Historic dry dock headed to China
After 57 years of maritime service and another 15 years as something of a San Francisco eyesore, the historic, 4,200-ton Drydock 1 was hoisted onto the deck of a cargo ship bound for a ship recycler in China.
The carefully choreographed maneuver Saturday morning required tugboats to drag the huge, rusting dry dock to the middle of the bay off San Francisco’s Pier 50, where the deck of the M.V. Tern was settled well below water line waiting for it.
The ship, a semisubmersible, heavy-lift vessel, then deballasted and rose up to cradle the dry dock, which at 128 feet wide will overhang the Tern by 12 feet on each side.
In other words, it’s a really big dry dock.
Getting rid of it has been an even bigger deal.
Drydock 1 was built for Navy use in 1942 and remained in military or commercial use until 1999, when it was declared unfit for service.
The San Francisco Port has tried to dispose of it over the years — especially after it broke loose in 2002 and floated to Yerba Buena Island, where it was stranded until it could be towed back to its home at Pier 50. Over the years, the dry dock has taken on water and threatened to sink in storms, port officials said.
The port tried to auction off the dry dock twice. The first time a bidder bought it for $76,000, but then was unable to move it. At the second auction, the bids were a negative value, meaning the port would have had to pay someone to take it away.
This year, the port negotiated a deal to ship the dry dock to China as scrap.
“It’s huge for us,” said Daley Dunham, the port’s manager of special projects. “It was a complicated problem that required a complicated solution.”
While port officials had hoped to celebrate the successful removal of the hulking eyesore, the day turned somber when a body floated loose from the dry dock as it was towed to the waiting ship. About 300 yards off Pier 50, a tugboat operator saw the decomposed body and shut down all engines.
Efforts to secure the body failed and it floated away. As the operation to transfer the dry dock to the Tern continued, teams on San Francisco Police boats searched for the remains in the water off the Port of San Francisco.
Officials speculated that the body might be that of a missing kayaker who capsized in a tugboat’s wake off Pier 80 in 2011. His body was never recovered. Dive teams had searched the dry dock for remains, but had found nothing.
“We had already taken a hard look at it,” Dunham said. “We thought the chances of (finding a body) was very remote.”
As search teams continued looking for the body Saturday afternoon, port officials completed the transfer of the dry dock to the shipping company, which is scheduled to depart for China on Tuesday.
The project to ship the dry dock to China was subsidized by the Department of Defense and cost $6.8 million — $1.5 million less than original estimates, Dunham said.
“We’re finally, in a responsible way, getting rid of our own mothball fleet,” Dunham said. “We’re happy to have found a final resting place for this dry dock.”