page_title: USS Monitor
section_title: Recovery
hierarchical_section_title: USS Monitor / Rediscovery / Recovery
caption_attribution_description: English: Atlantic Ocean (Jul. 17, 2002) -- Navy diver Hull Maintenance Technician 1st Class Steve Grier works on extending a piece of equipment called "the spider," which is being used to raise the gun turret of the sunken Civil War ironclad USS Monitor. The famed warship sank during a storm Dec. 31, 1862, off Cape Hatteras, N.C., as she was being towed to Beaufort, S.C. Four officers and 12 men were lost with the ship. Monitor was located in 1973 sixteen miles off the Cape by a team of scientists. The site was designated as the nation's first marine sanctuary in 1975. U.S. Navy photo by Photographer’s Mate 3rd Class Jeffrey Lehrberg. (RELEASED)
context_page_description: USS Monitor was an iron-hulled steam-powered ironclad warship built for the Union Navy during the American Civil War, the first such ship commissioned by the Navy. Monitor played a central role in the Battle of Hampton Roads on 9 March 1862, where, under the command of Lieutenant John L. Worden, she fought the casemate ironclad CSS Virginia to a standstill. The unique design of the ship, distinguished by its revolving turret which was designed by American inventor Theodore Timby, was quickly duplicated and established the monitor class and type of armored steam-powered warship built for the American Navy in the next several decades.
  The remainder of the ship was designed by the Swedish-born engineer and inventor John Ericsson, and hurriedly built in Brooklyn, New York on the East River beginning in late 1861 in only 101 days. Monitor presented a new concept in ship design and employed a variety of new inventions and innovations in ship building that caught the attention of the world.
context_section_description: Initial efforts in 1995 by Navy and NOAA divers to raise the warship's propeller were foiled by an abnormally stormy season off Cape Hatteras. Realizing that raising the whole wreck was impractical for financial reasons as well as the inability to bring up the wreck intact, NOAA developed a comprehensive plan to recover the most significant parts of the ship, namely her engine, propeller, guns, and turret. It estimated that the plan would cost over 20 million dollars to implement over four years. The Department of Defense Legacy Resource Management Program contributed $14.5 million. The Navy divers, mainly from its two Mobile Diving and Salvage Units, would perform the bulk of the work necessary in order to train in deep sea conditions and evaluate new equipment.
  Another effort to raise Monitor's propeller was successful on 8 June 1998, although the amount of effort required to work in the difficult conditions off Cape Hatteras was underestimated and the fewer than 30 divers used were nearly overwhelmed. The 1999 dive season was mostly research oriented as divers investigated the wreck in detail, planning how to recover the engine and determining if they could stabilize the hull so that it would not collapse onto the turret. In 2000 the divers shored up the port side of the hull with bags of grout, installed the engine recovery system, an external framework to which the engine would be attached, in preparation for the next season, and made over five times as many dives as they had the previous season.
  The 2001 dive season concentrated on raising the ship's steam engine and condenser. Hull plates had to be removed to access the engine compartment and both the engine and the condenser had to be separated from the ship, the surrounding wreckage and each other. A Mini Rover ROV was used to provide visibility of the wreck and divers to the support staff above water. The engine was raised on 16 July and the condenser three days later by the crane barge Wotan. Saturation diving was evaluated by the Navy that dive season on Monitor and proved to be very successful, allowing divers to maximize their time on the bottom. The surface-supplied divers evaluated the use of heliox due to the depth of the wreck. It also proved to be successful once the dive tables were adjusted.
  Much like the previous year, the 2002 dive season was dedicated to lifting the 120-long-ton (120 t) turret to the surface. Around 160 divers were assigned to remove the parts of the hull, including the armor belt, that lay on top of the turret using chisels, exothermic cutting torches and 20,000 psi (137,895 kPa; 1,406 kgf/cm²) hydroblasters. They removed as much of the debris from inside the turret as possible to reduce the weight to be lifted. This was usually concreted coal as one of the ship's coal bunkers had ruptured and dumped most of its contents into the turret. The divers prepared the turret roof for the first stage of the lift by excavating underneath the turret and placed steel beams and angle irons to reinforce it for its move onto a lifting platform for the second stage. A large, eight-legged lifting frame, nicknamed the "spider", was carefully positioned over the turret to move it onto the platform and the entire affair would be lifted by the crane mounted on the Wotan. The divers discovered one skeleton in the turret on 26 July before the lift and spent a week carefully chipping about half of it free of the concreted debris; the other half was inaccessible underneath the rear of one of the guns.
  With Tropical Storm Cristobal bearing down on the recovery team, and time and money running out, the team made the decision to raise the turret on 5 August 2002, after 41 days of work, and the gun turret broke the surface at 5:30 pm to the cheers of everyone aboard Wotan and other recovery ships nearby. As archaeologists examined the contents of the turret after it has been landed aboard Wotan, they discovered a second skeleton, but removing it did not begin until the turret arrived at the Mariners' Museum for conservation. The remains of these sailors wer
caption: A Navy diver prepares "the spider"
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