The SS United States finally sank in the Gulf of Mexico at around 10 p.m. ET Wedneday night. Not since the Minnow had a doomed vessel’s last tour run so far over schedule and still kept viewers engaged. Those who stuck with the 10-hour livestream were rewarded with an amazingly touching denouement.
The ship had its day. The SS United States hit the seas in 1952, and at 990 feet long was about 100 feet longer than the Titanic, yet was able to hit speeds of more than 38 knots, still faster than any transatlantic ocean liner ever. But it was deemed obsolete and taken out of service way back in 1969, and spent the last 30 years docked in Philadelphia. Attempts to keep the SS US above water as a hotel or museum failed, and some folks in Okaloosa County, Florida, decided the liner was most valuable at the bottom of sea. The county floated a $10 million plan to turn the ship into an artificial reef and thereby enhance the Redneck Riviera’s reputation as a fishing and scuba diving destination. This entailed sinking the SS US about 22 miles off Fort Walton Beach during the very same week that the Edmund Fitzgerald hit bottom 51 years earlier.
To help get the buzz going about the reef plan, the county and other interested parties produced an online broadcast of the United States' final hours, though from the looks of things the ship ended up getting a lot more final hours than originally scripted.
The stream commenced at noon ET. Early on, the broadcast featured a solemn mini-documentary on the SS US, showing the ship in its glory days and also as it was towed from Philly to Mobile, Ala., to sit in dry dock and be prepped for sinking. Viewers heard a downbeat narrator saying lines like, “Not an ending, a new purpose,” over a brilliantly maudlin soundtrack.
Every now and then over the first few hours, with the SS US showing no sign whatsoever of going under, an emcee would pop onscreen to deliver stats and stories about the allegedly imminently vanquished vessel. A little before 3 p.m. ET, she said the sinking would actually commence in “45 minutes.”
But the ship just kept floating. And floating. And floating. The county wanted the SS US to land upright on the Gulf floor, which would provide a better and safer environment for divers than a vessel that was upside down or on its side. So they couldn’t just blow a big hole in its hull and risk capsizing.
As the broadcast began to drag on, other than very occasional promises that the sinkage was really, truly, deeply about to commence, all a viewer got were drone shots of the ship and that soundtrack, which was synth-based and very elevatory with doses of the Titanic score, the Beach Boys, and Quaaludes.
I was taken enough by the soundtrack to call the Okaloosa County Tourist Development Council (TDC), which produced the broadcast to ask about its origins. Alexia Johnson, a visitor information specialist for TDC, told Defector that her group has gotten lots requests for information about the music, but that there’s not much to impart. “It’s just stock music, no composer per se. I guess you can look at it like an AI song,” Johnson said. “We don’t have permission to put it on our website now, but we’re trying.”
However artificial its source, by god, the visual/aural package delivered a real punch to the gut. The mood of the sinking ship livestream was more funereal than most funerals I’ve attended.
But the SS US’s sendoff would not end; after about four hours, even the emcee had given up and gone home. I, however, have never left a funeral early, not even Catholic ones, and I decided I was going to ride this thing out. The sun went down, and the ship was still up. My mood occasionally drifted from melancholy to mad—recalling having watched The Mystery of Al Capone's Vaults as a younger man and thinking here I’d been suckered all over again—to bored, and left to come up with puns like "Snoozitania" and "Andrea Snore-ia" and "Edmund Fitzzzzzgerald," and make jokes about how Shelley Winters would still be among us if these people were in charge of sinking the SS Poseidon. The demise of SS United States had become a seafarer’s version of Jimmy Carter in hospice. Yes, Johnny Rotten, I had the feeling I’d been cheated.
But I remained on board. I had the stream on a TV in the living room through dinner and hours beyond, staring at the big boat, floating in total darkness other than a spotlight from a tugboat pushed up to the SS US’s side apparently to keep it from capsizing.
In the end, I was repaid for my time. At about 9:45 p.m. ET, the stream began showing a new angle of the ship, and I thought I noticed it was actually listing. I got closer to the television and, sure enough, something was afoot, if still afloat. After hours of nothing, with breathtaking quickness the SS United States flopped on its side and began falling like Nvidia's share price. Geysers were shooting skyward from the length of the hull as the ship sank. Yet alongside the violent visuals, the somber soundtrack played on, like the Titanic's orchestra. Within minutes the big boat disappeared into the sea within massive whirlpools. A few people cheered; I was weepy as hell. This was incredible cinema. Turns out over the long day I’d grown to care about this ship as much as I cared about any character in Friday Night Lights. (That's a lot.) Now it’s gone.
The stream ended within 90 seconds of the sinking. I woke up to reports that the ship landed upright on the floor of the Gulf. All the planning and delays hadn’t been in vain. I was glad to read that. RIP, SS US.
