On 3 July, just ahead of Independence Day weekend, the beloved floating Battleship New Jersey Museum and Memorial reopened her decks to visitors. The event signaled completion of a long-overdue three-month stint of repair, maintenance and restorative painting for “Big J.”
On 14 June, reversing a process that began in late March, the legendary 878-foot, 45,000-ton behemoth was towed from Philadelphia Naval Shipyard’s Dry Dock Number Three—close to a slipway where BB-62 was launched on 7 December 1942.
“The last line was cast off at 0839,” said New Jersey Vice President and Curator Ryan Szimanski. “We fit pretty closely in that dock, so it took a while. Fortunately, we were towed by the same four tugs at both ends of the trip.”
Next stop on the return journey was Paulsboro, New Jersey, where onboard tanks were drained of ballast water used to help squeeze the four-story vessel under Walt Whitman Bridge. On 20 June, as New Jersey Education Director Libby Jones recalled, Big J finally returned home to Camden: “She arrived in at 1325, high tide, making sure we had all the needed water depth under her. We’d posted the arrival all over our social media, so a big party, including Philadelphia area sports mascots, were on hand.”
The venerable Iowa-class battleship’s arrival kicked off a deliberate process to prepare for Big J’s pre–Independence Day reopening. “Hooking up electrical power, plumbing, the sewage, the internet, was mostly plug-and-play,” according to Jones. “But getting the air conditioning back required more time. We’re still functioning on the same air conditioning the ship had in the 1980s. With so many compartments, it takes a while to cool the ship down. We did manage to do a fireworks event on 29 June.”
With the shipyard project finally behind them, Szimanski and Jones summed up three primary accomplishments:
First, Big J’s roughly 160 “sea-through” openings, once used to admit seawater to cool engines, were inspected for points of failure-either water leaking in through a valve or through the exterior. “We’d been lucky before going into the shipyard,” said Szimanski. “Only one set of double failures over the museum’s career. Now, with all the openings securely welded shut, we’re set for the next couple decades.”
Meanwhile, experts knew beforehand that updating BJ’s corrosion protection—replacing 1,204 hull-mounted zinc anodes with 604 aluminum anodes—was a must. “The zinc anodes we’d been using have been functionally useless in our [brackish freshwater] environment,” Szimanski explained. “They weren’t corroding at all. We already have an active [electrical] corrosion protection system. But if there’s a short in that system, we risk not knowing about it for months. The new passive anodes give us a better safeguard.”
As to the New Jersey’s thorough “pre-rinse” and new paint job: “We realized that hydro-blasting might punch holes in the hull, places held together by paint or rust,” Jones acknowledged. “But Philly was the time to find out and fix them. Turned out holes didn’t happen.”
Repainting added both luster and another early-warning capability. After undergoing three rounds of hydro-blasting, BJ’s hull below the waterline got three separate coats of paint: a buff color, then a gray, and finally a red. “Different colored layers warn us when paint is wearing off.” The waterline got its own paint layers, a coat of gold topped by a coat of black with an anti-fouling agent.
While the New Jersey’s three-stage revitalization was well worth the $10 million price tag—funded by a combination of outright grant, bond guarantees, donations and drydock tour fees— renewal and preservation work on Big J never ends.
As just one example, Libby Jones pointed to an ongoing project to repair or replace the ship’s 43,000 square feet of teak deck. “Work on this continued while we were in drydock. We’re close to finishing the main deck, but things get trickier on the superstructure where it’s harder to work. After multiple years, most of the project is done. But there’s still work ahead.”
—David Sears
