The Puget Sound Naval Yard, now known as the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard and Intermediate Maintenance Facility, was constructed in 1891 as a naval station. Ten years later, Navy officials renamed the site Navy Yard Puget Sound. The Naval Yard sits near Puget Sound on the coast of Washington State, southwest of the city of Bremerton, east of the Kitsap Naval Base’s Bremerton Annex and north of the Sinclair Inlet.
In the early 1900s, as well as during the years of World War I, workers at Navy Yard Puget Sound constructed numerous vessels for the American war efforts. Crews assembled and manned both submarines and anti-submarine boats, as wells as tugboats, minesweepers and munitions supply ships. In all, construction workers built nearly two thousand vessels from 1900 to 1920.
During the early 1940s, the US war effort in the Pacific led to more work at the Navy Yard Puget Sound. Of the six battleships that survived the attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, crews at Puget Sound repaired five of them. The yard’s mission changed from ship construction to repairs and upgrades to existing vessels. The work crews led efforts to repair much of the battle damage that American, British, and other allied ships suffered in battle against Japanese naval vessels and attack aircraft during the war.
After the war ended in 1945, the Navy redesignated Navy Yard Puget Sound to Puget Sound Naval Shipyard. Work around the yard consisted primarily of upgrading war-era vessels to combat new threats in the Pacific. Many of these projects involved updating flight decks on aircraft carriers to handle the newer, heavier jet fighter planes.
The early 1950s saw the first shooting of the Cold War, the Korean Conflict. In those years, Puget Sound Naval Shipyard saw many ships launched for active duty. Throughout the rest of the decade, one of their primary missions was to oversee the construction of a new class of guided missile frigates.
The 1960s saw the expansion of both technology and the Cold War. Puget Sound Naval Shipyard also expanded its responsibilities by becoming a repair facility for US submarines in 1961. Four years later, the facility was equipped to handle repairs and updates for the US nuclear submarine fleet when the site conducted operations on the USS Sculpin (SSN 590).
The Navy gave the crews at Puget Sound Naval Shipyard another daunting task in 1990 when the yard began to handle the dismantling and recycling of some of the older nuclear-powered ships in the fleet. Projects often involved disposal of a ship’s nuclear reactor compartment and disassembling the superstructure of the vessel.
Puget Sound Naval Shipyard consolidated operations with the Naval Intermediate Maintenance Facility, Pacific Northwest, in May of 2003. Navy officials redesignated the merged site as the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard and Intermediate Maintenance Facility. Previously, the IMF handled the maintenance and upgrades for the US Navy’s fleet of Trident nuclear submarines. That same year, the site also merged operations with the Northwest Regional Maintenance Center. With the addition of these operations, Puget Sound Naval Shipyard is one of the few sites that can effect repairs on Navy vessels of any class.
