Sunken oil tug discovered in river in 1980s
Published 3:17 pm Tuesday, January 2, 2018
Editor’s note: Andrew Perzo is on vacation. The following first ran in 2004. It’s a companion to Sunday’s column, which was about the Navy’s post-World War II ship-decommissioning program in Lake Charles.
In January 1946 the Navy leased the Lake Charles city docks for one year. The contract, signed by Mayor Tom Price and the City Council, called for the Navy to pay $1 for its lease.
In its story on the deal, the American Press reported that the Navy — obviously still in wartime, loose-lips-sink-ships mode — said it had “no intentions of berthing surplus vessels in Lake Charles.”
Two days later, on Jan. 4, 1946, the newspaper reported that the Navy “will use dock space leased from the City … for maintenance and security of surplus vessels to be berthed in the Calcasieu river.”
Within 10 days, two LCIs, or “landing craft, infantry,” arrived.
The paper called them “the advance guard of the small navy armada” that would soon arrive. LCIs were small vessels, measuring 158 feet, and a Navy spokesman told the paper “that larger ships, up to and including tankers,” would eventually arrive.
That news worried state officials, who feared for the fate of the drawspan bridge at the end of Shell Beach Drive, where the Navy planned to access the upper Calcasieu.
City residents, too, worried: If the bridge were damaged, they’d have to detour at least 55 miles to get to work at the industrial plants on the river’s western side.
Officials eventually decided to use pontoons to protect the bridge’s concrete piers, and the structure was able to weather the decommissioning project.
As it turned out the most notable, and consistent, damage the Navy wrought in Lake Charles was to overhead power lines, which were snapped a couple of times by the ships’ masts.
The largest ship the Navy sent to Lake Charles, the 492-foot-long USS Lamar (APA-47), was pictured on Page 1 of the April 26, 1946, American Press.
It left two months later. Around that time, the second-largest Navy ship on the river “was towed through the opened bridge, and 400 cars were counted backed up” on U.S. 90 west of the river after the bridge reopened.
Two years and 350 ships later, the newspaper announced the end of the decommissioning program and the departure of the last few vessels.
More than 40 years after that, state and federal environmental officials, on a mission to clean up and investigate a bubbling oil leak in the river, found a sunken ship.
It lay about 10 feet underwater and about 20 yards from the shore at River Road. Its hull was wooden, and the ship was leaking about a gallon of fuel oil each hour. “Information provided by area residents had led investigators to identify the ship as the USS Duntree, a 138-foot minesweeper,” according to a Press story from July 25, 1989.
But blueprints the Navy gave to investigators showed the USS Gumtree, “a YN-13 class antisubmarine net tender, a metal-hulled vessel,” lead EPA investigator Mike Ryan said at the time.
The Coast Guard had no record of a shipwreck for that part of the river, and the search for the vessel’s identity was made more difficult by the flood of theories about the wreck.
One theory said the ship was owned by the country of Argentina but “was scuttled after the death of Eva Peron, the country’s charismatic leader, on July 26, 1952.”
According to one resident, “It sank in the winter of 1945, or maybe the summer of 1946. … It started listing, then it gradually went over and slid down out of sight,” he said.
“The tide had gone out. It could have been water in the bilge that caused it to turn over.”
Another resident told the paper the ship was a “seagoing tug that had been given or sold to Brazil for the Brazilian Navy” years before. “I’d say it sunk in the early ’50s. It was just waiting there for Brazil to come and take it,” he said.
Investigators searched records in Washington, D.C., and New Orleans, and divers — amid murky water and many years’ muck — searched the ship inside and out. But no one was able to find the ship’s true identity.
After taking a break from cleanup work to prepare for Hurricane Chantal, divers and officials succeeded in pumping the remaining oil from the ship, which they eventually determined was most likely the ATR-77, a 166-foot ocean tug.
They based their determination on the ship’s features — rudder size, stern type, number of capstans — none of which matched those of other vessels offered as possibilities.
“That’s the tentative identification,” Ryan said in early September. “In other words, until someone else comes along and proves to us that it’s not that ship, we’re calling it ATR-77.”
Navy records say the U.S. Maritime Administration sold ATR-77 to Fordham Trading Co. and sent it to 1717 Broadway in New York.
“That’s where the paperwork says it went,” Ryan told the paper. “The reality is, the ship never left the Calcasieu River.”
