![]() In 1944, a man named Wilber Bowers, a graduate of Arizona University, found one of the ship’s bells wasting away in a shipyard, waiting to be melted down. Not every part of the Arizona lies at the bottom of the harbor. There, the names of the 1,177 men who died on the Arizona are inscribed on a white marble wall. It draws in about 1.8 million visitors a year, according to Blount. The memorial - a white arched concrete structure for onlookers to pay their respects - was unveiled in 1962 and is located above the wreckage. Oklahoma, creating a “V-shaped hole, four feet wide by twelve feet long.” That earlier blow took a few weeks to repair, according to the university, but the damage in 1941 was not possible to recover from. Less than two months before the attack, during a training exercise, the ship was struck on the port side by the U.S.S. The damage at Pearl Harbor was not the first hit that the Arizona had taken. Blount says that temperatures reached as high as 8000☏ - more than three times as hot as lava spurting out of Hawaii’s Kīlauea volcano, which erupted last year.īefore its tragic fate in the Pearl Harbor bombings, the Arizona had been part of the “British Grand Fleet at the end of World War I, president Hoover on a cruise of the Caribbean in 1931 and aid after the 1933 Long Beach earthquake,” according to the University of Arizona Libraries Special Collections. The ship burned for two and a half days after the initial attack. It was her own ammunition - hundreds of thousands of pounds of ammunition, exploding all at the same time,” Jay Blount, spokesman for the Pearl Harbor National Memorial tells TIME. “It wasn’t the bomb itself that created the giant explosion. The forward deck of the Arizona was struck by a 1,760-pound bomb that triggered a massive explosion, lifted the 33,000-ton vessel out of the water and killed 1,177 sailors and Marines instantly.
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