Where is us mothball fleet

The Perry class was a small multipurpose warship capable of anti-submarine warfare and self-defense against anti-air threats.

Each could carry up to two Seahawk helicopters. The Perrys could operate independently but could also travel as part of a carrier battle group, adding anti-submarine capability. Navy built 51 Perry frigates, but all have been decommissioned. Most of them were scrapped, sunk, and turned into fish habitat and transferred abroad to U.

Fewer than twenty are sitting in mothballs in Bremerton, Pearl Harbor, and Philadelphia, awaiting their ultimate fate. Navy has a long tradition of keeping ships after they leave Navy service, parking them in quiet corners of navy bases and letting them quietly rust. The so-called mothball fleet shrank dramatically over the past two decades, from a high of several hundred ships after the Cold War to less than fifty today.

Today there are The reason for the sharp decline is partly environmental: as the ships have settled into obsolescence, paint from the rusting surfaces has been flaking off, depositing toxins such as lead, copper, zinc, and barium into the bay. In a few years, every ghost ship from the Mothball Fleet will be gone. The federal Maritime Administration has pledged to remove the last of the outdated ships by September 30, , and is operating ahead of schedule. Most of the ships' final destination is a scrap yard in Texas, where they will be broken apart and recycled.

Although the Navy has not yet announced the date of when the carrier will depart or which company will be awarded the contract to dismantle the ship, Kitty Hawk 's departure from the Naval Inactive Ship Maintenance Facility in Bremerton is only a matter of time.

There are currently seven ships, including the Kitty Hawk, that are moored in Bremerton's mothball fleet. The remaining vessels include the former amphibious transport dock ship Dubuque and the guided missile frigates Rodney M.

Both the Austin-class transport dock ships and the Oliver Hazard Perry-class guided-missile cruisers are no longer used by the Navy. The fast combat support ships USNS Bridge and USNS Rainier, which were last a part of the Navy's civilian-crewed Military Sealift Command's fleet of combat logistics ships, are both being held in reserve at the inactive fleet as a cost-cutting effort.

Philadelphia is home to more than half of the Navy's decommissioned ships. They could be sold, used as museums, or scrapped. It used to be called the "Mothball Fleet," a collection of Navy warships and other vessels that were no longer in use but could be reactivated if needed.

One of the former Mothball Fleet's best known ships was the New Jersey. After the battleship was decommissioned at the end of World War II, it was recommissioned and decommissioned three more times in the decades that followed — for the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and in the s as part of President Ronald Reagan's initiative for a ship Navy.

It is now a museum and memorial on the Camden waterfront. The term "Mothball Fleet" is seldom heard these days — perhaps because mothballs themselves are not widely used anymore — and decommissioned vessels are now stored at three Naval Inactive Ship Maintenance Facilities around the country. The sight of those ships prompted questions from a reader on Curious Philly , our question-and-response forum in which readers submit questions about their communities and our journalists report out the answers.

Of the 49 inactive ships nationwide, 31 are in Philly's Navy Yard. But there used to be even more.