Friday, January 30, 2015

"Curator's Tour" Video of the Battleship Iowa

Found this on YouTube while I was searching for something else, and thought I'd repost it here. This is an abbreviated video tour of the one I took a few months ago, and it's worth the 9 minutes of your time.

Hang on, I'm still sorting through the pix of the Superstructure Tour, and I'll get those posted later today.

All of the tour guides and other people you'll see wearing Iowa shirst in the video are people I work with on the ship, and a nicer bunch of men and women would be harder to find. We're all there because we appreciate having this grand ship available to us and the public, and we treat her like the fine ship she is.



3 comments:

  1. Simply outstanding. I'd love to do that tour, one day.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. If you ever make it down here to La-La Land it will be arranged!

      Delete
  2. I've been on tons of these ships, volunteer on the USS Salem and have seen most of the existing battleships, the Massachusetts and North Carolina almost in their entirety including full turret crawls. I just booked a tour for April and am looking forward very much to see this, with all the wonderful people that volunteer in great places like this it never gets old, you always learn something new.

    As big as these ships seem, they are shockingly fragile. Doing a serious hard-hat tour on the North Carolina took us down into the magazines and spaces of the first turret as well as multiple places which were supposed to be below the armored citadel where it was hit by a Japanese torpedo. All these years later there are huge gaps, ill fitting fixtures or joints and significant folds in many bulkheads. It's not easy to move around in there, what brave men who served there. Anything went wrong down below while technically there were escape trunks I don't know how likely anyone would have the chance to use them as intended to get out of Dodge with flooding, fire, steam leaks and explosions afoot. Brave men indeed!

    ReplyDelete

Keep it civil, please....

Gloomy, Gritty, Grey Day

 At 1700 local it's as described in the headline; 30*F, 88% RH, completely overcast, snowing like crazy (small flakes, but lots of them)...