The old oceanographic ship «Almeida Carvalho» was slow to go to the bottom, because its purposeful immersion it only occurred 56 minutes later than originally scheduled. But from the first explosion to its disappearance in the Atlantic waters, about three miles off the beach at Alvor, time passed quickly: 1 minute and two seconds.
This time, the nearly 50-year-old ship is right at the bottom and firmly seated in the sand, as was observed shortly after the sinking by Navy divers.
But actually this is not the
first time the ship sinks. In 1965, when it was still under construction at the shipyards of Marietta ShipBuilding Co, California, on the East Coast of the United States, the passage of typhoon Betsy sank it.
Second told the Sul Informação Rear Admiral Nunes Teixeira, representative of the Chief of Staff of the Navy at the sinking this Sunday, "the typhoon caused another ship to lose its mooring and come crashing into this one, causing it to sink." The result is that the ship only entered the service of the US Navy, the US Navy, in January 1969, under the name "USNS Kellar".
Just three years later, in April 1972, it began its operational activity in the service of the Portuguese Navy, carrying out all the diversity of hydro-oceanographic tasks on the mainland coast and in the archipelagos of Madeira and the Azores.
With the name of «Almeida Carvalho», he carried out more than 41 thousand hours of navigation and covered more than 244 nautical miles over more than 30 years in the service of the Navy and technical-scientific research in Portugal. It holds, so far, the largest number of scientific cruises within the scope of the Portuguese Navy.
On December 4, 2002, it went into a state of disarmament, for subsequent slaughter of the Navy's ships.
The «Almeida Carvalho» was equipped with a diesel-electric propulsion plant of 1200 horses, had a garrison of 36 men (5 officers, 7 sergeants and 24 soldiers), and could also house a technical team of 10 people.
The name Almeida Carvalho evokes the frigate captain Ernesto Tavares de Almeida Carvalho, who is responsible, among other works, for the hydrographic survey of the coast of Sines and the publication of several studies on the density of sea water and the depth of the sea. oceans.
Veja here all the photos of the sinking of the hydrographic vessel “Almeida Carvalho”.
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