Sinking of an Aircraft Carrier | Free Documentary

[Music] the uss oriskany she was a fearsome presence in the wars of korea and vietnam she hasn't served the u.s navy in more than 30 years now a rusted veteran awaiting barry let's see golly it's like putting a legend on the bottom but the oriskany has one final mission before she's laid to rest a salvage crew races the clock to strip the last of her riches so that's what we're pulling out gold copper gold their mission is to remove tons of hazardous material from this floating city it's pretty dangerous down there crack the skull open something bad will happen then she will be towed more than 500 miles across the open sea but the mighty riskiness won't go without a fight as her end approaches a bomb squad will rig the ship with lethal quantities of explosives we do not want to have an accident and these kind of accidents kill then this giant will be scuttled creating the largest artificial reef in the world it's a high-stakes project to sink the unsinkable over the centuries countless ships have been destroyed by war or scuttled to make artificial reefs but no one has ever reefed an aircraft carrier docked at corpus christi texas the decommissioned oriskany is the first vessel chosen for the u.s navy's artificial reef program sinking the largest and most complex warship on earth will test the skills of one of the best marine demolition crews in the world their goal is to sync the aircraft carrier with explosives but you can't just drop a couple of bombs on an aircraft carrier and expect it to sink it's built to stay afloat under any circumstance it's a top-secret ship and the navy doesn't want the designs to fall into the wrong hands it will take months of planning for the team to unravel the mystery of how to sink the unsinkable when this ship was constructed decades ago there were thousands of engineers and shipbuilders who gave their best efforts to ensure this ship would never sink this is not a trivial task and it will require almost as much effort as it took to build the vessel to finally sink the vessel it will take thousands of hours of scraping torching and hydro blasting to prep the aircraft carrier for sync day the team will be working seven days a week and will have only eight months to complete the job it's an incredibly complex vessel a floating city filled with every supply and service imaginable everything the 2600 crew members would need to live and fight at sea for months at a time it has four separate kitchens sleeping quarters hospitals machine shops and radar installations everything from dental offices and barber shops to shoe repair and movie theaters literally thousands of rooms and the team is still discovering new ones every day i've been crawling the ship hard for three months about 10 hours a day and uh just do the sheer magnitude of the ship i still come across every now and then a room that i've not ever seen before but after 30 years in storage the ship is in a rusted and decrepit state it's full of lead-based paints foil aviation fuel asbestos and pcbs all toxic materials that have to be removed so she won't poison the ocean environment oriskany's journey from warship to reef began in september 1976. after an eventful and storied career oriskini was decommissioned twice before finally being stricken from the naval registry in 1989 she joined a large number of u.s warships left to rot in storage [Music] after two failed attempts to sell this monstrous vessel for scrap the navy chose her for the artificial reef program people around the world have been creating reefs for centuries artificial reefs are created when obsolete vessels are sunk they form an outcropping for sponges and coral to colonize [Music] today reefs attract recreational fishing and sport diving to boost the local economy many gulf states competed to have a risk any reef in their waters the state of florida won the bidding and her environmental remediation began don herring is project manager and the man assigned by the navy to verify that every job is done to strict environmental standards he has to inspect every square inch of the ship looking for toxic waste literally crawling through thousands of rooms and 565 tanks to make sure there no is type material left in the tanks so when the ship's actually reefed hazmat into the water some as large as an aircraft hangar others as small as a coffin [Music] but cleaning is just half the project the sink plan is the other half i think the contractor put a good sink plan together it's going to flood basically without any mechanical means and they decide how much water she can balance how much displacement she can take on how the water has to move where it has to move and when it has to move quite involved involved is an understatement the job is nearly impossible since world war ii not one u.s navy aircraft carrier has been sunk in action to do so during war means first getting by rings of defenses a cone of aerial protection escort vessels and even submarines are part of the package if an attacker makes it past these lethal weapons it is faced with four inch armor plate surrounding an inner core of over a thousand rooms each one capable of being isolated for flotation [Music] nothing short of a nuclear bomb can sink one [Music] aircraft carriers came into their own during the pacific campaign of the second world war they revolutionized combat by providing a highly mobile air station that could supply a constant barrage of aerial attacks to the most isolated battle arenas one of the most daunting things about the oriskany reef project is her size at 911 feet long and 145 feet across the beam she displaces 30 800 tons something this big needs serious moorings to keep it in place it's secured at the dock using dozens of lines the most effective are these massive chains two of them lead to gigantic anchors weighing in at a whopping 33 000 pounds each buried 25 feet into the earth a nice little anchor and this is only the flux so the anchor goes down probably another five feet so it's pretty big i gotta try and get out of here definitely was easier going down frank leckie is an expert on ship demolition but he's never seen anything this big before there's so much to do in so short of time for instance the lighting of the ship we ran 25 000 lights throughout the whole ship and 25 000 feet of lights just for instance it's every 10 feet apart you have a light that's 125 000 feet long that's just one small phase of it one just small part of it every aspect of this job is a huge challenge the peeling paint for example contains lead and it's all got to go we were tasked with 29 tons halfway through we got 29 tons and we're already halfway finished we ended up saying okay we'll just fill up 24 dumpsters we ended up filling 50 dumpsters the uss oriskany was a ship caught in a fundamental shift in naval history the end of world war ii her construction began in may of 1944 and she was supposed to become the most modern ship fighting the war in the pacific but the war ended before the oriskany was put to sea the uss oriskany 27 000 ton essex class aircraft carrier awaits launching at the new york navy yard she is the first united states capital ship completed since war's end at that time she was only able to launch and land propeller driven aircraft and her role in the fleet was uncertain [Music] she was redesigned with more powerful hydraulics steering system bridge and flight deck to launch jet fighters by 1952 she was reclassified an attack aircraft carrier and truly became the mighty o she was a strategic player in the wars at korea and vietnam right through to the 1970s the oriskany was one of the busiest ships in the us fleet the bomb elevators once used to raise her firepower are now the key to her demise like miners working a coal scene the demolition team uses these shafts to cut deeper into the ship the engine rooms are where the most toxic chemicals and hazardous materials are hiding we develop we call mine shafts that go all the way down to the main engine rooms but also they feed each of the levels we had to cut to two inch armor plating class a armor plating here and then in level four just before the engine room down here if you can look all the way down we had to cut through armor plating again from six stories below the flight deck every level has to be cleaned of grease and oil and the only thing that can handle decades-old grime is a hydroblast or extreme pressure washing that peels away the filth with over 8 500 pounds of force [Music] through the floors and some valves down there all blasted out all about stance you gotta stand right you'll stand right you'll slip the fall crack your skull open it's pretty dangerous down there some of the tanks are only accessible by narrow ladders that descend 60 feet straight down not only are they operating in tight spaces they have to contend with the heat at a scorching 110 degrees nothing is easy what you can notice where you enter the tank is it's not only extremely hot there's no airflow whatsoever [Music] okay it's uh somewhat oily and it's approximately uh oh 50 60 feet deep and one has to go down a real narrow ladder to get there so it's all in all an extremely strenuous job that requires frequent rotation of people because of the arduous conditions [Music] but for all the risk there is reward the medals that the ship was made from are now being mined to pay for the operation these are very high grade metals the navy only used the best metals when they made a ship there's a lot of revenue coming back out of each of these loads and we ship two to three loads of this a week but the main reason for metal recovery is several fourth one is the income and the other is that putting the metals back into brass copper and aluminum back into the economy it saves energy and resources every time you make a new ton of copper it takes tremendous natural resources and to have it sit in the bottom of the ocean is not helping the reef this is our gold mine this is where we mine our gold that's what we're pulling out gold copper gold but the mother lode is on the outside of the ship this is the starboard elevator the planes came from here and we're taken up this way anything over the water like this is dangerous and safety you can't this whole elevator is not worth anything and one man gets hurt that's not worth it so we take our time and do it correctly it's interesting the navy built this ship to be unsinkable so it's going to take a great job engineering to have it sink properly the sink plan is the most critical part of the operation before the demolition team can begin work there is one more place that has to be inspected the ocean side of the massive hall a navy dive team will check the condition of all previous repairs and look for any new damage this is critical information for the placement of the explosives so our job here is to identify uh dimensions and conditions of all the blanking plates on the openings to the sea of the risk there are 124 on the drawing and we have to go down and identify the condition of each one to make sure the next crew knows what they need to do when you're working underneath the ship you can identify the patches and the patch numbers and correct the drawings the drawings then on the inside of the ship will identify which pipes go into that patch so when you want to sink the ship and sink it level and sink it even you have to calculate how much water is going to come through each pipe and that's not done right this ship will not sink correctly and it'll probably lay on its side or something strange like that they want to sit it down on the bottom sitting vertically up just like you see it sitting here pure side except it'll be underwater the divers are working in less than 50 feet of water but at near zero visibility the job comes with a few risks probably the worst thing that can happen is uh either diver to lose his air or lose his mask and then panic and come to the surface if you do that and you hold your breath the compressed air on your lungs explodes basically out of your lungs and goes and your gets in your bloodstream goes through your heart and goes to your brain and that's uh that's called an arterial gas embolism and can result in paralysis death pretty pretty bad stuff despite the risks these highly trained navy divers are having [Applause] top success red diver i got a patch we're on one one one but sometimes it's just a luck of the draw before disaster strikes okay great okay great okay sam okay stand by okay okay red we got an unconscious diver on the surface tinder slender head back up get over here get him out of the water red divers on the surface hold him on the surface doc get the stretcher over here what you called that we got vitals breathing you've got difficult eyes open okay coming around oh yeah hey god happened all right i was coming to the bottom uh this appeared that we had a diver come up had a schedule so omit the decompression and uh he seems to be fine so i think we're okay to go get him up get him this is the kind of close call they train for all the time now the demolition team will kick up the stakes another notch is the bomb squad leader his team will be working in these huge chambers they contain giant valves called sea chests these valves and pipes open directly to the ocean to allow ballast water to enter the chambers stewart's job is to choose which valves to blow apart we blow in this sea chest here and that sea chest there we've identified 22 positions and valves throughout the ship most of them are in the center those are our primary there's also some critical locations both fore and aft bomb placement and complete detonation are critical place the charges in the wrong spot or use an incorrect amount of explosives and the ship could flood unevenly and the project would end in disaster as the ship would roll and sink on its side everything will detonate simultaneously and the ship should settle on an even keel we're using a double redundant system to ensure that all charges detonate together we don't want to have any charges not detonate because we don't have any unexploded demolition material left in the ship if all goes according to plan the top of oriskany's control or conning tower will stand 55 feet below the surface that makes her a prime sport diving site and that's a crucial reason not to leave behind any unexploded ordinance that could put an unsuspecting diver's life at risk [Music] this won't be the first time the mighty o has felt the devastating impact of explosives on october 27 1966 a signal flare accidentally ignited a chain reaction of explosions in oriskany's forward hangar bay and when we went in there the fire was going up the side of the building we went to turn on the hoses on the side of the um magazine and when we somebody hit it with water with the other hose and magnesium explodes when you hit it and it just went like it was raining fire entombed by armor plating the men inside never had a chance fire is the most dangerous most of the people that died on that fire died from suffocation they didn't die from burns well they got burned after they suffocated it was the worst disaster in the oriskany's history 44 pilots and crewmen lost their lives as the remediation team rushes to prepare oriskany for her own burial at sea mother nature throws them a curve we had a very unusual uh semi-tropical uh storm that passed through it rained uh at least several inches and it's not a major concern for the safety of the project but what we have to do is be concerned about cleaning up water that that entered the vessel structure so that there's no effect on stability but this certainly isn't the last complication the team will face the navy is happy with the work that the remediation team has done so far the state of florida however has decided the oriskany is not safe enough to be scuttled in their waters but it looks like they want to make the thing a little more diver safe diver friendly and bundles of cables such as this that are hanging down these are the potential entanglement items that we'd like to remove as well as something like this i'll go ahead and spray this everything with green has got to go they've marked out some cabling overhead obstructions and stuff like that we're running into a little bit of a problem time wise we're approaching hurricane season so we need to either hurry up and get it done if they want to get this thing towed over to florida before hurricane season kicks in the extra work doesn't end with entanglements the wiring as well as the wooden flight deck contain pcbs it's one of the most toxic substances in the world and all of it has to go that puts more pressure on the team as they race to beat hurricane season we did a calculation counted wires length of the island etc how many levels and we estimate that there was probably close to 200 miles of cable in this superstructure alone all of these have to come out these are these are called cable trunks mostly communication cables we can't use torches because the cables contain pcbs as soon as you heat them and put flame to them they'll release them into the air and then we have a problem so we don't torch any of them everything's done manually with the sawzall or with the cable cover a lot more aggravation but it's what you got to do to get it out right this is a pile of cable that one man has removed in approximately four hours and 15 minutes dropped not yet removed but that's what a man with the sawzall and a pair of cable cutters can remove in about that amount of time as the crew puts the finishing touches to the remediation preparations begin for oriskany's final journey will be towed nearly 600 miles from corpus christi texas to pensacola florida that's where the most dangerous phase of the operation will take place rigging the bombs that will drop the mighty o to the sea floor but towing this giant across the gulf of mexico poses another risk as hurricane season approaches i'm glad she's leaving i think we've done everything that we was asked to do and it's it's time for it to be over and i think we certainly accomplished everything we came here to do the anchors that were buried eight months earlier have to be dug up and loaded onto the flight deck along with thousands of feet of chain they'll come along for the ride and will be used to hold the oriskany in place on sink day tonight and tomorrow morning we have the tugs coming in that are going to pull it out monday morning they'll hook up all the tugs they'll start heading out the channel we'll park right up here in the two-lay lake channel the toughest one to get under is this lift bridge right here i mean we cleared it coming in but it was real tight like six or eight inches and then we're headed straight back out to the bay and hang in line with the ship it's so tall out of the water that if it's windy i can't leave so a lot of it depends on the wind so i'm going to have all the tugs all the people everyone and if it blows more than 15 miles an hour i have to start all over again on tuesday morning and if it flows again i gotta start all over again on wednesday morning the oriskany is a dead vessel that means it's without power or steering ability so wind conditions have to be calm for the tugs to handle her with winds blowing over 25 miles an hour it's too dangerous to leave port well as you can see today it's not a good day to go today we've got probably 20 knot winds we can't leave until it's 10 at least 10 knot winds is the maximum today it's probably blowing 30 to 40 mile an hour winds the pilots canceled the pilots but there's always a possibility you know this front's coming in this should be a lull should give us about six seven hour window so wait well as you can see with the wind behind us and the flag and the smoke with all this wind it's for sure cancelled with all crews on standby the costs are mounting it can cost up to 100 000 a day you have the pilots the assist hugs the lead tugs put some gas in your car look at the prices today i've got 10 000 horsepower tugboats for one day that'll burn 7 000 gallons just that one boat just alone right there is 30 000 in fuel then you have the assist tugs then you have the pilot then here they require four pilots guys in the morning we're all going to come in at six o'clock it may be good weather it may not be good weather but if we come in at six we're gonna finish early we'll try to get everything done then the following morning we're gonna do the same thing until the ship leaves there's nothing left to do now but gamble on mother nature in corpus christi texas the oriskany has been waiting days for perfect weather but today's forecast finally looks good it's not been an official go yet but if i had to bet my paycheck on it we're out of here word comes down and the job of wrangling the massive hulk begins roger rogers are going to go ahead and cut that table for you as soon as the dolphin tug is free i'll just go ahead and cut this one and we're done oh he's done now with over a thousand tons of precious metals and hazmat pulled from the ship it rides higher the team has had to pump ballast water in to clear the bridge the oriskany is nearly 200 feet high and the bridge 203 only the tide will tell how much clearance did we have the last time three or four dollars i had a guy up there with the sauce all ready to go probably going about three knots i'd rather go going slower the danger is if it's going fast then it hits something it's going to damage a lot of it's going slow it can touch it it's a huge gamble the tugs aim for the center of the bridge if the tide is too high the mighty o will rip it down with only inches to spare the oriskany slips through that's a beautiful sight right there i'll tell you she's done all right her next challenge is to make it to pensacola almost 600 miles away but as she reaches the bay the tow line snaps suddenly the oriskany drifts dangerously close to the rocky shore and the crew realizes that something has gone wrong [Music] [Music] the oriskany is no help as it drifts without power repeated attempts to snag the anchor line fill the crew of the pilot tug wrestled the chain and finally reconnected to the tow bar they can complete the journey to florida where the final and most dangerous phase of the operation will take place the oriskany has finally arrived at the naval base in pensacola florida the team begins work on the most important phase of the operation executing the sync plan the naval engineers have developed a plan that they believe will sink the ship evenly and quickly poles are strategically cut through dozens of tanks and chambers the oriskany was built not to sink because of her side protection system and she's got tanks on either side of her four to aft if it took a hit in the first tank he had two more tanks inside to keep it water tight or maybe it would penetrate two tanks you still had one more to keep it watertight so in the sink plan what they had us do was fill all of these tanks so they're already full of water so now all of this protection system is now full of water we flood around it that's why the unsinkable ship is now sinkable it's all about compromising the integrity of the vessel double layered hull side protection tanks and thick steel walls must be cut in a precise way to allow seawater to fill the ship evenly and quickly once we get out to the sink site frank will have some of his people come down in the space and they'll remove all of these patches too much water in one side or the other and the ship will roll over our major deal has been trying to pump the ship down putting all the ballast in it and we put approximately uh 15 000 tons of water which is about 540 tanks that we've filled but there's a hitch the ship is leaking like a sieve and water is getting into the tanks where it could affect the explosives we have engine spaces that we need uh to put explosive charges in with an old ship like this the tanks are leaking through the pipes so a lot of the water is going into the engine room spaces we have to pump that out before the explosives go on board so we need to keep these spaces real dry now the bomb squad moves in laying the detonation cord through the maze of corridors within this floating city is an extremely treacherous job aircraft carriers are you know the biggest ships we've got you think you can go one way you know you think you're going starboard and all of a sudden you get turned around you're going for it the 22 bombs are connected with 10 miles of debt yeah sometimes the most important thing for us with dead core is the route we want to make sure that we don't think it or cross over other charges or other debt the detonation court runs up to the flight deck and into this boat it houses the electronic brain center that will control the ignition of the bombs the 45-foot bow is strapped down to the deck but will release and float away when the aircraft carrier sinks beneath it this actually turns on the firing system fires the firing system and also functions the cable cutters that cut this whole vessel away from the ship as it sinks there's a duplicate over on the support vessel basically what we have is a brake wire around each charge and as each charge detonates we'll get an indication here we record it down here instantaneously and then it's transmitted back to the support vessel for verification today the number one thing is safety we've got this entire ship rigged with explosives and with military decor that's the stuff right here kind of green kind of smooth nobody goes below the hangar deck without an escort because we have all of our charges in place and they're all attached to their debt cords the worst could happen would be an uncommanded detonation if you happen to disturb it pull it snag it just let me know and we'll take a look at it i cannot stress it enough you know we do not want to have an accident and these kind of accidents kill the demolition team rushes to complete last-minute clean-up but now they have to work side by side with the bomb squad making for uncomfortable workmates one misstep could trigger the explosives the ship would sink at the dock and lives would be lost there's only 24 hours before the oriskany leaves port the pressure is on the closer we get to the end here probably the more dangerous it gets because now we're opening every access that we created for for the sink so there's holes everywhere there's every hatch is removed there's holes in the deck holes in the bulkhead deck plates are gone which is all planned and supposed to be that away but it gets hazardous gutted cleaned and wired to blow there's only one thing left to do hey let's get a second aircraft carrier [Music] loaded with explosives the mighty arm is cut loose from her moorings the eris canyon leaves port for her final resting place frank and the demolition team ride along they monitor the patches and welds and are ready to man the pumps if she begins to take on water [Music] it's an old ship and look at her after all the gutting we've done she's still tough an armada of tugs takes up position in case the aircraft carrier breaks free from her tow lines the countdown to zero hour has begun [Music] 25 miles from pensacola florida the oriskany floats above her final resting place in the gulf of mexico [Music] nes uh harbor security this is alpha tango how copy over security just want to re-clarify we need a 1250 foot arc from any point on the oriskany today under agreement with the state of florida the aircraft carrier has to be sunk on a very precise set of coordinates [Music] the tugboats carefully nudge the mighty o over a buoy that marks the spot how far away are we robert 150 feet forward ranger we're about 350 feet off hey when it gets close right give that a tug right here hard to pour and it'll swing the bow over there and get right where you want it to ensure the ship stays precisely over the target the anchors will be deployed in a four-point anchoring system this is the starboard anchor chain which is connected up above to the island from here we're going to have approximately 100 tons of chain and anchor that's going to hold the ship offshore and this will be the first and most major chain and anchor that we're going to deploy the ship's anchor was normally three inch chain we brought three and three eighths chain and the original ships anchors were like 25 000 pounds we brought 30 000 pounds to keep the ship in one place we only have one time deployment once we cut our cable we cannot retrieve it we cannot bring it in we cannot shorten it we cannot lengthen it we have one shot and this is the only shot that we have to deploy nearly 100 tons of chain per leg of anchor frank gives work to cut the anchors loose [Music] yeah you're looking good last anchor's in the water but there are still a few more incisions to be made once these sections of the hall are opened up there's nothing to stop her from sinking we cut the six by six holes on the side of the ship so that when it comes down to that level the water will flow in and make the ship sink fast you guys his job we got her here go blow it up tomorrow the sun rises on sink day [Music] 25 miles off the coast of florida the oriskany is anchored above her final resting place [Music] this is the same day we're doing it we're clearing off the rest of our equipment i didn't get ourselves off so they when they arm the explosives we're crazy but we're not that crazy to stay here [Music] one of the final jobs on board the mighty o is to mount video cameras to capture the explosions to film the oriskany sinking from inside the ship cameras are mounted on the hanger deck images from within the sinking vessel that have never been seen before it's been pretty smooth since we've been out here and i expect it's going to remain that away the weather looks good but anything can happen you know anything can happen final systems are checked and rechecked before the green light to start the countdown security is tight and all ships are kept outside the one-mile exclusion zone the bomb squad rolls out the final lines of detonation court they'll connect the explosive charges to the ike boat hey five three two one the charges have blown successfully but will the mighty o settle straight on the bottom or will she go down fighting this is really really strange you had to see her do this i mean just uh eerie she's taking on a lot of water right now a lot of water it appears that she's uh just about to the third deck right now frank and don are getting a little concerned as the ship begins to list to the port side [Music] you're seeing the whole of the flight deck what's going to happen is the house is going to help to start writing it once it goes down the only problem is right now it's this bit too much i could roll on her side come on baby girl see what she's supposed to do she'll level out she'll level out she's gonna do it her way come on baby roll back over again roll back over level it up in this spectacular footage from the hangar deck camera a wall of water engulfs the ship only 37 minutes after detonation the mighty o succumbs to the sea and slips beneath the waves she's starting to ride herself it's coming back around again boom it's going to hit the bottom [Applause] the cheers are only temporary for the job to be successful oriskany has to sit upright on the sea floor the only way to know for sure is to dive on the site sitting upright and in perfect position the cutting and chopping behind her the crew can rest assured that the mission is a success [Music] [Music] from her launch at the end of world war ii through years of valiant service the mighty o attack carrier finally lays at rest [Music] she survived korea a near disaster in vietnam and eight months of scraping gutting and explosives [Music] now she's ready to serve again this time as the largest artificial reef in the world [Music] so [Music] you

Channel: Free Documentary

Views: 2,110,715

Keywords: Free Documentary, Documentaries, Full documentary, HD documentary, documentary - topic, documentary (tv genre), sinking a destroyer, sinking, destroyer (ship type), ship sinking, ship, ship documentary, Demolition Documentary, aircraft carrier, aircraft carrier documentary, sinking an aircraft carrier

Id: WOAdxLLFfhI

Length: 49min 48sec (2988 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 30 2020