After serving more than 38 years in the United States Navy, the USS Saratoga launched Thursday from Rhode Island on its final voyage to Texas, where the ship will be scrapped.
Signet Maritime Corp. will tow the ship to Brownsville, Texas, where 59,000 tons of steel will be recycled
after the USS Saratoga's estimated 15-day trip, said Maritime Executive.
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ESCO Marine will recycle the carrier, although it is still owned by the Navy until that process begins, Maritime said.
The Saratoga, named for the American Revolution battle in New York, was commissioned in 1956 and
served the Navy through 22 deployments, The Associated Press said.
The ship was decommissioned in 1994.
“It's a sad day in a way to see a great lady finish her career by being towed off to be scrapped," Bill Sheridan, who worked to turn the ship into a museum, told the AP.
The ship had been on the Navy donation list but was removed when the USS John F. Kennedy became available for a museum, the AP said. The USS Saratoga Foundation said in a 2010 newsletter that the Saratoga would be scrapped and that it would support the efforts to create a museum and educational center in Rhode Island’s Narragansett Bay with the Kennedy ship.
Veterans
saluted the Saratoga from the shore as the ship began its journey, WRPI reported.
Even though many are saddened by the Saratoga’s end on the scrap heap, the ship is meeting a better finale than another ship that bore the same name for 20 years: The Saratoga CV-3 was part of Operation Crossroads, which used aging ships in the Bikini Atoll to test the effects of a nuclear bomb.
In 1946, the Saratoga CV-3 survived the detonation of a nuclear bomb in the air, but sank after one was detonated underwater and the ship sustained severe damage.
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