Originally posted by Dreadnought
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As for MARAD's capabilities of maintaining the ship, they are extremely limited by small budgets, lack of personnel and this is normally not their job. However, extra measures are being taken to have the ship in somewhat of a decent condition for turnover to a museum.
This is because many people screamed to high heaven about the Navy's total lack of care when Iowa was anchored off of Rhode Island for a couple of years with NO dehumidification power and NO cathodic protection.
When she was moved to Benecia, several organizations (including myself when I was registered as Dreadnaught Consulting) bugged the hell out of Bremerton (INACTSHIPFAC for all of west coast mothball fleets) and they made sure power was run out to her for D/H and installed over-the-side Impressed Current Cathodic Protection anodes.
The ship still shows damage from her Rhode Island "abandonment" such as leaf plugged deck drain piping that filled full of water, froze in winter bursting the pipe and running water down into the compartment below when Spring came.
This is all fixable and even MARAD does some patching here and there when they can with what materials they can afford.
Pic: Flaking paint on overhead where a broken deck drain flooded the compartment up to 8 inches deep. Paint is of wrong formula and excess moisture from the flooding is causing it to peel off.
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