Fate
Kentucky was never completed, instead serving as a supply cache of sorts while in the mothball fleet at the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard from about 1950 to 1958. Hurricane Hazel hit the area on 15 October 1954; the storm caused Kentucky to break free from her moorings and run aground in the James River. In 1956, Kentucky's bow was removed and used in the repair of Wisconsin, which had been damaged in a collision with Eaton on 6 May 1956. Congressman William Huston Natcher attempted to block the sale of the ship by objecting to the bill in August 1957. Nevertheless, Kentucky was struck from the Naval Vessel Register on 9 June 1958 and her incomplete hulk was sold for scrapping to Boston Metals Company of Baltimore, Maryland, on 31 October. Boston Metals Company paid $1,176,666 for the vessel, and towed her to their shipyard in Baltimore in February 1959.
When the first two of the Sacramento-class fast combat support ships, Sacramento and Camden, were laid down in 1961 and 1964, the Navy used Kentucky's four turbine sets to power the ships. This would later prove to be a beneficial decision: when the Navy switched from 600 psi (4.1 MPa) boilers to 1,200 psi (8.3 MPa) boilers, sailors who had served aboard Sacramento and Camden were posted to operate the older boilers aboard New Jersey during her combat tour in the Vietnam War and aboard all four of the Iowas when they were recalled and modernized in the 1980s as part of the 600-ship Navy plan. A pair of 150-pound (68 kg) mahogany doors were donated by the state of Kentucky while the ship was still under construction; they were used in an officer's club in New York City before eventually being returned to the Kentucky Historical Society in early January 1994.
Read more about this topic: USS Kentucky (BB-66)
Famous quotes containing the word fate:
“It is not menstrual blood per se which disturbs the imagination—unstanchable as that red flood may be—but rather the albumen in the blood, the uterine shreds, placental jellyfish of the female sea. This is the chthonian matrix from which we rose. We have an evolutionary revulsion from slime, our site of biologic origins. Every month, it is woman’s fate to face the abyss of time and being, the abyss which is herself.”
—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)
“For after all man knows mighty little, and may some day learn enough of his own ignorance to fall down again and pray. Not that I care. Only, if such is God’s will, and Fate and Evolution—let there be God!”
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)
“‘Tis weak and vicious people who cast the blame on Fate. The right use of Fate is to bring up our conduct to the loftiness of nature.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)