🎙 The ship that took all day to sink | The Receipts - Dataspheres AI

The ship that took all day to sink (5 min), with captions The story The SS United States, the American ocean liner that has held the record for the fastest...

The ship that took all day to sink (5 min), with captions The story The SS United States, the American ocean liner that has held the record for the fastest Atlantic crossing by a liner since 1952, was sunk on purpose off Florida on Wednesday, November 11, to become an artificial reef. The county had planned for about 45 minutes of flooding, but the ship went under just before 10 p.m. Eastern, hours after the work began. She now lies 22 nautical miles southwest of Destin East Pass, in about 180 feet of water. The ship is 990 feet long. Okaloosa County, Florida, bought her in 2024 for exactly this purpose. Her maiden voyage was in July 1952, when she crossed the Atlantic eastbound in 3 days, 10 hours and 40 minutes, taking the Blue Riband for the fastest crossing. No ocean liner has beaten that record, and she left passenger service in 1969. After leaving service, the ship sat docked in Philadelphia from 1996 while restoration plans failed. In 2021 the pier operator doubled her dockage to $1,700 a day, and in 2024 a federal judge told her owners to move her. The county bought her, and in February 2025 she was towed out. She spent more than a year in Mobile, Alabama, where fuel, wiring and other non-metal material were removed, more than 400 portholes were taken out and 10-by-10-foot holes were cut in her decks. The preparation followed practices set by the Environmental Protection Agency, the Maritime Administration and the Army Corps of Engineers, and the county worked with Florida's environmental department. Federal rules barred explosives, so around 2 p.m. a fireboat began pumping seawater in, and shortly before 5 p.m. crews opened two valves. The date had been moved up a day, from November 12, because of forecast wind. The former aircraft carrier Oriskany, off Pensacola, was sunk as a reef on May 17, 2006. The Navy gave her length as 888 feet, and she took about 37 minutes to go under; until Wednesday she was described as the largest ship ever sunk as a reef. For the SS United States, the plan called for about 45 minutes, but from the valves opening to the ship going under took about 300 minutes, and counted from the first pumping at 2 p.m. it was closer to eight hours. County spokesperson Nick Tomecek said while the ship was still afloat that she was designed to be unsinkable and that fact had given crews challenges. The SS United States Preservation Foundation sued in federal court, and co-founder Carlos Camacho Junior warned of "serious potential for a Superfund site out in the Gulf." On November 6, Judge M. Casey Rodgers denied the injunction, writing that the filing lacked a verified complaint or an affidavit. The plan puts her top deck about 60 feet below the surface, though those are the county's planned figures rather than a survey, and whether she came to rest upright had not been confirmed in the first reports. Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution will sample the water at 132 locations around the wreck, testing for metals including iron, manganese and nickel. A baseline is due within one month, with yearly visits after it. Whether the reef helps the Gulf is a question scientists will measure at those 132 locations. Highlights Highlight In pictures Listen The episode as audio