Pearl Harbor National Memorial and the National Park Service’s Historic Preservation Training Center begin restoration and preservation work on Monday, April 28, on two of six historic mooring quays of Battleship Row that line Ford Island.
The work to return them to their 1941 appearance will not impact visitors to the USS Arizona Memorial and will, in fact, be much more visible to guests since they are next to the sunken battleship. These two structures were the anchor points for the USS Arizona and USS Vestal.
In 1941, the climax of the Japanese attacks took place on this site where U.S. Navy battleships were anchored while at port in Pearl Harbor. As ships burned around them, the quays served as a place of refuge where sailors and soldiers escaped the surrounding chaos.
The quays weren’t destroyed during the attack, but over 80 years they have become considerably weathered. Repainting of the structures will be historically accurate by removing ship names that were added to the mooring quays in the early 1980s. Instead, NPS staff will install banners with the ships’ names to allow visitors to see where ships were located and more accurately display how they would have been moored on Dec. 7.
“The project consists of removing the deteriorating paint coating. We’re doing the concrete patching. We’re also removing failed coatings from the metal rebar ladder rungs, bits, bollards, cleats and we’ll be repainting everything and going back to a more historic paint scheme, one that dates to around the Dec. 7 attack.
We’re also applying water-resistant coating just to ensure these historic elements are better protected into the future,” explained Historic Preservation Training Center Project Leader Sara Stratte in an NPS video.
Stratte says working on the water has been a challenge, but it makes the experience unique. “It entails a lot of creative problem solving, scheduling, working closely with our partners at the National Park Service, as well as the Navy and other agencies who share this harbor with us.”
The Historic Preservation Training Center crew is based in Vancouver, Washington, just outside of Portland, and works throughout the west from California, Washinton, Idaho, as well as all the way out to Guam.
“Through our jobs we always work in the proximity of history and of major American landmarks or structures and things that figure very much into who we are, but it’s really unique to be working so close the USS Arizona and to the memorial,” said Stratte.
“The biggest portion of the landscape from that moment and from that morning in 1941 that you can still see are the mooring keys. A lot of the landscape has changed, the harbor has changed, Oahu has changed, but these are probably the most telling vestiges of that moment in history,” Stratte said.
The NPS began restoration work in 2023, and two mooring quays have been completed to date. They expect this phase of the project will finish by 2026, with restoration of all six mooring quays completed by 2028.
Sarah Yamanaka covers news and events for Spectrum News Hawaii. She can be reached at sarah.yamanaka@charter.com.
