Teresa Diaz |
Madrid (EFE).- What happens to Navy ships when their useful life ends? Most end up in scrapping, some, the fewest, become museums, and others can be used as targets in exercises by the Armed Forces to end their days sunken at the bottom of the sea as a refuge for corals and fish.
The latter has been the fate of the Martín Posadillo, sunk in waters southwest of El Hierro with missiles and bombs. This decommissioned 2,300-ton, 75-meter-long transport ship was the target in the Sinkex-23 exercise on June 29, which King Felipe VI witnessed.
Sinkex exercises, common in all the navies around us, are intended to test weapon systems with live fire in which the sinking of ships or other afloat targets is pursued.
The vessels undergo a decontamination process so that the sunken remains do not have environmental effects, sources from the Navy assure EFE.
1991: destroyer Churruca, first ship sunk with live fire
On December 12, 1991, the destroyer Churruca, built in 1941, served as a target for the army to test its most modern weapons against surface ships for the first time: Harpoon surface-to-surface missiles, anti-aircraft missiles, and laser bombs dropped by aircraft. F-18.
It was the first time that the Spanish Navy had sunk an obsolete ship with live fire instead of scrapping it in the shipyards.
The ship, which participated in World War II and was ceded by the United States to Spain in the 1960s, had been decommissioned two years before it sank.
It had been prepared to withstand the fire afloat and had been fitted with a buoy, in addition to removing fuel and electricity and closing all compartments and doors.
The bombardment, which was carried out some 200 miles to the east of the island of La Palma, was part of the Sinkes-91 air-naval maneuvers, in which naval units, planes and some 2,000 men participated.
Churruca was followed a year later by the corvette Princesa, decommissioned in 1991 and sunk on September 17, 1992, one hundred miles northwest of Ferrol in the Sinkex-92 exercise as the target ship.
Planes and helicopters participated in the sinking and a wide range of missiles, rockets and bombs of a wide variety of types were launched. The firing of two Maverck missiles was decisive for the destruction of the target.
The A-61 cistern (previously called Contramaestre Castelló), the Cíclope ship, the Cartagena, the Ferrol or the frigates Cataluña and Andalucía also ended up at the bottom of the sea as artificial reefs in successive Sinkex.
Scrapped or end up as a museum
Decommissioned ships can also be subjected to a disposal process, through a public tender, and end up in the hands of a country or a company to turn the ship into scrap.
Although less common, another of the destinations is to serve as ornamentation through an agreement or convention of the Navy with the corresponding requesting body.
An example of this is the S-61 Delfín submarine, of the “Daphne” class, converted into a Floating Museum, based in the port of Torrevieja (Alicante).
On February 4, 2004, the then Minister of Defense, Federico Trillo, and the mayor of Torrevieja, Pedro Angel Hernández Mateo, signed the transfer agreement for this submarine, 57.8 meters long and 6.8 meters wide, which he served in the Navy from 1974 to 2003.
It was the first agreement of these characteristics signed in Spain, which was intended, according to Trillo, to advance the “culture of defense.”
The initiative to convert the S-62 Tonina submarine into a museum-ship that can be visited in Cartagena has recently started. The project was presented last March, with a budget of more than three million euros and based on the concept of collaboration. public-private.
It is a diesel-electric submersible of the Delfín class, which was used by the Spanish Navy between 1973 and 2005, which will be exhibited dry in the Plaza de la Marina Española (old CIM square), in the vicinity of the Naval Museum and will be placed parallel to the Isaac Peral submarine.
A Defense monitoring commission with the Suances City Council and the Trozo Cultural veterans’ association is studying the transfer of the Infanta Elena patrol car to the Cantabrian city council.
This ship, decommissioned from active service in June 2021, will be located in the Requejada estuary and will be set up as a museum.
The City Council of Benidorm (Alicante) has also requested the transfer of a submarine to put it on land as a museum. The technical feasibility of the project is under study.