UKDIVING
The wreck is known for its photogenic contrast of light and shade
Scans of the wreck help to track its deterioration
recorded the geophysics of the wreck over the years, with increasingly advanced scans. On the images you can easily see the damage to the starboard side caused by the salvage operations, and the stern section, which lies twisted off to one side across the sand.
The ship was fuelled by heavy bunker oil and its leakage is being monitored. The latest high-resolution scans are helping to visualize the decay, as the wreck collapses under its own weight and the weight of the encrusting marine life. It isn’ t the welds that are failing, but the steel itself.
Apocryphal tales of boiler salvage( well did you ever see any big round things down there?) are not true. It turns out the ship’ s boilers had a square design, seen in contemporary advertisements unearthed by the project.
And there is an unsolved mystery. Research has shown that during the time
the ship spent in Barry, a lead lined room was built into one of the holds. It was filled with boxes, each filled with 2-½inch diameter, ¼-inch thick discs. They contained Radium 226, a powder used for luminous instrument dials. They were removed from the wreck in the 1970s, but nobody at the Liberty 80 project knows why such a large quantity was being shipped to US Army Engineer stores in Belgium. Does anyone out there know? �
See a Liberty Ship today
Three Liberty Ships are still afloat. SS John W Brown is berthed in Baltimore. A museum ship, she still gets underway several times a year for living history cruises into Chesapeake Bay.
SS Jeremiah O’ Brien is looked after by a team of volunteers on the San Francisco waterfront. In 1994 she sailed from the US to France to take part in the 50th Anniversary of Operation Overlord, the
Allied invasion of Western Europe. Hellas Liberty, formerly SS Arthur M. Huddell, is now a museum ship in Greece. Greek shipowners bought many Liberty Ships after the war to replace the huge number of their ships sunk during the war. Many remained in service until the 1960s.
Photographs of the well preserved SS John W Brown
PHOTOS: CLIVE PUDDIFOOT
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