“She will be able to last past my time here,” laughed Paul Marzello, president and CEO of the Buffalo and Erie County Naval Park.Īfter a Naval surveyor’s visit in December, it became clear dry docking is what’s best. No doubt they have, and they continue to do so. “Some of us had a lot of nightmares.”īut Stephenson says they had to show their mettle. 'We still feel very stressed, traumatic,” he said. Stephenson says many are still dealing with the trauma of seeing the ship nearly capsize. It’s been an arduous year of cleaning and cataloging. Workbooks, foul weather jackets, photographs and even documents given to sailors of where they were docking were saved. “You know vacuuming, cleaning,” he went on to say. 'We had four different stations,” Stephenson recalled. Over on the USS Little Rock, he set up a triage center, with the help of a local art conservator from Undun Art Services for the damaged artifacts. For Stephenson, it’s been a labor of love. Staff was at the historic Fletcher-class destroyer's side for 22 days straight, roughly 11 hours each day.

“These are all individual electronic pieces, so they had to get in here and clean the oil out of each of these areas and all these components,” Stephenson said as he pointed to machines in a gun operating room. There are areas where you see the brown staining on the bulkheads, the overheads, and that would be leftover oil.”Īfter the water was removed, an environmental company came in to remove that leftover oil. “There’s abatement and they used lead paint. “We still have a lot of work to do down here,” Stephenson said. Work to preserve the 80-year-old ship and her story is still well underway. Thankfully, in a matter of hours, she was floating again. “If that pumping plan wasn’t in place, or thorough, and all of that data analyzed, it could have broken her back or her keel,” Stephenson said. Stephenson says it took six weeks of practice pumping and analyzing data to get it just right. “You can imagine all of this here filled with water, all the way up here, to about this center line,” said Shane Stephenson, director of museum collections at the Buffalo and Erie County Naval and Military Park, as he pointed to where the water was. Hope is to have her fully restored and open to the public in a few years.Repairs on the inside are on hold until she returns with a new hull.

USS the Sullivans will be dry docked, those plans are not finalized yet.

Buffalo submarine museum