Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 230, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 1 October 1918 — Salvage Lessens U-Boat Toll. [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

Salvage Lessens U-Boat Toll.

Raisina of Manu Sunken Ships bu Enaland Helps to Defeat the German Submarine Campaian

UILDIJs’G new ships to replace | losses is not the only way.to defeat ■ the German submarine campaign. I Saving ships that have been dam- ■<„; ■ aged, lifting those, even, that have been sunk, add restoring them to seagoing condition, are among the methods which have gradually been gjasS improved in England as the strln- , 7 gency of the shipping shortage became greater each month. The reason why the British authorities were not fully equipped to raise every ship that was sunk from the very start of the war is purely commercial. Salving ships costs money. Building new ones costs money. So long as the cost of salving was equal er even slightly in excess of the cost of building, so long it was not worth the while of owners to order salvage operations—just so long were invention and progress in the art of salvage delayed. When the salving of ships became urgent in the course of 1916 Inventors of new appliances and new methods, salvage experts of many years standing, set their brains to work,* and the result is that today ships can be raised and repaired. from positions that two years ago would have been abandoned as hopeless. As showing how need stimulates invention, I may instance a discovery in chemistry which has proved to be of the utmost value in salvage work, writes H. C. Ferraby in Country Life. It is obvious that when a,ship, laden with grain, beef, or other perishable stuffs, gets water-logged with seawater, something very unpleasant is going to happen to her cargo. In point of fact, it turns into ' miniature poison-gas factory. Grain produces sulphuretted hydrogen, and the salvage men who stumble on a pocket of that in a beached ship would be seized with violent siokness, wchild be partially blinded for some time, and would turn a dull leaden color in the face. Experiment brought an antidote to this trouble, and now the cargo of a ship that is to be salved can be sprayed with a special solution as soon as there is any reason to suspect poison gas. This spraying removes all danger. Salvage work before the war was purely a private enterprise. The admiralty had no salvage branch, and when warships went ashore or were beached after collision the private firms, like the Liverpool Salvage association, were called in. War jltered that, like many other things in the maritime world, and today the whole of the salvage work around the United Kingdom is carried out by an admiralty department. But since the men manning that depart* ment are, without exception, the former heads of the salvage business, the difference is mainly in titles and not in methods. Warship salving Is confidential, and the work done by the department in this* direction cannot be described. Its share in keeping the allies supplied with merchant ships, however, is not secret, and the record of work done since October, 1915, is an excellent one. Down to the end of 1917 the admiralty salvage section, under the guidance of Capt. F. W. Young, had rescued 260 wrecked, mined or torpedoed ships and sent them In for repairs. All that time their experience was growing. New material was being built for the work, new ideas were being put into practical shape, and the result is that the year 1918 has so far seen a remarkable Increase in the number of ships saved. The figures for the early part of this year are: January, 14; February, 41;March, 37; April, 36; May, 19; giving a total of 147. Thus in 32 months 407 ships have been restored to the world’s mercantile tonnage. The Germans count all these and some of them twice over, in their calculations of the tonnage loss Inflicted on the allies by the submarine campaign. Every salvage man will tell you that the only thing certain about it is that you never know what is going to happen. A ship may be ashore in the simplest position, with just one big hole in her to be patched up, and it looks like a job that will take a few days. In the end you are, perhaps, six months hanging around with that one ship before you can get her to float. Weather, tides and the condition of the cargo all play a leading part in the work. The only thing the salvage man has got to do all the time is to be patient. That, perhaps, is why they all look so tired. Waiting is a weary business. The weather is the worst enemy of salvage meu. It is very nice on a fine summer’s day to stand on the cliffs and look down at the busy . humming .workshops that we call salvage steamers clustered round a wreck that shines red with rust tn the sunlight. The motors of the pumps drone incessantly, and the great 12-inch pipes send out cascades, of gray water whose stale stfcnt travels far before it is lost. The metalhelmeted divers clamber up and down, sitting for a while in the sun to make report of their progress below, receiving orders for the next stage, or just resting. It is different when the southwesterly gales blow, when rollers pour in from the Atlantic and pound down like Naasmyth hammers on the decks of the wreck. The salvage boats and tugs all have to run for shelter, work has to be abandoned, and only the still, silent hulk is left to weather the storm. So long as she is firmly imbedded in the sand or shingle, however, and there is plently of water inside her as well as outside, it takes a good many months of storms to knock a ship to pieces. It is often necessary, in order to save a wreck from the effects of weather, to flood compartments in her that had remained watertight. The problem of dealing with the water in wrecks and in ships that have been holed but are still afloat has been advanced very far toward solution during the war by the general adoption of a new British invention, which has been described as a miracle of modern electrical engineering. Described simply, it is an electrically driven purrip which can be entirely submerged and will still pump as efficiently as if it were above water. The submersible pump, ds it is called, does' things that* no one ever believed a pump could do. I saw one in the hold of a wreck recently, covered with a black, evil-smell-

Ing ooze, looking for all the world like a bit of wreckage itself. But it had just finished a long bout of pumping under water in that hold, which was filled with floating barrels, beams, tangled Ironwork and a sludge that was indescribable; and when it had been put over the side and had pumped a few tons of clean sea water through itself, that pump was ready to start work again anywhere. The secret of the pump is that it is not watertight—which sounds absurd. It is, perfectly true that the water can flow in and around the whole of the works of the pump while it is at work. No one has ever hitherto succeeded in making electricity work under water in this way; but the uses of the discovery are plain even to the layman. A ship fitted with these pumps, for example, ought never to sink, if she has enough of them on board, because they can be set to work in the flooded compartments and pump the water out as fast as it comes in. Damage to the engine rooms does not affect the pumps, because they do not rely for their current on the ship’s dynamos, but on their own portable outfit. Salvage experts tell one rather amusing tale of the versatility of the pumps. A fire broke out in the hold of a ship that was carrying a very valuable Inflammable cargo. Two submersible pumps were on board, and the captain slung them over the side into 4he sea, attached a good length of hose to then! and set them going to pump water at the rate of about 350 tons an hour each into the burning hold. They soon put the fire out, and the captain then lowered the pumps into the hold and made them pump out the water they had previously pumped in.

Fire at sea, collision, weather and other marine risks are all dealt with by the admiralty salvage section just as much as war risks such as mining and torpedoing; but it is, of course, the war risks that provide the bulk of the cases. The work of the section falls really into three parts. There are, first of all, the rescue tugs. These proceed to any ship that is in distress, whatever the cause, and endeavor to tow her Into port, or at least to get her Into shallow water/ Where She can ger aground or even sink and still be salvable. In the latter case the second part of the section’s work begins—the patching up, emptying and lifting. This may take anything from six weeks to six months. When she is lifted and afloat again she is towed to the nearest sheltered anchorage, and there temporary repairs are effected, she is cleaned up inside and her engineroom restored to something like order. It is the aim, as far as possible, *to enable her to proceed to a shipyard under her own steam. There are cases, of course, where the torpedo or the mine has exploded just by the engine-room and blown everything to fragments. Then the hull, patched up, has to be towed to the repairing yard; but in the majority of cases the damage is in the bows or in the stern, and the vessel can limp along by herself after first aid from the salvage Section. British salvage experts have little hope of ’ salving any of" the ships that are down in deep ° water. The physical limitations of divers alone would make it an impossibility to raise, for example, the Lusitania, and, so far, no mechanical devices that have been suggested or made hold out any hope of doing the work of the diver with any success.