PEARL HARBOR, Hawaii – The USS Arizona Memorial’s visitors center was designed to accommodate 750,000 people a year when it was built in 1980, but today it’s jammed with crowds more than twice that size, and it’s literally bursting at the seams.
Portions of the shoreside building and plaza commemorating the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor have settled as much as 30 inches and are still sinking.
The Pearl Harbor Memorial Fund is working to raise $34 million to replace the visitors center, the starting point for ferry rides across the harbor to the white memorial that straddles the sunken Arizona, which contains the remains of 1,177 sailors.
A total of 2,390 people were killed in the Dec. 7, 1941, surprise attack that drew the United States into World War II.
The one-story, open-air visitors center was constructed on fill material that was dredged from Pearl Harbor decades earlier and was expected to settle 18 inches. Its architects even designed in the ability to raise the building using concrete shims.
But the building has been raised four times now, causing cracks in the concrete walls that have exposed steel reinforcing rods to moisture. Last year, engineers gave the building a life expectancy of just five to 10 more years.
A new center will be built with lighter materials atop pilings that go deep into the ground to prevent sinking, said Douglas Lentz, the National Park Service superintendent in charge of the visitors center. There is also an option of building it on a floating foundation.
The current museum has 2,500 square feet of space, with barely enough room for crowds of visitors to squeeze between the displays. Preliminary plans for the new center call for 24,000 square feet of space, more restrooms and a 5,400-square-foot museum to display artifacts.
Talk to us
- You can tell us about news and ask us about our journalism by emailing newstips@heraldnet.com or by calling 425-339-3428.
- If you have an opinion you wish to share for publication, send a letter to the editor to letters@heraldnet.com or by regular mail to The Daily Herald, Letters, P.O. Box 930, Everett, WA 98206.
- More contact information is here.
