The Sinking Of An Aircraft Carrier | USS Oriskany | Spark

[Music] the USS Oriskany she was a fearsome presence in the wars at Korea and Vietnam she hasn't served the US Navy in more than 30 years now a rusted veteran awaiting berry let's see golly it's like but no 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 this or going out gold copper gold their mission is to remove tons of hazardous material from this floating city so open something bad will happen then she will be towed more than 500 miles across the open sea but the mighty Oriskany would go without a [ __ ] as her end approaches a bomb squad will rig the ship with lethal quantities of explosives do not want to have an accident and these kind of accidents kill then this giant will be stuck creating the largest artificial reef in the movie 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 reached 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 singing 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 sink 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 sink day the team will be working seven days a week you 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 that 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 barbershops 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 ten hours a day and just do the sheer magnitude of the ship I might still come across every now and then a room that I've not even seen before but after 30 years in storage the ship is in a rusted and decrepit stink it's full of lead-based paints the foil aviation fuel asbestos and PCBs all toxic materials that have to be removed so she won't poison the ocean environment or risking his journey from warship to reef began in September 1976 after an eventful and storied career a Riskin II was decommissioned twice before finally being stricken from the naval registry in 1989 she joined a large number of US 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 today reefs attract recreational fishing and sport diving to boost the local economy many Gulf states competed to have a risk Andy reefed 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 [Music] some as large as an aircraft hangar others as small as a call but cleaning is just half the project the sink planner is the other half I think the contractor put up a good sink plan together it's gonna flood basically without any mechanical means and they decide how much water she can ballast 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 two not one US Navy aircraft carrier has been sunk in action to do so during war means first getting by rings of Defense's a pound 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 air core over a thousand rooms each one capable of being isolated for flotation [Music] nothing short of a nuclear bomb and sink one [Music] aircraft carriers came into their own during the Pacific campaign 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 nine hundred and eleven feet long and 145 feet across the beam she displaces thirty thousand eight hundred 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 it's a nice little anchor and this is only the flukes 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 a 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 a hundred and twenty five thousand feet long that's just one small phase if it was this small part of it every aspect of this job is a huge challenge the peeling paint for example contains ladder and it's all got to go we were tasked with 29 tons the halfway through we got 29 tons and we already halfway finished we ended up saying okay we'll just fill up 24 dumpsters we end up filling 50 dumpsters the USS Oriskany was a ship caught in a fundamental shift in naval history the end of World War two 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 brought to see the USS Oriskany 27,000 ton essex-class aircraft carrier awaits launching at the New York Navy Yard he is the first United States capital ship completed since war's end [Music] 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 and attack aircraft carrier and truly became the mighty oh 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 seam 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 developed we call mine shafts that go all the way down to the main engine room but also they feed each of the levels we had to cut through two-inch armor plating Class A armor plating here and then in level four just before the engine room down here if you look all the way down we had a 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 grind is a hydro blast or extreme pressure washing that peels away the film with over 8,500 pounds of force [Music] - down bottom on the step [Music] we thought about Stan Stan right you'll slip the fall crack your skull open 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 and it's approximately 50 60 feet deep and one has to go down a real narrow a ladder to get there so it's always 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 metals 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 there each of these loads and we ship 2 to 3 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 it's not helping to reap this is our gold mine this is where we miner a gold this were 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 [Music] [Music] anything over the water like this is dangerous and safety okay this whole elevators not worth anything if one man gets hurt that's not worth it so we take that 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 [Music] 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 dimensions and conditions of all the blanking plates on the openings to the co2 risk inhale 124 on the drawing when 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 or 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 gonna come through each pipe and that's not done right this ship will not sink correctly and it probably lay on this side or something strange like that they want to sit it down on the bottom sitting up vertically up just like you see it sitting here pierside 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 either diver to lose his hair or lose his mask and then panic and come to the surface if you do that and you hold your breath the compressed air in your lungs explodes basically out of your lungs and goes and your gets in your bloodstream goes through your heart and goes your brain and that's that's called an arterial gas embolism and resolving your paralysis that pretty pretty bad stuff despite the risks these highly trained Navy divers are having success [Applause] but sometimes it's just a look of the disaster strikes [Music] Eddi what's called that we have vital disappeared that we had a diver come up and a schedule so omit a decompression and he seems to be fine so I think we're okay to go this is the kind of close call they train for all the time now the demolition team will kick up the stakes another notch Stuart Sachs 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 Stuart'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 were in the center those are our primary there's also some critical locations both fore and aft bomb placement and complete detonation our 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 a risk in ease 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 ordnance that could put an unsuspecting divers life at risk [Music] this won't be the first time the my tio has felt the devastating impact of explosives on October 27th 1966 a signal flare accidentally ignited the chain reaction of explosions in a risky knees 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 that side of the magazine and when we somebody hit it with water with the other hose that 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 would have died on that fire died from suffocation that endive burns well they got burned after they suffocated it was the worst disaster in the riskiness history 44 pilots and crew lost their lives [Music] as the remediation team rushes to prepare a risk a need for her own burial at sea Mother Nature throws them occur we had a very unusual semi tropical storm that passed through it rained it's 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 the 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 more diverse 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 the screen has got to go they marked out some cabling overhead obstructions we're running into a little bit of a problem timewise we're approaching hurricane season so we can either hurry up and get it done if they want to get this thing told 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 be for a gain 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 and a superstructure alone all of these have to come out these are some these are called cable trunks mostly communication cables we can't use pointers because the cables contain PCBs as soon as you heat them and put flying tones that will release them into the air and then we have a problem so we don't fortunately 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 is removed in approximately four hours of 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 a risky's final journey she'll 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 bonds that will drop the mighty owe to the seafloor but towing this giant across the Gulf of Mexico poses another risk as hurricane season approaches 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 that 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 IRISA p.m. place on sink day tonight and tomorrow morning we have the tugs coming in that are going to pull it out Monday morning that'll hook up all the toads will start heading out the channel right up here in the Thule Lake Channel the toughest one to get under there's 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 hey good luck 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 gonna have all the tugs all the people everyone and if it flows more than 15 miles an hour I have to start all over again or Tuesday morning and if it flows again I got to start all over again on Wednesday morning the Oriskany is a dead vessel that means it's without power 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 cancel the pilots but there's always a possibility you know this fronts coming in this should be a low should give us a bus 6 7 hour window so wait well as you can see what happened behind us in the flag in the smoke with all this wind it's for sure canceled with all crews on standby the costs are mounting it can cost up to $100,000 a day you have the pilots the assist tugs the lead toes put some gas in your car look at the prices today I've got ten thousand horsepower tugboats for one day that will burn 7,000 gallons just that one vote just alone right here 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 gonna 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 meant an official go yet but if I had to bet my paycheck on it we're out of here word comes down that the job of wrangling the massive hall begins rajaraja's are going to go ahead and cut that cable tree since it's open tug is free I'll just go ahead and cut this one we're done with over a thousand tons of precious metals and has Mack pulled from the ship it writes higher the team has had to pump ballast water in to clear the bridge the ERISA is nearly 200 feet high and the bridge 203 only the tide will tell which average cleared should we have the last times we've had a guy after all the Sol's already girls I'll be going about three nights one slower the danger is if it's going fast and 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 Todd's aim for the center of the bridge if the tide is too high the mighty Oh will rip it down with only inches to spend via risk and he slips through that's a beautiful sight right there I'll tell you she's done her next challenge is to make it to Pensacola almost 600 miles away but as she reaches the bay the towline snaps suddenly the Oriskany drifts dangerously close to the rocky shore and the crew realizes that something has gone wrong [Music] [Music] the 30-ton Sheng thrashes the tongues the risky is no help as it drifts without power repeated attempts to snag the etheline fit [Music] 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 sink plan the naval engineers have developed a plan that they believe will sink the ship even liam quickly poles are strategically cut through dozens of tanks and change the Oriskany was built not to sink because of her side protection system and she's got tanks on either side over for two F if it took a hit in the first tank he had two more tanks inside to keep of water type 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 syncable it's all about compromising the integrity of the vessel double-layer call side protection tanks and thick steel walls must be cut in a precise way to allow sea water 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 remove our major deal is being trying to pump the ship down putting all the ballast in it and we put approximately 15,000 tons of water which is about 540 tanks that we're 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 to put explosive charges in what's an old ship like this the tanks are leaking through the pipes so a lot of the Waterston into the engineering spaces we have to pump that it before the explosive scoreboard so we need to keep these spaces real track 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 you know biggest ships with God do you think you can go one way you know you think you're going starboard and also you get turned around you're going for it the 22 bones are connected with ten miles of debt quad most important thing for us with dead quarters the route we want to make sure that we don't get over other the detonation cord runs up to the flight deck and into this book it houses the electronic brain Center that will control the ignition of the bombs the 45-foot boat 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 is a duplicate over on the support vessel basically what we have is a break 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 debt course 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 the det cords 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 cleanup but now they have to work side by side with the bomb squad which 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 sport yeah 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 the for the sink so there's holes everywhere there's every hatches removed there's holes in the deck holes in the bulkhead deck plates are gone which is all planned and supposed to be that way but it gets hazardous got it cleaned and wired to blow there's only one thing left to do [Music] loaded with explosives the mighty ovens cut loose from her moorings de-risking leaves port for her final resting place [Music] [Music] Franken the demolition team ride-along they monitor the patches and wells and are ready to man the pumps if she begins to take on water [Music] it's an old ship and look at it 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 towline the countdown to zero hour has begun 25 miles from Pensacola Florida the Oriskany floats above her final resting place in the Gulf of Mexico NES Harbor security this is alpha tango how copy over the army here everything this one to re clarify we need a twelve hundred and fifty foot mark from any point on a risk Anita de roger 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 my tío over a buoy that marks the spot how far away are we Robert ranger we're about three hundred and fifty feet off 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 gonna have approximately a hundred tons of chain and anchor that's going to hold the ship offshore and this would be the first that once made your 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 connect shortening we cannot like this we have one shot and this is the only shot that we have to deploy nearly a hundred tons of chain per leg of anchor Frank gives work to cut the anchors loose [Music] last anchors in the water but there are still a few more incisions to be made once these sections of the holler 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 where we got our very standardized 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 distinct day we're doing it but it cleared off the rest of our equipment I didn't get ourselves off so they when they armed the explosives we're crazy but we're not that crazy to stay here one of the final jobs on board the mighty oak is to mount video cameras to capture the explosions to film a risky sinking from inside the ship cameras are mounted on the hangar 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 gonna remain that way the weather looks good but anything can happen anything can happen [Music] final systems are checked and rechecked before the green light to start the countdown security is title 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 do you copy hey Khoi the charges have blown successfully but will the mighty Oh settle straight on the bottom or will she go down fighting this is really really strange great oh you had to see her do this I mean just theory she's taking on a lot of water right now it appears that she's just about to the third deck right now Frank and Dawn are getting a little concerned as the ship begins to list to the portside you're seeing the whole of the flight that what's going to happen is the house it's going to help to start bright it once it goes down the only problem is right now it's this a bit too much I could roll on our side baby girl what's supposed to do still level out is your level up you gonna do it her way come on baby roll back over again roll back over in this spectacular fridge from the hangar deck camera a wall of water engulfs the ship only 37 minutes after detonation the mighty OSA comes to the sea and slips beneath the waves she's starting to ride herself it's coming back around again well let's put it at the bottom [Applause] now that says the cheers are only temporary for the job to be successful a risk and he has to sit upright on the seafloor the only way to know for sure is to die 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 two through years of valiant service the mighty o attack carry on finally lays it 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] [Music] Oh

Channel: Spark

Views: 1,221,533

Rating: 4.8241158 out of 5

Keywords: Spark, Science, Technology, Engineering, Learning, How To, education, documentary, factual, mind blown, construction, building, full documentary, 2017, 2016, 2015, full, space documentary, bbc documentary, Science documentary, military aircraft carrier, us military aircraft carrier, uss oriskany, uss oriskany diving, uss oriskany air ops vietnam 1972, uss oriskany vietnam, uss oregon battleship, uss oriskany documentary, how to sink a military ship

Id: F2-Aew7SMO8

Length: 49min 35sec (2975 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 20 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Oscar-Wilde-1854]

45:18 starts the actual sinking if that's all you're interested in.

Although the actual process itself is quite interesting. (And also answers all the questions asked here).

It's completely cleaned and toxin free before sinking. It's purely a structure which coral can grow on and other marine life can live in. Not bad for the environment at all.

[u/FartFiller]

Thanks. This is right up my alley. My ship was Vietnam era. LPH-11. It took years to go from the sea duty too the yards too an artificial reef. I've got a pic if her sinking. Not much to see, just listing some.

[u/1BigUniverse]

46:55 Is nightmare fuel for those that are afraid of deep open water.

[u/Its_Nduati]

Not available in my country😢

[u/voodoochick05]

I was actually stationed in Pensacola when they were stripping it down to prepare it for the water. It was neat to drive by it and see it in various stages of dismantling. We watched them tow it out to sea and then watched the rest live on TV.

[u/hotstupidgirl]

49 and a half hours long?

[u/Gawkhimm]

Great Carrier Reef

[u/bikeidaho]

My grandfather was one of the 44 men whom died on this ship during the fire...

[u/SexyWampa]

My dad served on The Mighty O in Korea.