An aerial view of the USS Arizona Memorial taken March 30, 2014, shows the pair of white quays that anchored the battleship on the day of the Dec. 7, 1941, surprise attack and are now being restored by the National Park Service. (Diana Quinlan/U.S. Navy)
Visitors to the USS Arizona Memorial in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, will get an extra eyeful in coming months as crews work to restore a pair of historic quays where the doomed battleship was moored on the morning of the 1941 Japanese surprise attack.
The National Park Service Historic Preservation Training Center began restoration work Monday on the second of three pairs of historic quays being rehabbed in a multiyear project.
Work is expected to be completed on the Arizona quay in 2026, with full restoration of all the quays expected by 2028, the Park Service said in a news release Friday.
The USS Arizona and the USS Vestal, a repair ship, were docked at the quays on the morning of Dec. 7, 1941, when Japanese torpedo bombers laid waste to the Pacific Fleet’s Battleship Row.
Japanese aircraft ignited ammunition stored near the Arizona’s forward turrets, setting off a massive explosion that quickly sank it, taking the lives of 1,177 crew members.
The battleship’s sunken hulk lies almost entirely submerged on the harbor floor — beside the pair of quays — and is now part of the USS Arizona Memorial. The monument draws about 2 million visitors a year.
The Park Service completed preservation work in 2024 on the first pair of quays, which had moored the USS West Virginia and USS Tennessee at the time of the attack.
The third set of quays had secured the USS Nevada on Dec. 7.
Along with the partially exposed hulls of the Arizona and the USS Utah, the quays are among the few landmarks remaining in the harbor that harken back to the day of the attack when the waters were covered with oil, fire and smoke.
As crews abandoned the blazing, sinking ships on Battleship Row, the concrete pillars served as staging areas from which men either climbed aboard small rescue boats or dived into the harbor to swim to safety.
The restoration of the aging quays is intended to both extend their lifespan and preserve the features of their original construction and the scars left from the attack.
The project removes ship names that were added to quays in the 1980s and replaces them with the Navy nomenclature they carried in 1941.
The Park Service plans to erect non-permanent banners carrying the names of ships anchored to 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 Pearl Harbor National Memorial, told Stars and Stripes in February.
Visitors to the memorial are welcome to ask Park Service staff questions about the quay project, the news release states.
