Steady as she goes: Volunteers help restore Battleship Texas before dry dock repairs later this year
In a Pasadena warehouse, roughly 20 miles south of the Battleship Texas’ berth at the San Jacinto State Historic Site, a group of seven volunteers is hard at work restoring the historic ship’s anti-aircraft guns.
Twice a week, these volunteers, many of them veterans, show up at the warehouse for the tedious and unglamorous labor of helping, bit by bit, to restore the Battleship Texas to its majestic splendor. More than two dozen guns were removed from the ship over three days in March 2020 by a barge crane and hauled to warehouse space donated by NRG, where they have been disassembled, sandblasted, cleaned and repainted a sleek cadet blue.
Amid the hum and clangor of tools in the warehouse, Bruce Bramlett, the executive director of the Battleship Texas Foundation — the nonprofit that manages the ship’s museum — marveled at the progress.
“It’s pretty amazing, truly, to get to say, while we’re dealing with the (ship repairs), ‘Let's get all this off and let's get it restored so that when we're ready, we'll put it back on the trucks, take it to the shipyard, and put it all back on the ship,’” Bramlett said.
Progress being made as Battleship Texas restorations continue
The Battleship Texas has been undergoing extensive renovations since it closed to the public in early 2020. Preparations are being made to transport the ship to an as-yet-unidentified dry dock to repair its leaky hull. Volunteers continue to put hundreds of hours into repairing some of the battleship's guns, the ship's bell, and other features.
The 106-year old battleship, the last surviving dreadnought that fought in two world wars, has been closed to the public since August 2019 due to its decaying condition. The proud ship that once shelled the Normandy coast during D-Day and bombarded Okinawa in the Pacific has seen its steel hull laid waste by years of saltwater corrosion. A system of pumps constantly pushing water out of the hull is the only thing keeping the ship upright at its current berth in the Houston Ship Channel.
Texas Parks and Wildlife has spent at least $54 million maintaining and repairing the ship since 2009. The work included two phases of critical repairs to engine rooms as well as the installation of an emergency generator, additional pumps, and fuel storage to help address leaks.
A bill passed by the state Legislature and signed by Gov. Greg Abbott in 2019 provided $35 million to tow the battleship and repair it at a dry dock, a potentially risky operation. At one point, dry docks in Louisiana, Mobile, Ala., or Tampa, Fla. were floated as possible repair destinations. Bramlett said the foundation is discussing towing the ship to a dry dock in Galveston for repairs, though an agreement hasn't been finalized.
A portion of the state appropriation has gone toward getting the ship in good enough condition to tow. From July through December, a salvage company was hired by the foundation to begin a process called foaming — where the hull of the ship is fulled with polyurethane to ensure insulation and buoyancy.
“With the state appropriation, we're gonna make the ship watertight,” said Travis Davis, the vice president of ship operations for the Battleship Texas Foundation. “We went from, this time last year, 2,000 gallons per minute of water coming in the ship, and we’re less than five (gallons per minute) right now.”
Making the voyage
The towing of the ship will likely have to wait until after hurricane season, Bramlett said. He acknowledged that while there’s always some risk to towing a vessel as old as the Texas, he’s not “overly frightened” by the prospect. The foundation has run two different virtual simulations of the towing operation for marine engineers, the Coast Guard and the Houston Pilots Association, as well as the ship’s insurers. Bramlett said all parties came away convinced that the ship could be towed safely.
“I hear people say, ‘Oh my God, we’re gonna blink and it’s gonna sink to the bottom.’ No, it’s not,” Bramlett said. “If the absolute worst happened, we’d run her aground and we’d figure out how to fix it and pull her back out. The insurance companies are convinced that’s not gonna happen, or they wouldn’t insure any of this, and we can’t move (the ship) an inch without it being insured.”
But before the ship can be safely towed 40 miles down the Houston Ship Channel there is still much more restoration work to be done in the Pasadena warehouse. Outside the warehouse staging area, rows of anti-aircraft guns and spotlights from the battleship are lined up, paint chipping and showing rust from years of wear and tear. The ship’s massive propeller, tucked away in a corner of the lot, will cost $100,000 alone to restore.
The volunteers toiling away restoring the ship’s artifacts show up at the warehouse every Wednesday and every other Saturday. While some have a mechanical background, they acknowledge that a lot of the restoration work is trial by fire.
“Most of the work we’re doing doesn’t take too many special skills,” said Calvin Bongers, 81, a Navy veteran.
“Or common sense,” joked Ward Slack, 66, also a Navy veteran. “I’ve never worked on a 3-inch (anti-aircraft) gun before.”
Vets pitch in
Many of the volunteers are marine buffs who are eager to see the battleship restored to pristine condition — as well as to tinker with outdated machinery and artillery foreign to most modern-day ship engineers. Some of the fruits of their labor will be on display at a Battleship Texas exhibit at the Lone Star Flight Museum in south Houston in the coming weeks.
“One of the great things about this work is we get to see parts of this ship that the public has never seen,” said Ron Lewis, 72, another Navy vet.
Where the battleship ultimately ends up after the dry dock repair is anyone’s guess. Bramlett, for now, is keeping its future berth close to the vest. In January 2020, the battleship foundation solicited proposals from various organizations and cities to be the ship’s new landlord.
Galveston was among the cities floated as a possibility. The foundation commissioned an economic study by Deloitte in 2016 that projected as many as 283,000 visitors and $3 million in annual revenue if the battleship moved to Galveston. Before closing to the public, the battleship typically attracted about 88,000 visitors annually and generated $1.3 million in revenue at its current location near LaPorte and in the shadow of the San Jacinto Monument.
“One of the conditions of (the bill passed by the Legislature) was that if we’re gonna fund these repairs, when you take (the battleship) out of San Jacinto, you cannot bring her back,” Bramlett said. “The state's been pretty much supplementing the cost of operations and maintenance of the ship against a revenue stream that never got close to what the need was. And so they realize we’ve got to have much more business and more bodies paying to come on board.”
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