During a ceremony that attracted media from around the state, a cofferdam that allowed work to be done on the USS North Carolina was flooded and the battleship floated once again.
Next up are meetings with contractors to discuss $1 million in repairs, funded by Hurricane Florence recovery funds, to the ship's main mast where the steel is deteriorating.
"Now that the ship itself has been stabilized," Bragg said, "the big wolf on our doorstep is climate change."
At this point, according to Bragg, the Battleship site, which includes a park, parking lot and a road to the facility, sees some kind of flooding three out of five days a year, increasingly caused by high tides on the Cape Fear River. This not only causes damage to he infrastructure used to operate the Battleship and its surrounding site, but also forces closures and delayed openings.
Some well-known attractions in North Carolina, most famously like the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse, have been physically moved in order to deal with threats from encroaching water.
But, Bragg says the Battleship isn't going anywhere.
"The Battleship will never be moved. People don't realize how big it is," said Terry Bragg, and getting it under the Cape Fear Memorial Bridge, which was built in 1967, after the Battleship was already in place (1961), would be nearly impossible.
"We have a suitable site, even though the Cape Fear River is not the Cape Fear River of 60 years ago."
--GreGen
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