By Robin Shulman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, November 22, 2006

NEW YORK, Nov. 21 -- On a recent cloudy day, Bill White, an upright man with a buzz cut, stared from a pier on Manhattan's West Side into the Hudson River. A crane and bucket dropped into the murky water and out again in rhythm: Collect mud, swing across, open clamshell, release. And again.

White is the director of the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum, overseeing efforts to free from the mud the famed aircraft carrier that houses his museum.

For the past week, workers under Navy supervision have dredged 24-7, gathering silt from the river's depths and swinging it over to a barge. The muck will be purified and taken to cover a landfill on Staten Island.

"We are deep in the throes of a major military-style dredging operation," said White, whose days have been filled with situation reports, conference calls and BlackBerry messages.

It all began as a military adventure that seemed, for a change, to bode well.

The Intrepid was to make a five-mile trip across the Hudson to New Jersey for needed repairs. A crowd of 500, including Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) and former mayors David N. Dinkins and Edward I. Koch, gathered on Nov. 6 to send it off.

"To our platoon of ex-mayor line handlers, I say, Mr. Mayors, cast off!" ordered retired Rear Adm. James Lloyd "Doc" Abbot Jr., 88, who commanded the ship in the Mediterranean in the early 1960s. Smoke spewed, water churned, and the tugboats pulled, eventually to reach a force of 30,000 horsepower.

But after settling for 24 years into the silt at Pier 86, the 27,000-ton, 900-foot-long ship was stuck.

"Four propellers acted as screws, and the Intrepid screwed itself into the goo," White said. With the ship resting on a bump of mud, the stern was left to sit about two feet higher than the bow, he said, placing stress on the ship that could cause damage.

Time for a tactical reevaluation. Before the attempted move, the museum had spent $1.2 million to dredge more than 15,000 cubic yards of silt from under and behind the ship to create a channel to deeper water. Hundreds of tons of water had been pumped out of ballast tanks to raise the ship two feet. And the move was scheduled during the highest tide of the year, to lift the ship several more feet above a typical high tide.

White asked for help from the Army Corps of Engineers and the Navy for an emergency salvage operation including a combination of reconnaissance by divers and dredging by bucket and suction.

Divers in reinforced helmets shot into the dark Hudson to survey the amount and composition of the thick, hard mud stuck to four massive propellers. But visibility is only a couple of inches, maybe a foot, said Peter H. Shugert, the chief of public affairs for the Army Corps of Engineers. And the divers had to feel their way through water that is 55 to 60 degrees.

"Salvage is more about what you don't know than you do know," said Michael Herb, the Navy's civilian director of salvage operations. "We don't know how compressed that mud is, how easily we can drag it out." It could take four or five weeks, he said. On Tuesday, Intrepid Foundation officials got a month-long extension on a federal dredging permit.

The ship, gunmetal gray and 17 stories tall at the top of the main mast, was launched in 1943 and spearheaded the naval defeat of Japan in the Pacific. It also served in the Cold War and in Vietnam, and as a recovery ship for NASA capsules.

When it became a museum, the Intrepid housed fighter planes on its decks.

The total cost of its restoration project will be $60 million, White said, and will include federal, state, city and private funding. The main effort, completely rebuilding the structurally damaged Pier 86, will cost $40 million, he said, and take about two years. The vessel itself needs repairs in Bayonne, N.J. The cost of the first attempt to move it there added up to at least $1.7 million, White said, and the next attempt will cost even more.

"There are certain things that, no matter what the cost, you're willing," former mayor Koch said in a phone interview.

At a time when the military news is often bad, he acknowledged, the Intrepid is a monument to the fighting equipment of a war that was won.

"How do you get that city to pay attention to anything?" asked White, standing beside the ship, as he turned to face the unresponsive din of the Midtown traffic, and waved his arms in a wide gesture that took in the whole of Manhattan. His answer: "Put an aircraft carrier right here."

During World War II, the ship survived five kamikaze attacks, White said. Kamikaze strikes set fire to the Intrepid's wooden deck, he said. "The sailors put them out. The sailors kept plugging leaks that were occurring as fast as they could," he said.

"Human beings kept it afloat."

And in tribute, human beings are now making their best effort to get the Intrepid out of the mud.