Not Junk

Since February, midtown New Yorkers have looked glumly or angrily out of their west windows at the hulk of the great U.S.S. Lafayette, nee Normandie, slumbering sow-like on her left flank in the Hudson River mud. All over the huge, ravaged hull workmen have been clambering, dissecting the dead thing, hauling away in antlike loads the three smokestacks and most of the two upper decks. People thought salvage was under way.

Not so. It had not been decided whether the stricken ship should be scrapped or salvaged. Only last week did a special committee of maritime experts decide definitely that salvage was possible. The job will be the biggest salvage operation in maritime history, will cost an undetermined number of millions of dollars, will take at best more than a year.

The problem is vast, tough, dirty, dangerous and infinitely complicated. Diving work of a magnitude never before undertaken will be required. A school must be set up on Pier 88 to train scores of divers and hundreds of other salvage workers before the job can even be started. When salvage finally begins, the problem will include the construction of mammoth bulkheads inside the boat, to control the shift of the thousands of tons of water when she moves. The silt under her must be blown out and dredged out. A thousand holes in her steel skin, such as ports, must be sealed up. Out of her hull must be drained as many of the tons of dirty water as engineering judgment decides. And at least 10,000 cubic yards of muck must be sucked out of her shell. When all this is done, with a hundred other more technical operations, the Lafayette will regain buoyancy, will right herself like a released rolypoly--the Navy hopes.

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