Salvaging the USS Oklahoma

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TerryMiller

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Hasn't been there that long, seem to remember a news flash about the Oklahoma stack when it arrived.

From Wikipedia:

Memorials and recovery of remains
During dredging operations in 2006, the US Navy recovered a part of Oklahoma from the bottom of Pearl Harbor. The Navy believes it to be a portion of the port side rear fire control tower support mast. It was flown to Tinker Air Force Base then delivered to the Muskogee War Memorial Park in Muskogee, in 2010, where the 40-foot-long (12 m), 25,000-pound (11,340 kg), barnacle-encrusted mast section is now on permanent outdoor display.


A mast leg from Oklahoma in War Memorial Park in Muskogee, Oklahoma. The mast section is on permanent loan from the Navy.
The ship's bell and two of her screws are at the Kirkpatrick Science Museum in Oklahoma City. Oklahoma's aft wheel is at the Oklahoma History Center in Oklahoma City.

On 7 December 2007, the 66th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor, a memorial for the 429 crew members who were killed in the attack was dedicated on Ford Island, just outside the entrance to where the battleship Missouri is docked as a museum. Missouri is moored where Oklahoma was moored when she was sunk. The USS Oklahoma memorial is part of Pearl Harbor National Memorial and is an arrangement of engraved black granite walls and white marble posts.

Only 35 of the 429 sailors and Marines who died on Oklahoma were identified in the years following the attack. The remains of 388 unidentified sailors and Marines were first interred as unknowns in the Nu'uanu and Halawa cemeteries, but were all disinterred in 1947, in an unsuccessful attempt to identify more personnel. In 1950, all unidentified remains from Oklahoma were buried in 61 caskets in 45 graves at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific.

In April 2015, the Department of Defense announced, as part of a policy change that established threshold criteria for disinterment of unknowns, that the unidentified remains of the crew members of Oklahoma would be exhumed for DNA analysis, with the goal of returning identified remains to their families. The process began in June 2015, when four graves, two individual and two group graves, were disinterred. In December 2017 100 had been identified; at the end of fiscal year 2018 181 Oklahoma unknowns had been identified by the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency. On 26 February 2019, the 200th unknown was identified.

In January 2016 the last survivor, Ed Vezey, died aged 95.

I just missed seeing it, I guess. We were there in 2013, and the mast was taken to Muskogee's museum in 2010. (Then again, maybe they just hadn't put it on permanent display yet?)
 


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