Translated material
Naval real estate
Over the course of a quarter of a century, the aircraft carrier museum has grown into the bottom of the Hudson.
The pretentious action of sending one of the main symbols of the city, the aircraft carrier Intrepid, to dry docks for repairs in New York ended in unprecedented embarrassment. Long turned into a museum, this World War II veteran, a participant in the campaigns in Korea and Vietnam, was unable to escape the captivity of the Hudson's bottom silt on Monday. This embarrassed the organizers of the action, who had gathered the US military-political elite on board the ship. With dozens of television cameras set to broadcast the Intrepid leaving the pier for the first time in 24 years, Bill White, president of the ship's Sea, Air and Space Museum, had to admit that "it was a very bad day." Invited US Navy veterans, many of whom served on the Intrepid, recalled with disappointment that the ship, launched in 1943, withstood five Japanese kamikaze attacks, seven direct bomb hits, and then failed at the most crucial moment in the last quarter century .Participants in the transport operation, however, argued that it was not the ship - the stars just so aligned on Monday that even the tide did not help the six powerful tugboats that were supposed to pull the Intrepid just five nautical miles. “We had enough power. The fastening was correct. The weather was right. But Mother Nature herself was against us,” AP quotes the captain of the lead tug, Jeffrey McAllister. According to him, blowing the ballast made it possible to slightly lift the ship in the five-meter layer of silt that had formed under the ship over 24 years, and the tugboats even managed to move the Intrepid a few meters from the pier, but the four-meter propellers soon became completely stuck. Fruitless attempts to continue the operation were abandoned after the tide began to ebb. The next "water maximum" is expected in the Hudson on December 6, but a disappointed Billy White has so far been cautious about forecasting the possibility of repeating attempts in a month.
At the same time, experts note that this symbol of New York, which was visited annually by up to 700 thousand tourists who came to gaze at both the honored aircraft carrier and the aircraft that represented the history of US carrier-based aviation, really needs to be repaired. For more than sixty years, the metal of the ship has probably suffered significantly from corrosion, and participation in three wars probably did not do any good. The aircraft carrier, decommissioned by the navy, was going to be scrapped back in 1981, but New York real estate entrepreneur Zachary Fisher managed to buy the ship and within a year turn it into a museum, which over time became one of the attractions of the Big Apple.
In addition, during the two-year renovation, which was planned to cost about $60 million, the creators of the museum intended to significantly reconstruct the exhibition premises, making not only the decks accessible to the public, but also some of the previously closed rooms, including those where The temporary headquarters of the city administration was located in case of emergencies. The last time Intrepid was used as a command post was on September 11, 2001, during a rescue operation at the World Trade Center, whose towers were attacked by planes hijacked by terrorists. And it was on its board that one of the memorials was then installed in memory of the victims of this terrible terrorist attack - two vertical five-meter steel beams, symbolizing the destroyed twin towers, on the ruins of which they were found.