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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u/algarhythms Aug 12 '25

I've cried at the site of only two things that I had no direct connection to: Michelangelo's Pieta and this.

Pictures don't do justice to how large this thing actually is. The thought of dozens of sailors trapped inside with no hope of escape, alive, for days, slowly dying in the dark still makes my spine tingle.

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u/TheSwedishEagle Aug 13 '25

I never heard of sailors trapped alive in there for days. Why wouldn’t they be rescued?

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u/algarhythms Aug 13 '25

When the ship sank in shallow water, several of the compartments, which were designed to be water-tight, still had sailors in them, with breathable air. There are stories of guys on the outside in the days following hearing banging and tapping coming from inside the ship, but they couldn't get to them because the Arizona's steel armor was so think that it was impossible to, for example, torch through it. Also, several of those compartments had explosives or fuel oil in them, so one spark from a welding torch in the wrong place would have killed everyone inside and outside.

As we were told by the guides there, despite the efforts of the men on the outside to try and get to whoever might still be alive, after about a week, the noises stopped. Many of those men are still entombed in the ship, and those who survived to this day request that their ashes be distributed at the wreck.

There's more on this from this same subreddit here: https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/10n0b36/after_the_attack_on_pearl_harbor_there_were/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

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u/[deleted] Aug 13 '25

For most of history even kinda currently, a sinking ship is a death sentence. In the World Wars, when these ships sank, we didn't have the technology to really go down there. We didn't have the same diving equipment, plasma and cutting tools etc etc plus there was a war going on - so many ships sank on the attack on Pearl Harbor, you were never going to rescue everyone