Recovery of the USS Monitor's Turret-- Part 1

I wrote about the GE Monitor top refrigerator in the last post (so-named because of its resemblance to the turret of the USS Monitor) and the death of  Phillip Carson Lee, who participated in the raising of the real turret in the post before that.

From Wikipedia  "Recovery."

The 2002 dive season was dedicated to the difficult task of trying to raise the 120 long-ton turret of the USS Monitor since the recovery of the whole ship was impossible because of deterioration.    This was the part Phillip Carson Lee participated in.  

Around 160 divers were assembled to remove  parts of the hull, including the armor belt, that lay on top of the turret.  (The turret had fallen off upside down as the ship sank and the hull had landed on top of it.)  They used chisels, exothermic cutting torches and 20,000 psi hydroblasters.  They removed as much  of the debris from inside the turret as possible to reduce the weight to be lifted.

This debris was mostly in the form of concreted coal as one of the ship's coal bunkers had ruptured and dumped much of its contents into the turret.

--Old B-Runner