A mooring quay in Pearl Harbor bears the name of the ship that was anchored there on Dec. 7, 1941. A National Park Service preservation project has repaired the quay and removed the name. (National Park Service)

The National Park Service is engaged in a multiyear preservation project on six battle-scarred mooring quays in Pearl Harbor to repair decay and return them to their 1941 appearance.

The mammoth concrete quays just off Ford Island were a centerpiece of Battleship Row on the morning of Dec. 7, 1941, as Japanese torpedo bombers laid waste to the Pacific Fleet in a daring surprise attack.

Anchored to these three pairs of quays were the USS Arizona, USS Vestal, USS Nevada, USS Tennessee and USS West Virginia.

Few original structures or artifacts remain in the harbor from that day, aside from the quays and glimpses of the sunken hull of the USS Arizona. The Park Service has dubbed them “silent sentinels” of the calamitous attack.

“The biggest portion of the landscape from that moment and from that morning in 1941 that you can still see is the mooring quays,” Sara Stratte, the National Park Service’s project leader for the multiyear effort, said in video posted on the service’s website.

“A lot of the landscape has changed, the harbor has changed, Oahu has changed, but these are really probably the most telling vestiges of that moment in history,” she said.

The project, conducted by the service’s Historic Preservation Training Center, completed preservation work in 2023 on the first quay, designated F-6-N at the time of the attack.

Wooden forms were used to lay the concrete for mooring quays in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, as shown in this undated photo taken in the 1930s. (National Park Service)

Workers with the National Park Service’s Historic Preservation Training Center stand on a floating dock beside a mooring quay in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, in this screenshot of an NPS video taken in 2023. (National Park Service)

The Tennessee and West Virginia were moored at F-6-N that day.

West Virginia was hit by almost a dozen torpedoes that tore open its hull, and it sank to the harbor floor on a relatively even keel.

More than 100 crew members died, including the ship’s captain.

The Tennessee was hit by a pair of bombs that destroyed two of its 14-inch gun turrets.

Flaming debris from an explosion on the nearby USS Arizona set parts of the Tennessee on fire. Five crew members died in the attack.

As crews abandoned the blazing, sinking ships on Battleship Row, the quays served as staging areas from which men either climbed aboard small rescue boats or dived into the harbor to swim to safety.

The ongoing work on the aging quays is intended to both extend their lifespan and preserve the features of original construction and attack scars, Larry Waldrop, a section manager at the Historic Preservation Training Center in Vancouver, Wash., said by phone Monday.

“As the concrete gets older, it loses its alkalinity,” he said. “Metal starts to rust, and that rusting action starts to basically blow chunks of concrete. It’s called oxide jacking. It forces concrete off, and you get these large spalls.”

The Park Service “wants to preserve the history of Dec. 7 and the salvage operations immediately to follow the attack,” he said.

The quays, built in the 1930s, were constructed by driving precast piles into the harbor floor, Stratte said in the video.

The massive concrete platforms atop the piles were formed by using “some pretty impressive, extensive” lumber forms that were filled with cement, she said.

Among the features the project is trying to preserve are the marks that were left in concrete as it set while resting against wood grain.

“We’re matching surface finish, replicating board form marks, trying to make improvements as invisible as possible,” she said.

Restoring the quays to their 1941 appearance also includes removing the names of ships from the concrete sides and replacing them with the nomenclature they carried in 1941, such as F-6-N.

The project team hunted down historic photographs to get an accurate location of where that original identifier was painted on each quay, he said.

“We blew up the photographs, measured and then stenciled that on [a quay] to see how it looked,” he said. “It looked comparable to the photographs, and we painted it.”

Lines from the USS Tennessee are attached to mooring quay F-6-N in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, in this photo taken on Dec. 7, 1941. (National Park Service)

Not everyone is pleased that the ship names are being removed, even in the name of historical accuracy.

Earlier this month on the Pearl Harbor National Memorial’s Facebook page, one commenter wrote, “Changing names to meaningless numbers will not enhance the majesty or authenticity of a visit to the Memorial.”

The Park Service, however, intends to erect non-permanent banners carrying the names of ships that were tied off on each quay the morning of the attack.

The banners will “allow visitors to connect with the name and location of the ship that was there but not hinder our mission to preserve and protect the historic features that we maintain on site,” David Kilton, a spokesman for the memorial, said in a Feb. 5 email.

Work is expected to begin later this year on the quay designated F-7-S, which was home to the Arizona and Vestal on Dec. 7, 1941.