Posted on March 3, 2020
Members of the Bring the Battleship to Baytown Committee have a little longer to submit its proposal to the Texas Battleship Foundation.
The deadline has been moved to April 10. The original deadline was March 13.
“We all got an extension based off of someone else making a request,” Calvin Mundinger, a committee member, said.
Bruce Bramlett, the Foundation’s executive director, has not said who else besides Baytown is in the running for the USS Texas, but some in Galveston have made waves indicating they would like to have the historic dreadnought.
The committee has been working hard on responding to the RFP and turn it in on time. The proposal needs to include information on how to dredge the area around Bayland Island to allow for placement of the ship. The 750-foot ship needs to be in about 30-feet of water. The depth around Bayland Island is
estimated to be 8- to 10-feet deep.
Mundinger said based on Lloyd’s calculations, the channel width would have to be 200 feet for the ship. Seeking a way to reduce dredging costs, Mundinger said he spoke with employees at Hard’s Marine in Channelview.
“I asked him, is it possible to get push boats on one side and one in the rear and maybe do a more narrow channel?” Mundinger said. “He said we might be able to get away with a 160-foot channel. But he said he needs to get drawings and put some thought to it. But, if we could get away with a 160-foot width, we could save about $4.8 million.”
The committee invited Stan Lloyd of Lloyd Engineering to come and talk about dredging possibilities. One challenge Lloyd mentioned that could cause issues was wind.
“It is all about the wind,” he said. “It is a big mass you are trying to control.”
The committee is looking at ways to place tugboats around the side of the ship to prevent the wind from causing havoc.
Lloyd added the ship’s rudder is stuck at 27 degrees, something that happened when the ship was repaired in 1988.
Another obstacle would be seagrass, according to Lloyd.
“We get inundated with seagrass issues,” he said. “If it is 6- to 8-feet deep, you shouldn’t have a problem. But, if it gets to 3- or 4-feet deep where certain types of seagrass grows, and you might have to mitigate it. You might have to pick a spot where it doesn’t have seagrass.”
Lloyd said it was important for the ship to be readied properly to be towed out of the Houston Ship Channel to be repaired because if it sinks, the Antiquities Code of Texas covers it, preventing it from being cut up for salvage.
“It would have to raise in its whole entirety,” he said. “That was a scary thing to a lot of oil companies we worked for since the channel would have to be shut down for a long time if it had to be raised.”
Lloyd said he would take the information given to him at the meeting and send back some options in an email after doing his due diligence.
“We will help you develop a product and get you started on something,” Lloyd said. “We now have a good idea of where you want to put it and what you want to do.”
Source: baytownsun.com
