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Travelers driving north across the Martinez Bridge are treated to an unusual sight upriver. A number of gray ships, moored abreast in several rows about a mile east of the bridge, patiently await their fate. These ships are commonly referred to by the public as the “mothball fleet.”

Immediately following the end of World War II, Congress voted to establish a National Defense Reserve Fleet (NDRF) to serve as a reserve cadre of ships for national defense and national emergencies. The Maritime Administration (MARAD) maintains this fleet so it can provide surge sealift capability whenever required. MARAD is also responsible for disposing of reserve ships, and other non-combatant Government ships, as they become obsolete.

At its height in 1950, the NDRF (aka “mothball fleet” or “ghost fleet”) consisted of 2,277 ships kept at one of eight anchorages around the U.S. Over time, the NDRF has dwindled to just three anchorages: Fort Eustis, Virginia, Beaumont, Texas, and Suisun Bay in Benicia, California. As of March 31, 2011, there were only 183 vessels left, primarily dry cargo ships along with some tankers and military auxiliaries.

In 1976, an additional Ready Reserve Fleet component was established to provide rapid deployment of military equipment. The Ready Reserve Fleet comprises 48 vessels, some of which are kept with the “mothball” fleet. An additional 28 non-NDRF ships are held in storage for other government agencies. The Suisun Bay fleet contains all of these various categories of ships. For instance, the WWII battleship USS Iowa languishes in row “G” on a donation hold from the Navy until it becomes a museum in California.

Since 1950, NDRF vessels have supported emergency shipping operations during war and national emergencies. During the Korean War, 540 vessels were activated to support the military forces. During the Vietnam War, 172 vessels were activated to support military operations in southeast Asia. More than seventy-five percent of the RRF ships provided support to the U.S. effort’s in the Persian Gulf between August 1990 and April 1991.
In 2005, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) used five RRF and four NDRF ships for relief operations in the aftermath of hurricanes Katrina and Rita. The ships provided messing and berthing functions for refinery workers, oil spill response teams, and longshoremen, providing about 83,000 berthing nights and serving roughly 270,000 meals.

MARAD activated six vessels in response to the devastating earthquake that struck Haiti in January of 2010. Three of the six vessels played a direct role in the relief efforts, with two providing logistical support from Port au Prince’s harbor. Another operated as a high speed freight and passenger shuttle between the continental U.S. and Port au Prince.

In addition to maintaining a fleet of active and inactive ships, MARAD is the government’s disposal agent for Federally-owned obsolete, merchant-type vessels, and naval auxiliaries that are equal to or greater than 1,500 gross tons. MARAD disposes of vessels through a variety of methods including domestic recycling and sinking for use as artificial reefs. Due to environmental concerns, the disposal process has been accelerated over the past two years. Of the 72 non-retention vessels currently in the NDRF, 60 are in the disposal process or are ready for disposal and 12 are being reviewed for their historical significance.
By 2017, only a few Ready Reserve Fleet ships will remain in the Suisun Bay fleet.

Suisun Bay Fleet – USS Hassayampa

Many of the ships in the Suisun Bay NDRF have made significant contributions to American history, often behind the scenes rather than in the headlines. July 2011 is the 42nd anniversary of the epic Apollo 11 flight to the moon. So it is fitting for this article to focus on a key contributor in the recovery of that first lunar landing flight.

In the early 1950’s, the U.S. Navy needed combat logistics ships fast enough to keep up with aircraft carrier task forces but with the cargo capacity to provision all the ships of that group. To accomplish this, the Navy created the Neosho class fleet oiler. Their mission was to transport bulk petroleum products, minor freight, mail and personnel from shore depots to these forces at-sea, and effect delivery to them while underway. The term for this latter operation is “underway replenishment” or “UNREP” for short. While logistics support is not considered a glorious mission, it is the cornerstone that allows combat forces afloat to maintain peak readiness and efficiency.

Navy fleet oilers are historically named after American Rivers bearing Indian names. The third Neosho-class ship built (of six total) was named USS Hassayampa (AO-145) after an interesting and historical river in Arizona. The river begins just south of Prescott, flows south through Wickenburg and empties into the Gila River. Except during the rainy winter season, the river bed is dry but the water keeps flowing via an underground channel.

Hassayampa was built in Camden, N.J. and launched in 1954. The vessel is 655 feet long, has a 38,000 ton displacement and can carry over 7.5 million gallons of petroleum products including naval special fuel oil (for ships), aviation gas (for helicopters and propeller aircraft) and jet fuel (for high performance jet aircraft). She was commissioned at the Philadelphia Naval Yard on April 19, 1955 with Senator Barry Goldwater proving the primary remarks at the ceremony.

Hassayampa served 23 years in the “regular” Navy with her home port in Pearl Harbor as part of the Pacific Fleet. From 1955 until 1964 she made many cruises to the Western Pacific and the Indian Ocean. During the Tonkin Gulf crisis in August 1964, which jump started the Vietnam War, Hassayampa supported ships of the Navy’s Pacific and Seventh Fleets in that area. She was recognized for being involved with fourteen naval campaigns during the Vietnam War. In one astonishing two-week period in November 1966, Hassayampa refueled 67 ships!

In July 1969, she was a member of Task Force 130, the small group of ships assigned to recover the Apollo 11 spaceflight. On July 22, forty hours before splashdown, Hassayampa refueled the primary recovery ship USS Hornet in the designated landing area 1,200 miles southwest of Honolulu. The next day, a large storm system affected the area, forcing NASA to move the target site 240 miles northeast. Thanks to the refueling, Hornet was able to steam through the night at high speed and was in position when the Apollo spacecraft splashed down early the next morning. In November 1969, Hassayampa was at it again, refueling Hornet the day before Apollo 12 splashed down in the mid-Pacific.

In 1978, she was decommissioned from the Navy and transferred to the Military Sealift Command (MSC) as the USNS Hassayampa (T-AO 145). Based in Sasebo, Japan as the “duty oiler” in the Far East, it was not uncommon for the ship and its civilian crew to ride out a dozen typhoons every year. In addition to her national defense duties, she handled many special missions. These include the 1983 search and salvage mission associated with Korean Airlines Flight 007 that was shot down by the Russian military. In 1990 and 1991, she was a key member of the naval forces executing the Desert Shield and Desert Storm operations in the Persian Gulf.

In October 1991, Hassayampa was placed out of service by MSC. Spanning her career with the Navy and MSC, she was the most decorated fleet oiler in U.S. history. In May 1999, title to the ship was transferred to MARAD who placed her into the NDRF in Suisun Bay. As ships are slowly withdrawn from that fleet now, only time will tell what the ultimate fate of the “Humpin’ Hass” will be. Her former crewmen are hopeful she will become an artificial reef rather than being cut up for scrap.

San Ramon Valley residents who are interested in the Apollo 11 recovery or in gaining further knowledge of fleet oilers or the mothball fleet, have a unique opportunity the weekend of July 23/24. On Saturday the 23rd, the Hornet Museum in Alameda will be commemorating the anniversary of the Apollo 11 recovery with special guests and activities. On Sunday the 24th, the SS Jeremiah O’Brien in San Francisco will hold one of its rare “Ghost Fleet” tours with a cruise to the NDRF in Suisun Bay. O’Brien’s Master Pat Moloney was the longest serving commander of the USNS Hassayampa and is willing to share his wealth of knowledge with anyone who asks

What is the structure of the universe? Scientists are now fairly confident that it’s not simply duct tape and money that holds it all together and so modern-day physicists have been working dutifully to answer this cosmic question for quite some time now, as have I.

I am at an advantage compared with other people as far as contemplating solutions to complex scientific problems goes—I have an unfathomable amount of time each week that I can dedicate to lay-person research and abstract thought-experimentation. Surely it is not everyone’s luxury to have the freedom to ponder, at length, such age-old questions as, “What came first, the chicken or the egg?” or, “Where did the universe come from?” while simultaneously watching every single science show that Dish Network broadcasts.

Recent research suggest that dark matter in our universe may form a lattice – grid – scaffold – type structure that branches out like the veins of a tree leaf, which then enables regular matter to form, thus creating the visible universe we know and love today. And we already know that there are elements in our universe that are fundamental, without which the rest of everything else can’t happen. For example, there are chemical elements, like those displayed in the Periodic Table of the Elements on the science classroom wall; there are classical elements, as identified by the Greeks as Earth, Air, Fire and Water; and there are elemental forces, like good ole Murphy’s Law of probabilities.

Everything else that exists or happens in the universe builds upon the fundamentals of the elements. Without Terra Firma, air, fire, and water, life does not seem to be able to exist in our universe. Without the fundamental chemical particles there would be no land, no water, and no oxygen. And without the fundamental forces of electromagnetism, the strong force, the weak force and gravity, there would be no planetary systems with all that incessant spinning and constant movement, which seems to be another fundamental component necessary for existence.

So what useful tidbit can we gain from all these facts? What may be an important link to understanding the nature and mathematics of the universe involves taking into consideration inherent, fundamental properties; in particular one really, really big one that scientist may not have factored in into all their mathematical formulas yet: That our Universe is a duality; that it is one of two—that maybe Universes come in pairs.
I don’t know if scientists are aware that what may be missing from their calculations for a Unified Equation of Everything, is taking into account that absolutely every time one thing comes into being, two things come into being. Inherent Duality may be a fundamental element of the Universe.

On Earth, we certainly experience a fundamental dualism with just about everything, right? In/out; right/wrong; conservative/liberal; privatization/socialization; male/female; traditional/exploratory; one side/the other side, yin/yang—the list is endless and many of the examples are profound. Things like Micro/Macro, and how fractals are the same patterns whether at the biggest Macro level or the tiniest Micro. That’s cosmic stuff.

Physicists already know that when one particle comes into existence it can be in two states or places at once and yet, so far, science has been unable to predict with accuracy which one place it will end up. I think this applies to certain individuals we all know, too, but I’m not naming names. But the reason there is always two potential extreme endpoints, if you will, is because everything happens along a scale between two states or two places of being, and that space in between interacts with time and forces, creating probability and eventual outcome. This is how computers operate, storing logic states of 1 or 0 in registers, based on data-information ‘forces.’ Even human beliefs fall across a wide spectrum from far–leaning one way to far–leaning toward the exact opposite opinion on the other side, and everywhere along the continuum.

This structure of two opposition states – connected by a chord of time, forces and probability, happens at the smallest levels of the universe as strings, in string theory, and also at the largest scale, as in the case of “universes.”

It was mentioned on a science program recently that one theory about gravity is that the reason it is so weak of a force in our universe is because we don’t have very much of it – compared to the magnitude that has been calculated for how much gravity would have existed during the Big Bang; and that there may be just a little trickle of it always filtering into our universe from somewhere else.

So maybe there are always two universes; one filled with matter and dark matter—the visible universe that we see and inhabit, and another universe—one that has all the anti-matter that was necessary to make the Big Bang explosion.
Perhaps it requires a lot of gravity to contain the anti-matter, which could explain why the vast majority of the total force of gravity is not found in our universe, as has been theorized by minds much greater than my own.

Perhaps the reason there is a chord of gravity (if there is one) that siphons from that one Universe into ours, is to enable a mechanism that allows for the two universes to maintain distance from each other, so as to not run into each other. Because that spells trouble for both universes, you know, and us in particular, since when those two universes collide, anti–matter accidentally touches matter and we get a new Big Bang, which starts the process over again.

This is a radical theory, but a lot of it is based on what theoretical physicists are already talking about and proving mathematically, like string theory and membrane universes and that there is not really ever a single point, but rather two places something can be every time you do the math.

So what might be being left out of the grand equation of the universe that physicists are looking for may simply be the other universe. If it were presumed to exist, and if the theory is correct, then it should fit very neatly into the mathematical equations of our universe.

Now this is where I must step aside, since we are going to need to call in some geniuses to apply the mathematical concepts. If scientists haven’t already started calculating the inherent duality of the universe into their “Unified Theory of the Everything” equations, perhaps they will start now.

Anyone who has ever read Tony Hicks’ twice-weekly humor lifestyle column in the Contra Costa Times, might think this witty, sarcastic, self-deprecating writer would be a cool guy to hang out with, and you would be correct. After months of trading emails and Facebook messages, our mutual admiration society had finally scheduled its first meeting. Tony and I met one afternoon at Peet’s Coffee in Walnut Creek. When I arrive, he is engaged in a whimsical conversation with a political surveyor collecting signatures for a bill or petition. He is casually attired in cargo shorts, Vans and a cool Star Wars t-shirt depicting four Imperial Storm Troopers wearing the very identifiable “KISS” face paint. Tony has a collection of tattoos on his stocky frame and is easily recognizable by his trademark billy-goat scruff facial hair (he was in the process of growing his beard out when we got together to shoot photos for the article) which is visible in the headshot shown above his newspaper column. As we talked about a variety of topics over the course of a couple of hours, Tony reminded me of what the character John Bender, portrayed wonderfully by Judd Nelson in the popular 80s movie The Breakfast Club, might resemble as an adult. He is laid back and affable, but possesses the keen ability to provide humorously insightful observations of people, places and events.

Whenever I’m asked who has influenced my writing style in the magazine articles I’ve done for ALIVE, four names come to mind; Dave Berry, Scott Osler, Rick Reilly and Tony Hicks. When I shared this with Tony, he blushed like a little school girl. While Tony is almost 6 years younger than me, I’ve always admired that he can churn out two columns a week in addition to his twice weekly People Column responsibilities and his occasional feature pieces. When asked where he comes up with the ideas for his column, Tony says inspiration comes from personal experiences (parenting and growing up in the shadow of Mt. Diablo) or things he picks up in the media. “Most of my columns are written at home (often times in bed) and I’m a really poor planner so it’s usually just something that strikes me at the time.” I can totally relate to that as a fellow procrastinator.

Tony grew up in Walnut Creek, but his family moved to San Ramon when he was twelve. After graduating from Cal High School in San Ramon in 1985, despite having rock star aspirations as the drummer for the pop-alt band Nag Nag Nag, Tony left the group before the band relocated to Southern California and enrolled at Diablo Valley College. Tony says. “I wasn’t in any hurry to leave and there was plenty of partying to do while still living at home.” Despite receiving praise for his flair with the pen in a creative writing class at DVC, Tony felt like he had made a mistake by not going to L.A. with his band. ”I decided to move down south hoping the band’s new drummer would eventually quit”. After initially finding an apartment in Korea Town, which happened to be in the heart of rival gang territory, Tony eventually did rejoin the band and find a new place to live. Nag Nag Nag became a recognizable member of a group of promising So Cal bands known as The Alternate Power Source. However, after a couple of years of establishing their place in the club scene (amongst the popularity of grunge and metal acts), Tony left the band again and headed home… to be a writer.

The year was 1993 when Tony re-enrolled at DVC with aspirations of being a sports writer, and in the perfect world, the Warriors beat writer. After signing up for journalism courses, Tony joined the staff of the DVC Inquirer. Initially a staff reporter and later the Editor-in-Chief, Tony would go on to win a countywide creative writing competition sponsored by the East Bay Press Club. “Jake Williams, Deputy Editor at the Contra Costa Times, was a judge for the contest and we hit it off right away.” “I got a call a couple of weeks later from someone at the Times asking if I would like a few hours of weekly work reporting on Caltrans road work and street closures. As dull as that sounds, I thought I had hit the big time.” Ironically, it was around this time, mid 1995, that the band came calling again. Fortunately, or unfortunately, Nag Nag Nag’s lead singer was now playing in a band called Green Jello, which was getting some play on MTV and the group’s drummer was happily honing his craft as a writer.

Working an assortment of jobs at the Times gave Tony valuable experience in record research, city government and real estate editorials. He was also given the enjoyable task of covering sports on the weekends.After reading the book, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail by Hunter S. Thompson and following the 2002 Presidential Election, Tony’s interest in politics blossomed. During this time, Tony and his earliest mentor, Jean Dickenson (his advisor at DVC) continued to stay in touch even after he transferred to San Francisco State to earn a degree in journalism. It was Jean the editor for the Valley Times (owned by Lesher Communications) who called after having interviewed Tony for a summer job as a fill-in for the day cop reporter. “I misspelled Lesher, but luckily Jean vouched for me.” Tony went on to fill-in as the Moraga beat reporter for the paper, where he eventually met his first wife. At 30, Tony did become a husband and step-father and by 2002, the two had a daughter, Olivia. Originally Tony and his wife had planned for a water birth delivery and had several false starts commuting from their home in Cordelia to the birthing facility in Pleasanton. Ultimately, the baby was delivered in the more conventional manner. “No, I wasn’t enamored with the idea of a water birth.” Tony states. The couple divorced in 2006, which was very tough on Tony at the time having just bought a new home ten months earlier and not getting to see his young daughter every day.

While his personal life was in state of turmoil, Tony was happy as the music critic for the Contra Costa Times. Having covered the local music scene in 1999, as a six month fill-in for the regular music critic, Tony then transitioned into covering the Berkeley beat for the West County Time in the spring of 2000. “If you can’t find something to write about in Berkley, you shouldn’t be a reporter”. Eventually he landed the dream job of full time music critic in July of 2001. “I worked my butt off covering concerts, conducting interviews and churning out articles”, Tony says. “I loved it.” When asked about his favorite memories, Tony recalls an hour long interview with Steven Tyler of Aerosmith, befriending Brad Gillis of Night Ranger, receiving a bottle of Cabo Wabo Tequila from Sammy Hagar and recording a jam session with former Metallica bassist, Jason Newsted. “Jason was getting ready to go on the road with Ozzy Osbourne when he invited me to jam after our interview. That didn’t suck”, Tony proudly admits. Surprisingly, it was a review of a show featuring Chrissy Hynde and the Pretenders that drew his biggest negative reader response. “Chrissy made some disparaging comments during the show about the terrorist attacks of September 11th and people attributed them to me as the writer. It got really crazy.”

Tony does credit his column for finding his current wife, Michelle. “In 2007, after dropping 30 pounds and getting his life together, a co-worker told me that one of her friends really enjoyed reading my column.” Using Myspace (pre-Facebook), they initially connected over the internet. Both being single parents of young daughters, they set up an innocent play date at Heather Park in Walnut Creek. The next day they met up to watch the Super Bowl and have been together ever since. Today, they call Concord home and together the loving couple have a beautiful three-year old daughter, Lucy. Tony is once again attending his favorite community college in Pleasanton Hill as a 43-year old senior. Despite completing the required journalism classes, with a minor in political science, he still needs to finish up a few general education credits to earn his degree later this year. “Yes, yes, yes, life kind of got in my way,” Tony sheepishly admits.

Tony enjoys hearing from his loyal readers and gets email virtually every day, including occasional notes from that dork who writes personality profiles for ALIVE magazine. “I’m actually not as funny or interesting in person,” the big guy confesses, although I would disagree. As long as there are still stories to tell, Tony Hicks will always be a cool guy to hang out with and/or follow in the rags.