The website for the World War II Valor in the Pacific National Monument will need to be updated. As of Wednesday, the homepage caption still read: “The USS Arizona Memorial is closed until March 2019 for repairs.”
This glum projection is outdated and, even worse, turns out to have been too optimistic. Now the revised timetable makes it possible, even likely, that the suspension of walk-on visits to the memorial that sits above the sunken vessel will stretch to a total of 15 months.
Considering that this poignant memorial is among the state’s top-ranked visitor attractions, this is really unacceptable.
The official justification is that the repairs to the floating concrete dock that enables visitors to disembark onto the memorial are complex and have grown in complexity. In fact, Andrew Munoz — a spokesman for the National Park Service, which oversees the monument — said the process that the NPS usually goes through to make such repairs normally would take three years.
So if the newest projection is correct (and that’s a big if), the hope was that the hiatus still would have lasted only half the time than it ordinarily would have.
Even if one assumes that the difficulty of repairs represent a factor beyond the Park Service’s control, there really was no excuse for publicizing the reopening date as March 2019, and for waiting until now to correct it.
Because in the intervening months since the dock shut down in May 2018, visitors planning a trip to Oahu who counted the Arizona Memorial among their sightseeing stops may have postponed their trip until they could gain access to the memorial. And now they will be let down; avoiding that outcome should have been within the control of the NPS.
Meanwhile, the latest from Jacqueline Ashwell, superintendent of the Arizona Memorial, is that a contract for the repairs is expected to be awarded in March. The fact that this step hasn’t been taken yet, and on a priority project, is disappointing, to say the least.
To be sure, this was not an easy fix. The floating dock is anchored in the mud beneath 40 feet of water using six chains and concrete blocks. Somehow that became dislodged, possibly in 2017 with the king tides, according to officials.
Then for several months thereafter, the unmoored dock was straining on the 30-foot metal bridge connecting it to the memorial, which is now more than 56 years old. The result, minor damage to the exterior of the structure, became visible and led to the curtailment of the boat visits.
Eventually NPS officials selected a new design for the fix. The dock will be anchored with “helical” steel pilings that screw into bedrock on the seafloor.
Even so, it should have become clearer last summer that the projected reopening date was unrealistic. In June, Ashwell said environmental studies might be needed.
Arguably it might be difficult to come up with a short-term substitute device for safely enabling visitors to step aboard from a ferry boat bobbing in the harbor waters alongside.
But somebody needs to make sure the search for a solution has been exhaustive — perhaps someone in Congress.
There has been action on Capitol Hill to improve the outlook for parks and monuments, including the Arizona Memorial. A bill titled the Natural Resources Management Act, now awaiting a signature from President Donald Trump, would protect about 1.3 million acres of wilderness and close to 700,000 acres of recreation and conservation lands.
It also includes two items for Hawaii: redesignating the Honouliuli Internment Camp as a national historic site, and, most importantly, designating the Arizona Memorial as a separate site within the Park Service.
Such enhanced status for the memorial would be even better if the public could have actual access to the site — and as quickly as possible.
