So All the Museum Ships Will Do Tours When They Go To Drydock, Right?

[Music] hi I'm Ryan samansky curator for Battleship New Jersey museum and Memorial somebody posted a question last week on the museum ship's Facebook page it's one of my absolute favorite Facebook pages if you're not a member of Museum ships yet head over there and check it out there's a great team of moderators that runs it anyway somebody asked the question that now that Texas and New Jersey have done Dry Dock tours is that going to become the standard for Museum ships are you going to be able to come down and and see a ship in Dry Dock anytime it happens I thought that was a really great and thoughtful question uh given that there is now precedent now and hopefully this precedent means that more ships will be able to do this I don't think we would have been allowed to to do our Dry Dock tours if Texas hadn't done theirs and we weren't able to show uh all the lawyers the insurance people that hey this has been done success sucessfully before so now that there are two uh Museum ships that have been able to successfully do this I really hope that other ships will however this is not something you can take for granted not every ship is going to be able to do this and it's not because they don't want to it really depends on what yard the ship is moving into and what their legal team says what their local law says what their insurance company says or or even other condition for example the Destroyer kid in Baton Rouge Louisiana is getting ready to go into dry do be sure to go and uh follow their social medias we link them down below uh donate to support them if you can um but check out the the most recent updates on what they're doing what they plan when they're going that sort of stuff uh but you can see kid on the blocks half of the time when you go and visit Baton Rouge just because of how the Mississippi drops her on her cradle or or picks her up and floats her so it doesn't necessarily make sense for them to take on the risk of opening the ship when she's in Dry Dock likewise they have both a museum and a ship with the ship gone the staff is still going to be working to have the museum open so where's the staff supposed to come from to operate the tours of the ship while it's in Dry Dock another consideration to take into mind is what kind of material is coming off of the hall or going onto the hall so for example a lot of our ships served during World War II and they may have led paint on them do you think you would be allowed in the dry dock while they're blasting lead paint off of the ship even if it's the weekend when they're not working they haven't necessarily cleaned all that up so it's still there and hazardous so for most ships especially if they're dry docking for the first time as a museam it's not likely that you'll be able to get down and see them for safety reasons tours also delay work on the weekend for example this past weekend the painters finished blasting the port side of the ship and the bottom of the ship and they were ready to move over to the starboard side however we were doing Dry Dock tours all weekend so they were not able to work that meant that they couldn't make up the time that they lost from earlier in the week when it rained and they couldn't continue to work many of these guys are contractors who are just here for this project and they want to get the project over as quickly as possible so they can go back home we want them to get the project over as quickly as possible cuz we pay by the day that the ship is on the Block whether work is happening or not unfortunately tours for us have been lucrative enough to offset that however that's not always the case and then of course we get back to the liability issue most yards are not going to take on the kind of liability of having folks who have never been in a shipyard before walking around we have to show a safety presentation and ensure that our guests have all sorts of proper PPE and the yard has staff here to help manage that as well from their safety department fortunately this is a private yard and they were willing to work with us and we gave them our initial proposal of what we wanted to do and they said well you can't really do it this way but we'll work with you and you can do some of this and some of that and they they really have been great working with us but not every yard will it's not worth the liability to them or maybe their public yards like uh last time missor was dry do she was at the Pearl Harbor Navy Yard uh likely ships in the Virginia area would go to the norol Navy Yard are those yards going to allow tours probably not however some yards have showed off their work even before Texas and New Jersey started doing their dry dockings for example when Constitution and C and young go into dry do you can't tour those ships anymore but you can walk around the top of the dryck and look down at the work happening on them they've been doing that for years so all of this is to say thank you both to North Atlantic Ship Repair for working with us and allowing us to create this opportunity and also to Battleship Texas for pioneering tours inside the dry dock so that there is precedent for other Museum ships like us to make this happen we would have been about a million dollars short towards this dry docking without the money that we're raising on these tours and we wouldn't have been able to fulfill our mission the Museum's mission is to both restore the battleship and educate the public normally a yard period forces you to pick you can either be open and cammed in educating the public or you can be closed in the yard preserving the battleship we're able to do both and that that is so great between 1990 when we were last dry docked and around 2060 when we next go onto the blocks there's likely only 5,000 people who will get the chance to take tours of the dry do with New Jersey in it make sure you get your tickets today we have less than a thousand left there's a link in the description below for our ticketing page so you can get your tickets and don't miss out on this rare opportunity hopefully many other Museum ships will be able to follow Texas's example in the future but what I really want to impart on you guys is do not take this for granted and hold it against other museums for not doing it because there are a whole host of reasons why they can't and don't think that just because a couple of Museum ships have done it now that you don't have to go and see them CU you can wait for your local museum ship to do it and in 2 years or 5 years there's a chance that won't happen what is the coolest chip that you've ever gotten to see out of the water let us know in the comment section down below if you're one of the 99% of people who haven't gotten to see a ship out of the water what do you think would be the coolest ship what's a ship that you would give anything to see out of the water let us know in the comments section down below Battleship New Jersey receives operating support from the New Jersey Department of State and also from a number of other businesses and private individuals like you we really appreciate the support you guys have given us through both donations and coming to see her in dry do you can also support us by liking sharing subscribing so more people find about the museum and our Channel thanks for watching

Channel: Battleship New Jersey

Views: 68,391

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Id: 4RyFRKvk_pE

Length: 8min 15sec (495 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 26 2024