USS Kentucky (BB-66) - Fate

Fate

Kentucky was never completed, instead serving as a supply cache of sorts while in the mothball fleet at the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard from about 1950 to 1958. Hurricane Hazel hit the area on 15 October 1954; the storm caused Kentucky to break free from her moorings and run aground in the James River. In 1956, Kentucky's bow was removed and used in the repair of Wisconsin, which had been damaged in a collision with Eaton on 6 May 1956. Congressman William Huston Natcher attempted to block the sale of the ship by objecting to the bill in August 1957. Nevertheless, Kentucky was struck from the Naval Vessel Register on 9 June 1958 and her incomplete hulk was sold for scrapping to Boston Metals Company of Baltimore, Maryland, on 31 October. Boston Metals Company paid $1,176,666 for the vessel, and towed her to their shipyard in Baltimore in February 1959.

When the first two of the Sacramento-class fast combat support ships, Sacramento and Camden, were laid down in 1961 and 1964, the Navy used Kentucky's four turbine sets to power the ships. This would later prove to be a beneficial decision: when the Navy switched from 600 psi (4.1 MPa) boilers to 1,200 psi (8.3 MPa) boilers, sailors who had served aboard Sacramento and Camden were posted to operate the older boilers aboard New Jersey during her combat tour in the Vietnam War and aboard all four of the Iowas when they were recalled and modernized in the 1980s as part of the 600-ship Navy plan. A pair of 150-pound (68 kg) mahogany doors were donated by the state of Kentucky while the ship was still under construction; they were used in an officer's club in New York City before eventually being returned to the Kentucky Historical Society in early January 1994.