th century of steam for sails, armor for wood, didn't change the dynamic much.
It wasn't until World War II that the aircraft carrier finally pushed the battleship from center stage. And the new star was not really the carrier, but the airplane. A plane could carry bombs a lot farther than a battleship could throw them. When the Iowa was commissioned in 1943, the era of battleship supremacy already was over.
But the centuries of love and calculation that went into big battleships account for the fanatical love many naval enthusiasts maintain for them. One reason the Iowa-class battleships repeatedly were brought back into service was that a group of dedicated battleship lovers within the Navy refused to let them die.
Going against what some might call good sense, the New Jersey was recommissioned during the Vietnam War. Then, in the early 1980s, all four were recommissioned at a cost of $2 billion. The ships proved valuable because they had a combination of strengths that contemporary ships lacked.
But now the Navy is getting rid of them, permanently, it seems.
Norfolk has a chance of getting one. It first must convince the Navy to give it one. That starts with a sound business plan.
So the question remains:
How much do we really want it? ILLUSTRATION: BILL TIERNAN/Staff color photos
One barrel of the 16-inch guns on the Iowa weighs as much as two 737
planes. The 209-foot high, 900-foot long ship, built in Newport
News, could become a part of the Norfolk skyline.
James Houk, right, who spent two years mothballing the Iowa, led a
tour for a contingent from Hampton Roads that included J. Douglas
Forrest, a vice president at Colonna's Shipyard.
BILL TIERNAN/Staff photos
Randy Wright, left, surveys the Iowa's engine room with J. Douglas
Forrest, Rick Boesch and John B. Eley. The four local men went to
Philadelphia last week to inspect the ship.
Names of crew members who left their mark in 1990 when the
battleship was decommissioned. by CNB