the USS Olympia, to replace her leaking deck.

The oldest steel warship, USS Olympia, is in dire need of funding to undergo some repairs involving her deck. In 1922, when she left the US Navy service and was decommissioned for service as a museum ship, the Navy poured concrete over the deck in order to protect the wooden deck from weathering. Unfortunately, over the years water has made it's way to the wooden planks below and has rotted them away all the same, causing extensive leaks throughout the ship when it rains, and unfortunately any actions the museum crew can enact given current resources is simply damage mitigation rather than repair.

The cost to strip the concrete and replace the deck are high. Not only would all the wood on the decks need to be replaced due to its age and condition, but the concrete removal is not going to be a simple process. As was common at the time, the concrete likely used asbestos threads as an aggregate material, so in the process of removing it, the museum is probably looking at, on a rough estimate, about 1000 square feet of asbestos remediation and disposal work as well. Other work that would be necessary include mapping where the wiring and conduit, the mess table braces, and the deck prisms that would have brought light into the lower decks originally are so that when the top deck is done being replaced, the museum knows where everything is supposed to go.

With the funding to repair and replace the top deck of the ship, she can look as good as she originally did over 100 years ago, allow more of her to be opened up for viewing to the public and be safer for visitors and make her more available to host special events, and with the hurdle of the initial cost of the deck, future maintenance costs will be reduced. Without these much needed repairs, she stands a great risk of deteriorating from the inside out, making future repairs much harder to accomplish and maybe even forcing this historical monument of engineering to be closed for good.