USS The Sullivans 'will rise again,' officials vow as water is pumped from ship

Officials don’t know how big of a problem it is, but say the worst of it is over.

“Right now, I’m looking at levels that look like – I’m being optimistic here – but it looks like she had reached its worst point about an hour ago,” said Paul Marzello, president and CEO of the Buffalo and Erie County Naval & Military Park, Thursday afternoon.

The WWII-era destroyer was leaning on its side and sinking Thursday in shallow waters in the Buffalo Inner Harbor.

The U.S. Coast Guard estimated Thursday afternoon there were more than 3 million gallons of water inside the ship.

But Marzello and other stakeholders vowed that the ship will be repaired and reopened to visitors.

“We’ve got some work to do. We are committed to making sure that she’s fix that. This is not going to go down. We’ve had a lot of inspirational messages from people around the country and other countries, and we just want to let people know this is a setback. This ship will rise again, and failure is not an option,” said Marzello, who was joined by Buffalo Mayor Byron W. Brown and Erie County Executive Mark Poloncarz at the park for an update Thursday afternoon.

The USS The Sullivans is a floating tribute to a working-class family that lost all five of its sons aboard the USS Juneau during World War II, when it was struck by a Japanese torpedo in the Pacific Ocean, resulting in the deaths of 687 men.

Marzello said he discovered around 9 or 10 p.m. Wednesday that the ship was taking in water. The breach is aft of midship, on the starboard side of the ship, which is listing to one side.

“We tried to figure out at what rate it was coming in. It was tough to tell last night,” he said. “I came down here at about 5 in the morning just to assess the damage and saw a significant increase in the amount of water just by checking the water line. Somewhere in that lower right section of the hull, we have a problem, and we don’t know what it is.”

Park staff put an emergency repair call into BIDCO Marine Group, the company hired to repair the hull of the decommissioned Fletcher-Class destroyer, Marzello said.

Divers were in the water earlier Thursday at the spot of the breach trying to determine the cause of the problem but were pulled out because the water temperature was very cold and the water was not clear, Marzello said.

“It’s more than a little bit dangerous to be swimming in through here,” he said, pointing to the breach. “As you can see, this is where the damage is. I can’t see it but based on the listing of the ship ... the damage is here, whatever it is, and it’s just too dangerous to put them in the water. They checked it out, and we pulled them because it just wasn’t safe.”

By Thursday afternoon, BIDCO crews were beginning to set up equipment and operations on the side of the ship where the damage is located to find the cause of the problem and repair the ship. Other equipment was being brought in, as well.

“We’re coming into some industrial-size pumping now,” Marzello said. “Because we lost power; we don’t have electrical power, they’re bringing in this industrial generator (to be hooked up) to these large size hoses, so we’ll be able to pump out much greater and faster than we did earlier today and that’s a good thing.”

Up to that point, crews had been pumping out about 13,000 gallons per minute. The ship was taking in more water, but workers were pumping out water faster than the ship was taking it in, he said.

Officials said late Thursday that the ship is starting to slowly right itself as more water continues to be pumped out.

Crews are expected to be working around the clock and into the overnight, said city spokesman Michael J. DeGeorge.

“We are all very, very saddened to see what has happened just in the last 24 hours,” Poloncarz said. “I think we all agree that we’re going to save this ship.”

“Obviously, we are all very deeply concerned about the condition of USS The Sullivans. This is an important part of our U.S. Naval heritage. The boat is very important, not only to us here in Buffalo and Western New York but important to people across the country and internationally, as well,” Brown said.

Douglas Jemal, who spearheaded the fundraising efforts last year that brought in more than $1 million to repair the ship’s breached hull, said the latest incident “is a bump in the water.”

“But we’ll get past this,” said Jemal, who did not attend the news conference. “We will have a moral obligation to pick her back up again, dust her off and stand her up, and that’s exactly what we’re going to do. All of us have bumps in the water. That’s life. You have to dust yourself off and get back to work again, and let’s get this situation fixed, which we can.”

BIDCO had been working on long-term repairs to the ship last year and discontinued operations in October for the winter because the water was too cold to do the work.

“They needed at least 54 degrees to have their epoxy adhere to the steel," Marzello said.

Crews were to resume repairs Monday, Marzello said.