k5083 wrote:
old iron wrote:
Why is there no US Navy museum to take care of these things? Every service has one if not service air museums for old planes but no museum that preserved and presents to history of the old ships. Surely this could be justified as a recruiting tool and to communicate the esprit de coups for active service personnel. What would the annual costs be as ratio to the daily costs of a carrier fleet?
Well, there sort of is.
This would fall under the US Navy's Naval History and Heritage Command.
http://www.history.navy.mil/index.htmlThis Command operates 12 museums. The Constitution is one of them. The Command preserves the submarine Nautilus in CT. It appears that the Navy used to preserve and operate the Wisconsin in Hampton Roads but has transferred it to the city.
So your question is why doesn't the NHHC preserve more ships.
I guess they have weighed the heritage, publicity, recruiting, and training value of maintaining old ships, and no doubt the Olympia in particular, in view of the cost and available resources and concluded that it just isn't worth it. They seem to feel that they get more bang for buck in preserving pieces of ships, such as gun turrets or sub sails.
It would be interesting to know more about the thought process and economics involved. One problem with heritage preservation of large, high-maintenance artifacts is that the benefits are vague and intangible whereas the costs are very specific and very tangible. Many of the benefits accrue not to the Navy but to the society at large. So they are externalities from the Navy's perspective.
We live in a time when most parts of government have been required to cut back, even in economically trivial areas that are more for show than for any real budget impact, and activities ancillary to the department's main mission are the first to go. This is probably not a good time to be lobbying for the navy to expand its side business of historical caretaking. Government support of culture, whether it be art, history, literature, etc., generally is under siege. It is left to communities, corporations, and philanthropists to pick up the ball of preserving even some of the most important artifacts. The Olympia is a big ball.
Temporary economic woes aside, this is a wealthy society that would seem to have enough surplus resources to preserve quite a lot of historical assets like this. It's a matter of getting the various constituencies that would benefit from saving a ship like this to acknowledge their interests and pony up.
August
Most of us understand the cost and condition difference between maintaining a static airframe undercover (or even on outside static display) as against restoring and maintaining the airframe in airworthy condition.
Unfortunately the maintenance of a steel hull and superstructure sitting in a salt water environment is nearly the same as an operating ship, even the boiler and engine is dead.
Clearly the solution for "some" of these historic ships in the US (and elsewhere) is to permanently dry dock them away from the salt water in an earth/concrete berth and give up on them being floating "ships", and move them into being "historical artefacts".
The ideal outcome would be to have them sufficiently away from salt water than the superstructure was away from salt from sea breezes, of course there will still be high maintenance due to external display, and the hull may need some treatment to stop it rotting from contact with the earth, but it becomes a civil engineering structure to maintain not a marine/sea worthy issue.
Of course once that is done it tends to lock the location indefinately, so it would be better to place them in federal land under control of the Navy than to have them on city land that later attracts re-development interest.
If we dont "keep" some of these early ships now, they certainly wont exist for future generations if we try to preserve them as "reefs".
regards
Mark Pilkington
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