I was in that dry dock at Bender Shipbuilding, Mobile, Alabama to work that launch evolution. I have nearly the same photo on one of my computers that I took with my Palm Phone.
During the first submergence, they had a couple of water leaks, so they pumped the dry dock up to make repairs.
They flooded the dry dock the next day and the leaks were fixed so they got it floating for the first time.
Under the stern, there were several steel support towers that the shipyard was supposed to remove the welds prior to submergence. The towers were rigger to one of the wing wall cranes to topple them to get them out of the way of the ship. The crane came up on the rigging and the tower didn’t fall over. I went in to check it out and then burned out the weld the shipyard worker missed and got the evolution back on schedule.
