A No-Prize for you if you can guess what the massive object is behind the Arizona Memorial in Pearl Harbor. Hint: it’s currently off the coast of Alaska and is one reason why it might actually be important to build a bridge to a sparsely-populated island. No, not the Bridge to Nowhere, the other one. Give up? Click here to find out.
h/t for this and the following post to Instapundit.
It’s a radar station destined for a location near Adak, Alaska.
You know, that thing is something of an amusement for me. Twice in my Naval career, on two different ships, I crossed paths with that thing… The first time, my frigate and I were taking shelter in Ingleside, TX, hiding from Katrina, and this monstrous beast floated by in the channel – the same channel that was barely wide enough for us, much less it! Apparently it was built down that way. Then, on the way back from my last deployment, we stopped off in Pearl, I was on watch back in CIC, and I got a call to the bridge that sounded approximately like “Whatthehellisthatthing?!” The common theory was that it was Karl Stromberg’s Atlantis, but not so much. The story we were told was that the radar installation was supposed to end up in Alaska (the same story I heard in Ingleside), but the crew to got Hawaii and decided they liked the weather there better – from what I understand, it spent a good few months there, being towed out into the Pacific during the week, and back into Pearl on the weekends.
Good to hear it finally made it where it was going, though. Seemed like one hell of a massive toy.
Darn, Yatalli beat me to it… the world’s largest target for anti-radiation missile target practice. (I sorta-kinda crossed paths with it through work, and I think the thing is darn cool, but can’t quite get over the big, immobile, floating target aspect.)
I’m sure there was a misprint somewhere about the population of Adak island. Maybe they ment civilians in their 100 population count. When I was up there in a SeaBee detatchment- that alone was what our company was..not to mention the other- entire NAS and Marine personnel assigned there.