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William O. Gray continued January 2011 www.sname.org/sname/mt (founders and leaders) and he got a seat on the ship. Once the ship got near the end of the ice, Smith would le his reports, and two or three days a week, we would be on the front page of e New York Times . People just loved it. Houston, under Stan Haas, had set it up?and this was 1969, the summer of the moon walk?to be mis- sion control? for the Manhattan voyages. ats what they called it. I had to y up to the Arctic, Montreal rst and then from Montreal up to Resolute. Its on the north side of the Northwest Passage, over toward the eastern end of it. From there, I was own in a twin Otter airplane that was used in the Arctic. I was own out to a beach near the western end of the Arctic where Manhattan had tried to go through the McClure Strait. She couldnt do it. She was just coming out of that when I got there. I stayed with her for about four weeks on the rst trip. We went through Prince of Wales Sound, and we got over to Point Barrow, which was good. en we went back in. We were doing ice testing in the mid to western part of the Northwest Passage and it was obvious there was a lot of rotten ice because it was the easiest time of year. We had already thought this was going to happen, that we would get optimistic results in 1969. ere was plenty of old ice and we did a lot of icebreaking during that early testing in 1969; it was very useful and we learned how to do the ice testing. The escort ship with us, John A. Macdonald , was a Canadian ice breaker, and she helped break us out of the ice, which had to hap- pen. at happened fairly frequently when Manhattan would get stuck. But there were two U.S. icebreakers with us, pre-World War Two era vessels, which broke down and had to limp out of the Arctic. When that happened, the commodore of the Coast Guard happened to be with us and he said, Boy, just get me home.? He got home to Washington and got a budget from Congress for two brand-new icebreakers. Smith was writing in e New York Times that the U.S. icebreakers were a liability to us, but the Canadians were helping us. KELLY: Bill, is there anything on the project, looking back now, that youd do di erently? GRAY: I dont really think so. I should men- tion there was something for which I got criticized very strongly by the Houston peo- ple. When we were doing the conversion, I decided we would put the double skin inside the engine room and the steering gear room because I thought that, if we had any dam- age there, we would have a terrible time. In the cargo section, where we were only carrying water anyway, it wouldnt make any di erence. I heard all kinds of things from Houston that it was a terrible waste of money. But we found out when we nished the first voyage that a big hole had been punched in the stern of the ship near the steering gear at. And that steering gear at was a deck that was connected, without any water-tight boundary, directly to the boiler room and the engine room. If I hadnt put that double skin inside that plate, we would have ooded the whole machinery space and it would have been a disaster. I think that everybody that was involved in the program, Doug, felt that we got this pretty right. When we got nished with it, we had designed, with Newport News Shipyard and with Wartsila, what we thought the tankers would be that we would use [going forward]. Compared to using pipelines, I think we had a better solution. Icebreaking tankers now operate in con- ditions that are just as sti as anything out there. e Russians and the Finns have com- bined on these things, and Conoco is heavily involved with it?icebreaking tankers have been working in the Arctic for 10 or 15 years now. I consider the program a success. KELLY: Where is Manhattan now? GRAY: We paid 8 or 10 million dollars to the owner to not convert it back to standard con- guration. We eventually took the ice belt o because it was bad with piers?it tended to drive the pier under water. Manhattan was in Taiwan or Korea, then in the 1980s, it was in drydock and there was a typhoon or something and she was driven ashore and her bottom was all beat up. Grounded on a reef, and by that time she was 20-odd years old and she was scrapped. Manhattan testing ice in on her way back through Viscount Sound in the Northwest Passage.