Thursday, November 18, 2004 Matthew A. Russell has been an archeologist with the National Park Service Submerged Resources Center since 1993. He serves as Project Director for the USS Arizona Preservation Project.

Last Day

Today was the final day of operations for the 2004 USS Arizona Preservation Project, which we mostly spent moving gear off the Memorial, and beginning the cleaning and packing process. Tomorrow we’ll finish packing everything and send it back to Santa Fe via FedEx. 

Art Ireland oversees the assembly of gear for the team's return to Santa Fe. NPS photo by Brett Seymour.

We took time out today to spend some time with good friends and colleagues Rich Wills, from the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command (JPAC), and Dave Grant, from the US Army Corps of Engineers. Rich and Dave are underwater archeologists we’ve worked together with on several past projects, including the 1996 assessment of H. L. Hunley and the 1999 investigation of USS Housatonic, which was Hunley’s victim. Rich kindly offered to give us a tour of JPAC’s Central Identification Laboratory on Hickam Air Force Base, where United States’ service personnel who have been lost in previous conflicts are brought for identification and are returned to their families. It’s an impressive facility and JPAC’s teams conduct challenging archeological excavations around the world, both on land and underwater, to locate fallen Americans. We appreciate Rich taking time from his busy schedule to show us around.

JPAC’s Central Identification Laboratory on Hickam Air Force Base, near Pearl Harbor. NPS photo by Brett Seymour.

Overall, we’ve had an extremely successful project.  We accomplished all our project goals with only minor setbacks along the way, and none of them kept us down for long. A project as large and complex as this can only be successful with the collaboration of many individuals, institutions and partners – if I tried to list everyone here I would inevitably forget many deserving people, but to everyone who helped us along the way (you know who you are), we thank you. We especially appreciate the support of the staff of the USS Arizona Memorial, who have put up with our disrupting presence for the last three weeks, and the numerous US Navy commands who have helped us out in many small ways. We also gratefully acknowledge the Department of Defense Legacy Resources Management Fund and the Arizona Memorial Museum Association, who continue to contribute funding for this project.

Model of the USS Arizona by Robert Sumrall site in the Memorial Visitors Center. NPS photo by Brett Seymour.

We’ve had fun doing these daily updates, and hope they’ve helped bring our work to a wider audience, while at the same time giving some insight into what happens “behind the scenes” on an SRC project.  If it proves successful, we hope to make this standard operating procedure on future projects.