by Eric Douglas
*****
Seashore Engineering, the company that was preparing the USS Beauregard for its next tour of duty as a home for fish, was allowing local volunteers to help clean up the ship, but they weren’t actively advertising for them. Allowing local workers with connections, or the staff of local dive shops, to come on board was much simpler and easier to control.
Jackson Pauley showed up at the work site. They were only two days away from the actual sinking, so he really didn’t expect to be given a difficult assignment. All of the heavy lifting and cutting should be done by now. When he told the foreman which dive operation he worked for, and about his previous service on board the ship, he learned his expectation – and Andrea’s intuition – was right on the money. That worked out well for two reasons. One, he really wasn’t in the mood to be hauling buckets of grease and oil. And two, he needed the ability to search throughout the ship.
The foreman asked him to survey the entire ship with a clipboard and prepare a list of everything that wasn’t complete. Jackson was given exactly the duty he needed to figure out if there was anything going on.
As he patrolled around the boat, taking his time and examining nooks and crannies, Jackson recorded everything he saw. He also looked for things that weren’t supposed to be there. He was nearly finished before he found what he was really looking for.
It was an odd experience for Jackson. Walking the decks of the Sumner-class Destroyer again, especially considering what the future held for the mighty ship, gave him an unsettled feeling. She was 376 feet long and 41 feet wide, with a draft of 14 feet – small by comparison to today’s Spruance and Burke-class destroyers, but big enough to do its job. She carried 5” guns, anti-aircraft guns, depth charge racks and projectors and 10 torpedo tubes. The full crew would have included 345 men working on board – men because in the Beauregard’s day, there were no women serving on combat ships. Jackson felt the ship seemed eerily quiet as he walked down the corridors. Her high-pressure, super-heated boilers were capable of generating 60,000 horsepower through twin screws, pushing the ship through the water at 34 knots, but now they were silent and incapable of turning a single rotation.
Today, there were only about 20 men and women on board getting her ready to sink. The engines would never turn again and there was no way to restart the boilers. The ammunition for her guns had been removed years earlier.
Jackson was checking out a compartment near the engine room when he discovered a water-tight door that had been dogged down – locked. Everything was supposed to be open and blocked with braces so it couldn’t be locked at all. They didn’t want divers to be able to get inside a compartment and get stuck. Doors had been removed. Holes had been cut in other panels.
But this one door was shut tight. Jackson searched for another access, assuming that this door was welded shut, but another hole was opened up elsewhere. He couldn’t find anything. That didn’t make sense, because they wouldn’t want to sink the ship with a compartment filled with air. It might make the ship unstable as it descended, causing it to roll over.
“Now just what’s going on here,” Jackson said out loud to no one in particular. He leaned against the opposite wall for a minute. The door was latched from inside, but he knew a way to open it anyway. While there were reasons to lock doors from inside in rooms with only one access, there was never a reason to lock one permanently from the inside. Navy safety protocols dictated that there be a way to open the door. Water tight doors are to keep water out in the event of an accident, not people.
Jackson grabbed a screwdriver from his back pocket – he was carrying some basic tools for just such an emergency – and removed a panel from the lock mechanism. From there, it was a simple step to flip the latch and release the door.
As soon as he spun the wheel and released the door, Jackson knew he had found what he was looking for. The large room was filled with crates and barrels of every description. Jackson entered the room and began to inspect them. He wasn’t a scientist and didn’t recognize the names on the panels. But what he did recognize from his days as a firefighter were the bright yellow warning panels designating everything in the room as a hazardous material. He wasn’t sure he understood the entire plan, but he had a good idea. A quick count and some educated guesses indicated the cavernous room was filled with nearly 2000 containers. And everything he could see was a dangerous chemical.
Jackson had seen enough. They obviously hadn’t cleaned everything off of the ship before sinking it. He couldn’t believe even half of this came from the ship in the first place. “They must have brought this on board,” Jackson said as he replaced the panel on the door.
The good news, Jackson thought, is with that door sealed, the chemicals can’t leak out in a hurry. It’ll all be protected from the seawater until we can get this sorted out.
Jackson picked up his clipboard, secured the panel and shut the door, then left. When he made it back topside, he realized it was nearly 4 p.m. He had spent the entire day below decks. He needed to get to Andrea and tell her what he had found. On his way out, he dropped off his clipboard showing dozens of things that remained to be finished before the ship could be sent to the bottom. It didn’t include the sealed hatch below decks.