The SS United States begins a final journey to the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico
(AP) — An ocean liner that is longer than the Titanic and was once the fastest on the seas headed Wednesday toward its final home on the floor of the Gulf of Mexico as the world’s largest artificial reef.
The SS United States floated placidly under a cloudy sky off the coast of the Florida Panhandle, most of it still above the water at dusk, even after workers flooded the hull to push it under.
The event — described by officials as a controlled sinking — was a long-planned $13.5 million project aimed at attracting more divers and fishing enthusiasts to the area while creating a home for tuna, marlin and swordfish.
The process of sinking the behemoth vessel stretched through the entire afternoon and into the evening, despite predictions that it could happen in less than an hour once flooded. Smaller boats remained around and even up beside it.
The project will keep what had been a technological marvel when it made its maiden voyage in 1952 from becoming scrap metal. The ship’s scuttling was streamed live online.
The SS United States crossed the Atlantic more than 800 times, carrying old Hollywood stars like Grace Kelly and Elizabeth Taylor. Other passengers have included Presidents Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy and Britain’s former King Edward VIII. In 1968, a young Bill Clinton took it when he went to Oxford University, decades before he was elected president.
Once aboard, passengers were treated to dinners that included caviar, roast duckling, smoked ox tongue and Calf’s Head en Tortue.
In preparation for the sinking, organizers removed the 65-foot (20-meter) smokestacks and plan to have them anchor a new museum that celebrates the ship.
“We’re not destroying anything,” Tim Mullane, a Navy veteran and chief operating officer of Coleen Marine, the company sending the ship to the ocean floor, said in a video aired online by local officials. “It’s going to serve a second life.”
The ship’s resting place has many artificial reefs
More than 500 artificial reefs are located in the waters near where the SS United States will rest.
Previously, the largest artificial reef came from the 2006 scuttling of an aircraft carrier, the USS Oriskany in the Gulf off of Pensacola — near enough to the SS United States site that an experienced diver could visit both in the same day, Tomecek said. The Oriskany, launched in 1950, was 911 feet (278 meters) in length.
“We’re trying to be the best diving destination in the world,” Tomecek said.
The ship was decommissioned in 1969. Attempts by a hotel magnate and Norwegian Cruise Lines to use the ship never floated, and from 1996 until recently, it sat along a dock in Philadelphia.
Mullane called the huge funnels — the smokestacks that have been removed to anchor the new museum — “works of art.”
“I’m just so happy that we are able to save parts of her,” Gibbs said.
