From the Sept. 29th KCOY, Santa Maria, California.
A contract has been awarded to Global Diving and Salvage by the US Coast Guard to see if there is oil in the wreck of the SS Montebello, 900 feet deep and 6.5 miles off Cambria, California.
It was sunk be a Japanese submarine December 23, 1941 and broke apart.
Between 1996 and 2010, multiple dives were made to see if the hull is still intact.
From the California State Military Museum and Wikipedia sites.
The Japanese submarine I-21, which participated in the attack on Pearl Harbor, fired two torpedoes at the 440 foot long SS Montebello loaded with 4.1 million gallons of oil. One was a dud, but the other exploded, fortunately, not by a filled oil tank. The 39 men on the ship abandoned it and the submarine surfaces and opened fire on the burning vessel to speed up its sinking.
Later that same day, the I-21 shelled and damaged the tanker SS Idaho. The I-21 went on to have a very successful career sinking allied ships until it was lost at sea sometime in 1943.
The Montebello was found November 29, 1996.
Still having Problems with World War II. --Cooter
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