At the end of the road – deactivation / decommissioning

[Sully]

Here are a couple of photos of the old girl at the end of her service life, The first one is the ship in drydock at the Newport News shipyard. The photo date is October 17, 1994 which would make this shortly after she was deactivated in July of the same year. Taking a close look at the image, you can see a tent structure placed over the rear deck which appears to be covering the #2 engineering space. That is probably when they were removing the aft nuclear reactor.

The second photo is dated March 2, 2011 and what was left of her decommissioned hull was moored at Puget Sound in Bremerton, WA.

I was really surprised they didn’t make her a floating museum as she was the very first nuclear powered surface ship. Would have been nice to be able to take my grandkids to see her.

[Gomez]

I was surprised to see her decommissioned so early as I really felt she had a lot more to give and yes, it really is disappointing that she wasn’t kept around afterwards as a key and historical piece of our naval nuclear timeline. Especially when I look back and see some of the ships they chose instead to keep around for the public to be able to tour.

The city of Long Beach would surely have welcomed the opportunity…

[Sully]

For sure! The USS Long Beach would have been a great tourist attraction for the city and could have been moored close to the Queen Mary floating exhibit.