Crews working to right the USS The Sullivans have made some progress, but Friday's high winds aren't helping the effort, the head of the Buffalo and Erie County Naval & Military Park said Friday morning.
Diesel pumps worked throughout the night and have reached a point of "equilibrium," in that they are pumping out as much water as is leaking into the vessel, said Paul Marzello, president and CEO of the park.
"The challenge right now is to try to get those pump hoses down into sections of the ship where she won't just draw air," Marzello said.
The WWII-era destroyer in the Buffalo Inner Harbor was leaning to its side and sinking Thursday in shallow harbor waters. Naval park officials said the ship started to list Wednesday night and it became more significant on Thursday.
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They believe there's a hole in the lower right section of the hull.
At one point Thursday afternoon, the Coast Guard estimated the ship had more than 3 million gallons of water inside.
On Friday, crews from BIDCO Marine Group, an industrial diving company, are attempting to get to areas of the ship that remain full of water and then seal up the areas once the water is removed, Marzello said.
But they're being cautious about what kind of spaces they're going into because they don't want the divers to get trapped, he said.
The first task remains to get the water out of the vessel.
The Coast Guard and Miller Environmental Group, an environmental contractor, are also monitoring the water that's being pumped out of the ship and treating it, if necessary, Marzello said.
The decommissioned ship has "residual material" in places that aren't publicly accessible, so authorities are taking environmental precautions, he said.
No work has yet been done on patching or sealing the hole in the hull since Wednesday night. Crews had been able to do some preliminary dives to assess the scope of the problem, but it became too dangerous to have them in the water because of the ship's listing position.
"We don't know if she's going to move any further," Marzello said.
Gusty winds add another wrinkle to the efforts.
The winds could shift water levels up to 6 feet or more, he said, "which means now you're raising that ship, which is now top-heavy, leaning to starboard. What is it going to do? So we've got some concerns."
Once all the water is out, there will need to be some salvaging work done, as artifacts on the ship have been destroyed.
It remains "too early to tell" what the long-term prognosis is for The Sullivans, Marzello said.
Problems with the ship's hull prompted fundraising efforts last year that collected more than $1 million. Work to repair the hull went on for a couple months last year before work was halted in October due to water temperatures.
Marzello estimated less than 25% of the needed work was done before work stopped.
Work had been scheduled to resume on Monday. Marzello said he's not sure whether having the crews here earlier would have made a difference.
"As things turned out, we were a few days short of having them in here," he said. "Had they been in here and had an opportunity to be here to do their work, we might have been able to avoid this. I don't know."
Naval park officials and others have vowed the ship will be repaired and reopened to visitors.
The ship, a Fletcher-class destroyer, was named for an Iowa family that lost five sons – George, Madison, Albert, Francis and Joseph – who enlisted after Pearl Harbor and were killed when a Japanese torpedo sunk the USS Juneau in the Pacific Ocean in 1942.
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