The SS United States, the fastest ocean liner ever to cross the Atlantic, has completed her final voyage — downwards. The retired 990-foot ship was deliberately sunk off the Florida coast on Wednesday, 11 November, settling upright on the seabed about 180 feet beneath the surface of the Gulf of Mexico.
The controlled sinking, carried out by marine engineering firm Coleen Marine, took around nine hours. Crews flooded the vessel gradually through openings prepared during more than 18 months of environmental remediation, without using explosives. The operation had been scheduled for Thursday but was brought forward by a day because of worsening weather.
The ship now rests about 22 nautical miles south-west of Destin-Fort Walton Beach, Florida. Her upper decks sit roughly 55 to 60 feet below the surface, within reach of recreational divers, while the deeper sections will require technical diving experience. On Friday, Okaloosa County confirmed the liner was resting upright, lifted the safety zone around the site and opened it to diving.
At almost 1,000 feet from bow to stern, the SS United States is longer than the Titanic and now surpasses the former aircraft carrier USS Oriskany, sunk off Pensacola in 2006, as the world’s largest deliberately deployed artificial reef. Her hundreds of rooms, corridors and elevator shafts are expected to become habitat for fish and other marine life, and researchers from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Dauphin Island Sea Lab and Louisiana State University will monitor how organisms colonise the wreck.
The ship’s story spans more than seven decades. She took her maiden voyage in 1952 and shattered the transatlantic speed record, crossing in three days and ten hours to win the Blue Riband — a record she still holds. Designed so she could be converted into a troop transport carrying 14,000 soldiers if war came, she carried passengers including Harry Truman, Walt Disney, Marilyn Monroe and a young Bill Clinton before retiring in 1969. She then spent decades docked in Philadelphia.
The SS United States Conservancy, which bought the vessel in 2011, had hoped to turn her into a hotel or museum, but legal and financial problems ended that plan and the ship was sold to Okaloosa County in 2024. Susan Gibbs, who chairs the conservancy’s board and whose grandfather William Francis Gibbs designed the ship, described the sinking as “a combination of grief, that I will be saying goodbye to her in her current form, but, gratitude and hope in terms of what she will continue to give to the world.”
The conservancy is now planning a land-based museum in Florida to preserve the liner’s legacy.
Sources: NPR and The Scuba News.
