"USS Houston at Risk" Topic

The U.S. Navy's recognition of a 72-year-old war grave began when an Australian scuba diver plucked a bent trumpet from 120 feet below the Sea of Java.

The mangled horn belonged to one of 1,100 sailors or Marines assigned USS Houston (CA-30) — a cruiser sunk by Imperial Japanese Navy ships in one of America's earliest skirmishes in World War II.

The 2013 recovery of the trumpet — albeit by a well-intentioned diver — caused an association of Houston survivors to warn the Navy that the wreck is at risk to less scrupulous operations…

link

Dive report: link

Interesting report. It is also interesting that they chose not to do any decompression dives.

I agree.

There are 'salvage' operators going after all the WW2 wrecks, just sending out barges with crane mounted grab buckets, ripping up great chunks off the ships and selling it as mixed scrap. It has been going on for some years and countries like Indonesia are not signatories to any of the international treaties protecting wrecks, so basically none of the locals give a rat's ******.

Indeed, why should they?

They are grave sites. They are literally robbing graves. The countries the ships come from can only give permission to remove anything from the ships.

To us, yes. To them, as long as they're not signatories to the treaties protecting wrecks, no. So they don't need any permission to salvage the wrecks. Like it or not (and I don't) that's the truth of it.