Recovery of Ehime Maru tests Navy skill

•	Graphic: Comparison of recoveries
	Video of divers cleaning up oil from the Ehime Maru (5.1 Mb) and searching the ship (4 Mb). QuickTime plug-in required
	Interactive graphic on the diving recovery operation and how the Ehime Maru was moved to shallower waters
•	Online special: Collision at Sea: Ehime Maru and Greeneville

By William Cole
Advertiser Military Writer

In its attempts to describe just how difficult it would be to rig and lift the Ehime Maru from a depth of 2,000 feet, the Navy did its best to draw a land-based picture of the deep-sea recovery it was undertaking nine miles south of Diamond Head.

Capt. Bert Marsh, the Navy's director of ocean engineering and supervisor of salvage and diving, in August likened the task to standing atop a pair of Empire State buildings and casting a fishing line to the sidewalk, aiming for a six-inch square.

"And oh, by the way, the building is moving," Marsh said.

Lt. Cmdr. Steven Stancy, a Pacific Fleet diving and salvage officer, said you can "equate it to hovering in a helicopter, and trying to maneuver things 2,000 feet down."

"Salvage of a vessel of this size from a depth of 2,000 feet is a complex and precedent-setting operation," the Navy said in mid-March.

"Precedent-setting" was an oft-used phrase. And for the Navy it was.

"It's definitely an amazing feat," Stancy said. "Never before have we recovered an object this large from this depth of water."

The Navy promised the families of nine Japanese men and boys killed in the Feb. 9 collision with the submarine USS Greeneville that it would attempt to recover their bodies. More than $60 million has been spent doing so.

Seventeen state, local and federal agencies were involved in planning the recovery operation. At least eight remotely operated vehicles, or ROVs, were used, and the recent 14.5-nautical-mile journey to a shallow-water site included a procession of surface ships, including the recovery vessel Rockwater 2, research ship USNS Sumner, the USS Salvor and Japanese ship JDS Chihaya.

But some experts do not believe this will be one for the record books — either for the Navy or the annals of salvage history.

James Clay Moltz, a research professor and submarine expert at the Monterey Institute of International Studies in Monterey, Calif., said moving the Ehime Maru "was a very significant rescue operation, but if you look at it in terms of what's going on in the industry and in the military, there's been a lot that's pretty amazing."

Like the $65 million raising of the 18,000-ton Russian nuclear submarine Kursk from the Barents Sea floor on Oct. 8, more than a year after it sank, killing its 118-man crew.

Depth not unprecedented

In the case of the Ehime Maru, the depth is not unprecedented, and the ship's size is modest, Moltz said.

"I don't think from a recovery standpoint this (the Ehime Maru) sets any great mark," Moltz said. "It was a difficult operation, but not one people are going to be thinking about decades from now."

Sherry Sontag, co-author of submarine espionage bestseller "Blind Man's Bluff," said the Navy itself may be reluctant to tout its success.

The fast-attack submarine Greeneville ripped a gash in the Japanese fisheries training vessel's underbelly during a surfacing drill, sending it to the seafloor in minutes.

The Navy purposely shied away from the type of documentation of the 830-ton ship's transport that might be carried by National Geographic or the Discovery Channel because of the sensitivity of the recovery. As of Friday, divers had recovered six bodies from a site in 115 feet of water near Honolulu International Airport's reef runway.

"I think given the circumstances of what happened to the Ehime Maru in the first place, it (the recovery) is going to be one of those things that's understated," Sontag said. "The recognition is going to be indelibly linked to the accident. The Navy won't go out of its way to say, 'Look what we're doing.' "

Moltz said the "granddaddy" of all deep-sea recovery attempts was that of the Soviet Golf-class ballistic missile submarine K-129, which sank off Hawai'i on April 11, 1968, in 16,500 feet of water.

Glomar Explorer

More famous than the submarine, which possibly went down because of a missile malfunction, was the ship that went after it in 1974, the Hughes Glomar Explorer.

Ostensibly deep-sea mining for "manganese nodules," the Glomar Explorer — built at the direction of Howard Hughes — was in reality fishing for K-129 as part of a CIA project code-named "Project Jennifer."

Outfitted with a massive hoisting mechanism, claw and cavernous internal hangar with access to the ocean, the Glomar Explorer secretly salvaged part of the Soviet sub and reportedly recovered two nuclear-tipped torpedoes, cipher and code equipment, and eight dead crewmen.

The recovery firm Smit-Tak, part of the Netherlands-based Smit International Group, was the primary contractor for the deep-water relocation of the Ehime Maru.

Dutch heavy-lifting company Mammoet lifted the Kursk, one of the world's biggest submarines, on 26 steel cables attached to a barge. A Mammoet-Smit salvage team succeeded in cutting off the damaged bow section of the Russian sub.

Navy divers have worked on the recovery of the Civil War ironclad USS Monitor, 16 miles southeast of Cape Hatteras, N.C., in 240 feet of water.

As far back as 1939, the Navy succeeded in raising the 1,450-ton submarine Squalus after its engine room began to flood and it went down in 243 feet of water near Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

Stancy said the Navy has recovered larger objects than the Ehime Maru from less than 300 feet, and smaller objects — like airplanes and helicopters — from 17,000 to 18,000 feet.

Weight, depth challenging

Working at 2,000 feet with the 830-ton fishing ship presented greater challenges, though.

One of the biggest was the exclusive use of ROVs because divers aren't able to work at such depths.

"This whole recovery has relied on ROVs," said Stancy, who was involved with the Ehime Maru following the Feb. 9 collision and up through the recovery. "Most of the things we do involve divers. The past three months was strictly an ROV operation."

Two Navy and four contracted ROVs were used along with ROVs from the Japanese ships JDS Chihaya and Kairei. Stancy said the comment was made that the ROV Phoenix III had more in-water time working on pre-rigging on the Ehime Maru than it would typically for a whole year.

It took 85 days to prepare the rigging for the move, a task the Navy initially estimated would take about 30 days.

"You've got factors like sea currents and swells moving the ship around and the potential of yanking on an (ROV) umbilical," Stancy said. "A lot of operations conducted by the ROVs are very meticulous, and getting jostled around by the seas makes it difficult."

Further complicating the effort was the need to abandon plans to bore under the ship to run cables beneath it. Instead, the Navy lifted the bow and stern of the Ehime Maru to put in place two lifting plates. The ship, tethered to the recovery vessel Rockwater 2 by four 4.5-inch cables, finally was lifted off the sea floor on Oct. 12.

John Craven, a University of Hawai'i professor emeritus who helped the Navy develop its deep-submergence program, said the project is unique because its sole purpose was to recover the bodies of the victims.

"I know of no other salvage operation that works that way," he said.

Reach William Cole at wcole@honoluluadvertiser.com or 525-5459.