HONOLULU — With the American flag billowing in the wind above and “The Star-Spangled Banner ” playing on the loudspeakers from Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam, the first boatload of tourists and residents in nearly 16 months stepped onto the USS Arizona Memorial on Sunday morning.
The 145 visitors on the Navy boat disembarked to spend a few solemn minutes within the white walls of the shrine at the same time, 8:10 a.m., that the Arizona was hit on Dec. 7, 1941, also a Sunday, by an armor-piercing bomb that sank the ship and killed 1,177 men. The battleship suffered the greatest loss of life of all the ships and planes attacked that day. Included among the dead were a father and son named Free and 23 sets of brothers.
“It was just terribly moving to be over there today, ” said Minneapolis resident Patty Drake, 63, who was in Hawaii celebrating her 27th anniversary with her husband, Bob. “All the death and the pain.”
She saw the oil seeping from the sunken ship that she recalled seeing the last time she visited the memorial while living in Hawaii more than 50 years ago.
“It was powerful, ” Bob Drake said.
The oil the Drakes witnessed leaks from the million gallons of bunker fuel oil that was aboard the ship when it sank, and is known as the “black tears of the Arizona.”
Visitors can now walk on the memorial and see the oil and the names of the dead etched into the marble wall as they reflect on the sacrifice of those who died in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, which brought the U.S. into World War II.
While the memorial was closed, the National Park Service, which overseas the site, offered a narrated harbor boat tour along Battleship Row and still showed a 25-minute documentary.
The memorial was closed in May 2018 after park staff found major damage to the anchoring system for the boat dock at the memorial. The anchoring system damag — possibly caused by king tides in 2017 that raised the concrete blocks out of the ground — allowed too much movement of the dock and created a risk of the bridge to the memorial collapsing.
Originally, the memorial, one of the state’s top visitor attractions with about 4, 300 daily visitors, was set to reopen in October. Frustration grew as the timeline was repeatedly pushed back — first to December, then March and finally this October. After the March deadline was missed, Hawaii’s congressional delegation wrote a letter to the acting director of the National Parks Service expressing the public’s disappointment and requesting monthly updates on the repair project.
Jay Blount, Pearl Harbor National Memorial’s chief of interpretation, said initially there were plans to repair the concrete block anchoring system, but rather than risk a repeat of the problem, planners decided to go with a completely new anchoring system, which was one cause of the early delays.
The new anchoring system uses giant screws, some longer than 100 feet, that have been driven into the seafloor. Twelve anchors were installed and then attached to the dock using synthetic rope as part of the $2.1 million repair.
In their letter to the Parks Service, lawmakers said the Pearl Harbor National Memorial, which is home to the Arizona Memorial, had nearly 1.8 million visitors in 2018.
Blount said it was unknown how large an impact the closure of the memorial had on park visitor arrivals, but recent park statistics show an annual visitor decline of about 8%.
Steve Mietz, acting supervisor of the Pearl Harbor National Memorial, said reopening the Arizona Memorial was the top priority of the National Parks Service.
“Reconnecting the American public to the USS Arizona Memorial is very meaningful to me, ” Mietz said. “People need to be there at that shrine to pay their respects to those fallen heroes. It’s such a moving sight.”
Blount said the memorial, which opened on Memorial Day 1962, stands as the symbol of American sacrifice in the Pacific theater during WWII.
For 13-year-old history buff Camden Koukol of Dayton, Ohio, visiting the sunken battleship was a key reason for coming to Hawaii, said his mother, Dominique Koukol.
Back in Ohio, Dominique Koukol had heard the Arizona might be reopening soon, and since her husband was going to be in Hawaii for business, the couple decided this would be a chance for them to affordably travel to the islands as a family, with the hope that the battleship would reopen in time for their son to visit.
The couple pulled Camden out of school so he could make the five-day trip.
“This was the reason we came from Ohio, ” Dominique said. “We threw the dice. We were just hoping.”
For some, the experience was an emotional one.
Jeff Coltri, 31, an Ohio native and marine who left the corps in 2010, had a difficult time putting in words what he felt as he walked through the memorial as part of the first tour on Sunday morning.
He and his friends, husband and wife, Dane and Kayla Summerfelt, of Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, stood over the ship’s underwater remains shortly after 8 a.m., the time of day it went down 78 years ago.
“I’ve never been to a war grave of such magnitude before,” Coltri said. “Words aren’t sufficient, basically.”
“It’s very emotional,” Dane Summerfelt, an active duty marine, added. “It’s one of those experiences when you just walk in, especially when you walk in with the names on the walls … It’s heavy.”
But it was an experience worth the effort. When the trio got word that the memorial would reopen, they knew they would be one of the first ones in line.
“I texted them and said, ‘Guys, were going on Sunday,” Kayla Summerfelt said.
West Hawaii Today contributed to this report.