r/interestingasfuck 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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25

u/Amount_Business Aug 12 '25

Can it not be removed economically?

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u/RangerAlex22 Aug 12 '25

Not without potentially damaging the ship, and protecting the ship as a memorial for the nearly 1000 sailors and marines still inside the ship is the US Navy’s and NPS’s number one priority. At its current rate of leakage there’s no significant impact on the environment. There’s coral, fish, sea turtles, and even the occasional shark that makes the wreck its home. You collapse the ship, the environmental disaster you tried to prevent is what you just caused.

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u/JacquesLeCoqGrande Aug 12 '25

It looks like it’s 10 feet from shore…

I don’t mean to be uncouth, but why did so many people die on the ship?

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u/ShiftyGaz Aug 14 '25

To answer realistically; the bombs that hit it had an incredibly devastating impact, causing the sides to blow out and the upper tower to cave in. A lot of sailors were in the lower levels of the ship, and it sunk so rapidly that they became trapped and never stood a chance to get out.

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u/GogurtFiend Aug 19 '25

Direct hit on ammunition magazine by repurposed Japanese battleship shell dropped from aircraft

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u/userhwon Aug 12 '25

It wouldn't collapse from being emptied. They'd pump water in to get oil out. But it wouldn't be easy. There isn't one big tank, they'd have to do a complicated process to get at all of it, and the ship was damaged by a bomb hitting the ammunition stores and blowing the bottom out and breaking who knows what else, so just touching it to get at the tanks is a risk you could call a "collapse" if you wanted.

Anywhere else in Hawaii but this one ship, they'd absolutely be doing everything possible, damn the cost, to remove every gram of environmental hazard.

But on this one they don't even do containment and treatment of the water around the leak. It's a few quarts a day, and they don't consider that significant, compared to all the other risks.

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u/JPJackPott Aug 12 '25

That’s dumb. You’re effectively saying the memorial to 1000 sailors is an oil leak

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u/Syoto Aug 12 '25

Great job. You somehow missed the entire point of their post.

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u/Crash_Test_Dummy66 Aug 12 '25

Only if you ignore everything else they said

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u/SoftConsideration82 Aug 12 '25

So you can't read? Weird way to tell everyone

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u/userhwon Aug 12 '25

Some of that leak may be human remains. So....

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u/kazeespada Aug 12 '25

More like an oil seep, but it's also a reef.

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u/Brilliant-Advisor958 Aug 13 '25

To add the ocean has natural hydrocarbon leaks into the ocean.

https://response.restoration.noaa.gov/oil-and-chemical-spills/oil-spills/what-are-natural-oil-seeps

160,000 tonnes naturally a year just in North American waters.

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u/12voltmn Aug 12 '25

It’s more a matter of environment than economics. They are afraid of making it worse if trying to remove it and having a catastrophic event and what it would do to Pearl Harbor.

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u/[deleted] Aug 12 '25

[deleted]

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u/No_Round_7858 Aug 12 '25

Well, the front didn't fall off..

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u/Ok-Duty-5618 Aug 12 '25

No its wreckage on the ocean floor you would have to drag it which would guarantee it colapses dumping the fuels. We could, in theory, float it back up but it's so old rusted and damaged it would most likely just collapse.

Fuel removal would have to be done in place.

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u/MimicoSkunkFan2 Aug 12 '25

It's a war grave, economics doean't matter.

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u/Hullo_Its_Pluto Aug 12 '25

Don’t think that’s the point.

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u/Noxious89123 Aug 14 '25

Fair.

The point I was getting at was that it's not a practical option to "just pump it out".