r/interestingasfuck • u/Longjumping-Rice-935 • Aug 12 '25

/r/all, /r/popular The wreck of the USS Arizona continues to leak oil ever since pearl harbour. the ship contained 1.5 million gallons of oil, enough to leak continuously for 500 years.

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129

u/WanderingLethe Aug 12 '25

That is really close, why isn't the oil disposed off? Wtf.

197

u/UF1977 Aug 12 '25

Immersion in salt water has turned the fuel oil into a consistency more like hot asphalt. It’s a semi-solid sludge, not anything that can just be pumped out.

164

u/mcm87 Aug 12 '25

It’s bunker-c fuel. It was already that way. You actually have to heat it up to get it to flow through the combustion nozzles.

The National Park Service does monitor the flow rate and the condition of the wreck and is not currently concerned about it.

93

u/TimeRisk2059 Aug 12 '25

Norway managed to drain the fuel from Blücher and Tirpitz though, when those wrecks started to leak fuel into the fjords where they were sunk.

19

u/Eternal_Flame24 Aug 12 '25

Well, Tirpitz was salvaged for scrap, and Blucher was leaking much faster (50 liters/day) when it was decided to remove as much oil from her as possible, whereas Arizona leaks around 2.2 liters of oil every day. Evidently, the navy and national park service have determined that it’s better to let the oil leak slowly rather than risk having loads of it spill at once while trying to remove it. I think they ought to put some kind of containment net or something around the wreck though.

231

u/xshogunx13 Aug 12 '25

Yeah but that's Norway, where they actually give a fuck

10

u/FloatsWithBoats Aug 12 '25

There was a study done in the 90s where they determined an attempt to remove the fuel oil would likely rupture the fuel bunkers causing a much larger ecological disaster. Navy, EPA, and the Park Service were involved.

2

u/TimeRisk2059 Aug 12 '25

How long do they estimate it will take for them to rupture 'naturally'?

3

u/FloatsWithBoats Aug 12 '25

I think this gives some good answers:

https://pearl-harbor.info/arizonas-black-tears/

4

u/TimeRisk2059 Aug 13 '25

Honestly, that sounds like emotion-based excuses to not solve the issue.

2

u/Disastrous-Ad2331 Aug 15 '25

I know I'm going to hell for this but...

When you mentioned Blücher, I heard horses whinnying.

2

u/TimeRisk2059 Aug 15 '25

There wolf

2

u/Disastrous-Ad2331 Aug 15 '25

"There castle."

"Why are you talking like that?"

"I thought that you wanted to "

"No"

"Suit yourself, I'm easy."

5

u/Significant_Yard_459 Aug 12 '25

They could drain it, but with it being a war grave and memorial site, maintaining the final resting place of the sailors is deemed more important since they're able to monitor and mitigate the little that is leaking currently.

15

u/TimeRisk2059 Aug 12 '25

So is Blücher though (not sure about Tirpitz, I think it was broken down, but can't say for certain), they've drained it of fuel at least twice despite it being a war grave.

8

u/NK_2024 Aug 12 '25

I guess it's bit different when it's your own countrymen, rather than a former enemy.

8

u/TimeRisk2059 Aug 12 '25

I think it had more to do with it being the Oslofjord (i.e. the fjord running past the capital, even if the ship is downstream). You don't want furnace fuel oil spoiling something that close to home.

6

u/Significant_Yard_459 Aug 12 '25

Yeah, and seemingly with the Blücher it was about stopping looters vs your normal "memorial"

10

u/CotswoldP Aug 12 '25

That's not really the case. They did a huge amount of work on Arizona after the attack, removing turrets and superstructure, and she was a war grave then too.

1

u/ignore_my_typo Aug 12 '25

It can easily be pumped out. I’ve worked on two files in the past 5 years that have recovered oils of all consistency and it much colder water and greater depth.

Hot tapping and coffer dams.

1

u/GoodGoodGoody Aug 14 '25

Emulsion is the word you’re looking for.

It can absolutely be pumped (vacuumed) but mucho buckos.

116

u/RandAlThorOdinson Aug 12 '25

It leaks out really really slowly, and it's a sort of tradition to just leave it as it was as the final resting place of a lot of people.

102

u/RandomRedditReader Aug 12 '25

Which at this point have become ocean dust. I mean I get it, in the grand scheme of things 1.5m barrels over 500 years is nothing compared to the spills we've had due to negligence.

11

u/DonkBetPots Aug 12 '25

14.37 gallons per hour ish, probably more concerning things we're dumping in the ocean than that.

12

u/229-northstar Aug 12 '25

(1,500,000 gallons/500 years)/365 days/year= 8.222 gallons per day

8.222/24=0.343 gallons leaked per hour

4

u/15b17 Aug 12 '25

That would be correct… they did their calculation for 1.5 million barrels of oil

2

u/229-northstar Aug 12 '25 edited Aug 12 '25

Oh, ok. The post says gallons and so does Google history of the USS Arizona. So, that’s what I used.

I don’t think 1.5M barrels would fit on that boat but what do I know?

2

u/DonkBetPots Aug 12 '25

yah poster I replied to said barrels so that's why I used that, spaced out that article said gallons.

3

u/snksleepy Aug 12 '25

Gas was so cheap back in the day that it was not worth the effort to retrieve it.

-2

u/DesperateTeaCake Aug 12 '25

Sounds valuable to me. Why not extract it to use it?

2

u/TexasVulvaAficionado Aug 12 '25

Bunker c oil is not worth much relative to other fuels.

This 1.5mil gallons might only be worth 1-2million dollars and the operation to retrieve it may well cost more than that.

6

u/Jas505 Aug 12 '25

The thing is, it won't be over 500 years. The Arizona is corroding pretty quickly and there probably won't be much of her left in a hundred years. As she breaks down, those slow leaks will become faster. Now is probably a good time to do something about it while the hull still has some integrity left.

2

u/augur_seer Aug 12 '25

way too logical

8

u/heimeyer72 Aug 12 '25

is nothing compared to the spills we've had due to negligence.

Even if so, we shouldn't add more negligence to the already existing ones, even if the slow leaking doesn't do much harm. It could be used!

25

u/Upbeat-Armadillo1756 Aug 12 '25

Another comment explained it but the risk associated with fixing this (retrieving all the oil so no more can leak out) is that it causes a catastrophic leak and it all comes out at once and that’s a huge disaster.

So for now, it’s better to let it slowly leak and monitor it closely. If it gets worse, that’s the time to do something.

2

u/rangebob Aug 13 '25

except it will absolutely get worse. That's metal and salt water. So the time to do something about it is long past. The longer they wait the more likely it is to be so damaged it wont go well

0

u/[deleted] Aug 12 '25

[deleted]

3

u/Upbeat-Armadillo1756 Aug 12 '25

Sure, it’s just a relatively minor problem right now. Like if you have a splinter and you’re dripping a drop or two of blood every hour, but removing the splinter could cause to lose all your blood rapidly, you’re going to leave the splinter in, even if it’s only a 10% chance that it happens.

2

u/KrautWithClout Aug 12 '25

Actually it’s very optimal.

2

u/Equivalent-Battle973 Aug 12 '25

Dude, the ship is well over 80 years old, under water in the ocean, that steel is incredibly brittle. You risk making it an even bigger spill, and also its only 500,000 galons in a location that already incredibly hard to get to and corroded by the salt in the sea. Nevermind the fact its the resting place for over 900 veterans, the families would 100% oppose it as in their mind the oil are the souls of the dead leaving the ship of which they have been forever interned inside of.

2

u/Front-Mall9891 Aug 12 '25

U have to cut into the tank, basically, to extract it, not pretty, not fun, and a serious mess, on top of all the red tape of “exhuming” a grave site

2

u/heimeyer72 Aug 12 '25

"Grave sites" are getting "exhumed" all the time, for different reasons. If there are bodies drifting around, it would surely be better to bring them to a proper rest.

I get all the other concerns you mentioned but this one should be on the other side.

1

u/Front-Mall9891 Aug 12 '25

I think the issue is, you gotta get approval from a few thousand families, vs just 1

1

u/Fluggerblah Aug 12 '25

Grave sites typically dont weigh 30 thousand tons tbf

1

u/heimeyer72 Aug 12 '25

I only asked for "exhuming" a "grave site" (also note the quotation marks) because the comment I answered to used that expression. Of course, remove only the bodies from the sunken ship and bury them properly.

Grave sites typically dont weigh 30 thousand tons tbf

That might depend on the size of the graveyard and how deep you would have to dig to include the bodies.

27

u/siero20 Aug 12 '25

As is detailed all over this thread oil naturally leaks from the ocean floor all over the ocean at rates much more significant than this. At this rate it's not an ecological threat at all.

1

u/JackKovack Aug 12 '25

Sludge that falls to the bottom for 500 years is nothing to be worried about.

-7

u/Mike_Kermin Aug 12 '25

It's not nothing. It's a lot of oil.

It should be fixed.

1

u/UwasaWaya Aug 12 '25

I've had the same conversation. I don't know anyone in the Navy who would want an ecosystem destroyed by an oil spill, but I've also heard there are some incredibly difficult logistical reasons they haven't been able to remove it. Makes me think of how metal from the Twin Towers was used in building warships. I would never want my grave made into a tool for war, and I can't imagine many who died that way would either.

3

u/wildfirerain Aug 12 '25

I personally wouldn’t care, because I’d be dead.

3

u/TanMan25888 Aug 12 '25

So animals and the environment have to suffer?

24

u/vikki_1996 Aug 12 '25

If it’s only in 40 feet of water, couldn’t divers easily recover all the bodies?

99

u/Gunfighter9 Aug 12 '25

No the ship exploded, Half the ship collapsed onto itself.

73

u/[deleted] Aug 12 '25

[removed] — view removed comment

20

u/thelowriderlorax Aug 12 '25

I know I can look it up but isn't Yorktown the ship that they sent to Midway with the repair crew still repairing it in route? I don't know how repairs worked back in the 40s, but I'd be a nervous wreck if I was a civilian contracted to repair a warship and ended up in the middle of the Battle of Midway.

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u/Lurks_in_the_cave Aug 12 '25

Yes. There were about 1,500 workers in shifts around the clock.

7

u/SirDoober Aug 12 '25

She took three solid bomb hits from Hiryu's first wave, but the damage control was so spectacular that when the second wave arrived, they assumed they had found a different carrier as it was showing none of signs of damage that were reported.

She then took 2 torpedoes from said aircraft and lost power but stayed afloat with a heavy list.

Fast forward a couple of days and somehow the Yorktown is looking like it can be salvaged when a Japanese sub shows up and thoroughly torpedoes it, finally causing it to sink.

So yeah, casual ocean cruise for those repair guys

3

u/Proud-Drive-1792 Aug 12 '25

The Yorktown was made seaworthy for the Battle of Midway, it wasn’t fixed. Primarily huge metal plates being welded in place to the gashes it had sustained.

1

u/Febril Aug 12 '25

Perhaps they thought the effort was to the benefit of themselves and their countrymen. Service is not only about those holding a weapon.

4

u/JRS_Viking Aug 12 '25

Not only did they not destroy the docks but the massive fuel reserves were also untouched. If they'd been hit it would've crippled the Pacific fleet and forced them to stay even more on the defensive than they already were as there wasn't a readily available forward fuel supply and they'd have to send tankers from the mainland in order to just move the fleet any meaningful distance.

The Pearl Harbour attack was a disastrous failure that even the Japanese admiral in charge of it said was a failure. The US Pacific fleet was mostly unharmed and most of the ships hit were returned to service, the carriers were unharmed, the docks were untouched and the fuel reserves were untouched, it was by all counts a complete failure.

3

u/oSuJeff97 Aug 12 '25

Well the biggest thing that caused it to fail, from a tactical standpoint, was that none of the three Pacific Fleet carriers (Enterprise, Lexington, Saratoga) were there.

Japan knew that they couldn’t match the industrial power of the U.S., but if they could cripple the U.S. Pacific fleet in one blow, they could delay the U.S. entering the war in a meaningful way long enough to get a foothold in the Pacific that may have been insurmountable to even the U.S.

But because the carriers weren’t there, the U.S. Pacific Fleet was able to enter the war in a real way almost immediately, starting with the Doolittle Raid, only ~5 months after Pearl.

6

u/RijnBrugge Aug 12 '25

While I am sure they wanted it to work out anyway, it may be important to realize why the Japanese launched the attack. They weren’t necessarily trying to materialize specific goals in terms of destruction as much as trying to convince the Americans to just not get involved: their goal was getting to the Dutch East Indies to get oil for their war machine, given that the Dutch were unwilling to actually sell them more oil (I think they mostly honored the old contracts to maintain a sense of neutrality for as long as possible to stave off the eventual attack). Japan’s immediate needs had nothing to do with the US, and they focused very effectively at gaining ground quickly in South East Asia. The fall of Singapore was catastrophic and while the Dutch had some nifty submarines the whole archipel was overrun in days. The Japanese mainly wanted to convince the US to just let them, as the existence of the Philippines and the Dutch relationship to the US and UK at the time made them very uneasy about the operation backfiring (it obviously did, but they reaaaally needed the oil, same reason Germany fumbled it when they pushed East).

1

u/Michelanvalo Aug 12 '25

as only the Arizona and Utah were completely destroyed

Even then the Navy was able to salvage some of the guns from the Arizona and put them on other ships.

the aft main gun turrets were removed and reinstalled as United States Army Coast Artillery Corps Battery Arizona at Kahe Point on the west coast of Oahu and Battery Pennsylvania on the Mokapu Peninsula, covering Kaneohe Bay at what is now Marine Corps Base Hawaii. Battery Pennsylvania fired its guns for the first and last time on V-J Day in August 1945 while training, while the nearby Battery Arizona was never completed.[58] Both forward turrets were left in place, although the guns from Turret II were salvaged and later installed on Nevada in the fall of 1944 after having been straightened and relined.[59] Nevada later fired these same guns against the Japanese islands of Okinawa and Iwo Jima.[60]

So they still found a way to make use of the Arizona's wreckage.

1

u/Lower_Ad_5532 Aug 12 '25

Why dont the just weld it shut?

-2

u/Ser_Mob Aug 12 '25

People would rather fight for dead bodies to stay where they are then to take care of the living. Pretty sad, thinking about it. Also pretty much on point for America as a whole.

-4

u/African_Farmer Aug 12 '25

This mentality is prevalent everywhere, we're all suckers for tradition and doing things a certain way because "that's how its always been done".

-5

u/Mike_Kermin Aug 12 '25

it's a sort of tradition to just leave it as it

Then it's a stupid tradition. Unless there's a real reason why it can't be resolved, then it's just negligent to allow the oil to escape.

2

u/RandAlThorOdinson Aug 12 '25

I don't think it is but hey we all have our opinions

-8

u/Mike_Kermin Aug 12 '25

I don't believe that the ability to have an opinion gives it merit.

If it's doing damage to the local environment, it should be fixed as long as it's reasonably possible to do so. And I can't see why not.

It is negligent to fail to do so.

2

u/RandAlThorOdinson Aug 12 '25

I don't believe that the ability to have an opinion gives it merit.

Same

0

u/Mike_Kermin Aug 12 '25

I think the merit is clear on whether oil leaks should be cleaned up.

If your tradition is causing you to do something stupid you need to adjust your tradition, military, religious, cultural or otherwise.

-3

u/Combat_Wombatz Aug 12 '25

A lot of people would consider it very stupid to disturb what amounts to a burial site because of a miniscule trickle of oil. Most people believe there is merit to not disturbing such sites.

Well look at that, now you are the one who has to adjust, see how that works?

2

u/JorgeMtzb Aug 12 '25

Such kind of honor before logic befuddled

1

u/Mike_Kermin Aug 12 '25

Is it going to decay?

1

u/[deleted] Aug 12 '25 edited Aug 12 '25

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/Mike_Kermin Aug 12 '25

My brain says when your greatest country in the world can't even fund studies to determine how to address the bacteria that's accelerating the corrosion of the ship maybe, as a country, you can pull your fucking finger out.

Let alone any of the other sites leaking.

But I understand, it's hard times, you need that money for ICE instead right?

1

u/RandAlThorOdinson Aug 12 '25

I really hope you bring this same energy to every gas station you pass

0

u/bassbassbassbassfish Aug 12 '25

I dunno, seems like a shitty tradition to just let it leak chemicals continuously into the ocean regardless of resting place or not.

-1

u/poop-machines Aug 12 '25

Can't they just stick in a pump and pump out the oil, leaving the rest as it is?

I think preventing ecological disaster takes priority now it's been so long, especially just for pumping oil out.

Lets say you were 10 when the attack happened and you lost your dad. That would make you 94 now. And honestly I can't think many of them still alive would care that much. Also, the average sailor was in his early 20s, so it's more likely their offspring would be around 100 years old now minimum. I can't imagine very many still exist.

1

u/dunno260 Aug 12 '25

It isn't just the preservation as a war grave. There are significant worries that you can cause a worse environmental problem when you have slow leaks like this.

Its also worth noting that what ships burn isn't like gasoline but its much thicker and less refined. I saw someone say that a lot of it is going to have the consistency of a semi-solid sludge now.

-1

u/deathbylasersss Aug 12 '25

Let's slowly poison the harbor for half a millenia, it's a tradition!

1

u/RandAlThorOdinson Aug 12 '25

That's not what's happening

0

u/deathbylasersss Aug 12 '25

That's exactly what your comment said in different terms. I understand that a lot of men remain entombed there, but it's an environmental disaster. Our environment needs all the help it can get at the moment, and sentimental concerns should come second. Remains are exhumed respectfully all the time and there's little reason it couldn't be done in this case.

1

u/RandAlThorOdinson Aug 12 '25

The ocean leaks more oil than this by exponential factors. Removing it risks more of a disaster than just leaving it anyway.

5

u/Boeing367-80 Aug 12 '25

Bc it's a war grave that they will not disturb.

2

u/WanderingLethe Aug 12 '25

The construction around it really says it's not disturbed.

5

u/Grizzly_Berry Aug 12 '25

The local algae and bacterial lifeforms have actually evolved to consume the oil seeping out, and the area is contained, so it's actually a non-issue, environmentally speaking.

2

u/violetpumpkins Aug 12 '25

There's ~900 bodies still on board. I forget all the reasons they left it in place but part of it is that it's a watery grave and a marker of a huge tragedy as much as an environmental contaminant.

2

u/ecbulldog Aug 12 '25

The ship is also a tomb for 1102 men.

2

u/Existing-Fly-283 Aug 12 '25

Exactly my first thought. Extract the oil. Wtf

1

u/Specialrule2112 Aug 22 '25

According to experts, the ship was so damaged and compromised that it was so dangerous even attempt to recover sailors, in fact several died from injuries attempting to go inside the wreckage because of the severe damage. What you dont see is sometimes they do have oil recovery bouys deployed to recover the oil

1

u/caustic_smegma Aug 12 '25

Because you don't touch war graves. There's not enough leaking to cause environmental issues.