USS Arizona Memorial In Hawaii Finally Set To Re-Open
EtN reports “the National Park Service is excited to welcome our visitors back to the USS Arizona Memorial very soon,” said Pearl Harbor National Memorial Acting Superintendent Steve Mietz.
The sunken battleship memorial, one of the most visited attractions in the state, sees 4,000 to 5,000 people a day. In 2018, nearly 1.8 million people visited the Pearl Harbor site.
Access to the memorial was suspended in May 2018 when park staff noticed minor damage to its attached floating concrete dock where boat passengers disembarked. Inspection of the dock revealed a failure of its anchoring system, which allowed too much lateral movement at the spot where passengers disembark from Navy boats.
A series of “helical” pilings were screwed into the seafloor, and synthetic rope was attached to a corresponding dozen points on the 105-foot dock as part of a more than $2.1 million fix, officials said.
The Hawaii National Park Service said today that the much-awaited reopening of the USS Arizona Memorial to walk-on access will take place this Labor Day weekend on Sunday after a 15-month closure.
The park service said that since May of 2018 when the memorial closed to foot traffic, multiple phases of a repair project for an adjacent dock have been completed including analysis, contracting, design, environmental compliance, mobilization, unexploded ordnance screening, resource preservation and project execution.
The Pearl Harbor Visitor Center is open seven days a week from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. The visitor center is free and no tickets are required to see the museums and grounds. The USS Arizona Memorial program is 75 minutes long. It starts in the theater with a 25-minute documentary and is followed by a boat ride to the memorial, time at the memorial and a boat ride back. Programs begin every 15 minutes from 7:30 a.m. to 3 p.m.
