Mobile, Alabama has a World War II submarine you can visit. So does San Francisco. Both of those make sense, since submarines tend to like salt water. Muskogee, Oklahoma has one too, the USS Batfish, and she’s been sitting on the bank of the Arkansas River since the early 1970s.<\/p>\n
Now she has to leave. A flood moved her in 2019, a flood-control project is about to squeeze the spot she’s on, and on Sept. 16 the Muskogee War Memorial Authority said it’s got $7 million and it’s ready to ask contractors what the job will really cost.<\/p>\n
Chairman James Gulley said after that meeting that the authority needs bids to get a price and “find out if we need more money,” the Muskogee Phoenix reports<\/a>.<\/p>\n I’ve got a feeling it will, and we’ll get to why.<\/p>\n Very slowly. The Batfish is a Balao-class boat, 311 feet long, 29 feet across at her widest and 56 feet from the bottom of her keel to the top of her tallest radio tower. She’s famous for sinking three Japanese submarines in about three days in February 1945, and Oklahoma’s submarine veterans adopted her after the Navy was done with her.<\/p>\n She weighs about 3.2 million pounds. I say “about” because the feasibility study in the authority’s 2023 meeting documents<\/a> also lists 3.25 million, and it points out that all the lead ballast bars have been pulled out of her tanks at some point. Its authors don’t know how much weight that took off, or whether anyone included the bars in the first place. The contractor has to verify those numbers, which sounds like a pretty fun first week on the job.<\/p>\n Getting her up the river from New Orleans came down to draft. Draft is just how deep a boat’s hull sits below the waterline. The Batfish’s is listed at 16 feet, and the shallowest stretch of the navigation channel she needed runs 12 feet.<\/p>\n So crews floated barges alongside her and hoisted her up until she sat high enough to fit. The 2023 study says three barges did it. The Batfish’s own history site<\/a> says four were planned, six were needed, and a speeding tanker’s wake sank one in New Orleans before the whole flotilla was even tied together. I can’t tell you which count is right, though I’d lean toward the version with the tanker in it.<\/p>\n At Little Rock she couldn’t clear a bridge until the Army Corps of Engineers dropped the river 3 feet, and she finally reached a temporary berth in Muskogee in May 1972.<\/p>\n Then a flood hit in March 1973, and she was tugging at her cables so hard that Oklahoma’s tourism commission tried to hand her back. The Navy, apparently, wasn’t accepting returns. A month later, four bulldozers and a tugboat pulled her into a freshly dug slip, and she’s been Muskogee’s problem ever since.<\/p>\n In May 2019, the Arkansas climbed to 520 feet. That’s height above sea level, not depth. The Batfish was resting at about 500 feet, so she suddenly had around 20 feet of water to sit in, and with all that lead gone, the study figures she only needs about 15 to float.<\/p>\n So she floated. She pulled up her moorings, drifted somewhere between 50 and 75 feet depending on which page of the study you’re reading, and settled on a slope when the water went down. (The study says that was the first time she’d lifted since the 1970s, while The Drive reported back in 2019 that she’d also briefly floated in 1986.) Museum volunteers then tied a 3.2-million-pound submarine to pine trees, which I suspect wasn’t in anyone’s manual.<\/p>\n That new spot turned out to be a bad one. In late January 2021, a scour hole turned up under nearly a third of her forward section, leaving the bow with under 18 inches of dirt beneath it. A scour hole is basically a void left where moving water or sinking sand has carried the ground away, and filling this one cost about $210,000.<\/p>\n The boat’s been closed to the public since the flood, too, and that’s been a big hit for a small museum. Gulley told News On 6 in March 2025 that the site went from about 50,000 visitors a year to about 500.<\/p>\n That’s how she got there, after all. But the water’s moved. The navigation channel’s been realigned since the 1970s, the Arkansas has wandered to about 1,000 feet from her bow, and the old stretch of river that once connected her to the channel has pretty much filled up with silt.<\/p>\n Floating her out today would take a trench 16 feet deep and more than 2,000 feet long, through ground flagged as archaeologically sensitive, with a Corps permit on top. The study’s authors ruled that out.<\/p>\n She can’t stay put either. The Corps committed to building a new levee on the park’s land after the 2019 flood. New port security rules would’ve put museum visitors behind a gate. Her lease on the land has run out, too, according to Gulley. The latest reporting just says a flood project at the port is going to cut into her space, which is a pretty gentle way of putting it.<\/p>\n The destination is Three Forks Harbor. Her first trip to Muskogee ran 1,350 miles and this one’s about 2 by Gulley’s count, but it’s arguably the harder job, because she’s now sitting on land.<\/p>\n Gulley’s short version, as he put it to News On 6: “raise it up, put it on a trailer, float it down the Arkansas River.” The long version gets a little hairy. The heavy-haul companies in the study favored a multi-axle trailer with custom cradles, and the study figures on at least 110,000 pounds per axle. A fully loaded 18-wheeler normally tops out at 80,000 pounds on an interstate, and that’s the whole truck.<\/p>\n That trailer also has to pass under power lines the utility would need to raise and shut off, and one of those lines feeds Muskogee’s water plant, which can only go 4 to 6 hours without a backup generator. Railroad crossings cost extra. Then she needs a ramp into the water, flotation to get her down to a 12-foot draft again, and a second ramp on the other side.<\/p>\n Don’t take any of that as the final plan, though. The study was comparing options, and the bidders’ methods won’t be public until the job’s been bid. If you’ve followed the Silversides’ summer in a Wisconsin dry dock<\/a> or the USS Kidd, which was waiting last month for the Mississippi to hit 32 feet so she could float back into her Baton Rouge cradle<\/a>, you know these old boats rarely move on anyone’s schedule. At least those two started out next to the water.<\/p>\nSo how does a submarine end up in Oklahoma?<\/h2>\n
The flood moved her about 75 feet<\/h2>\n
So why not just dig another ditch and float her out?<\/h2>\n
$7 million probably won’t cover it<\/h2>\n