Oh man
I'm getting old. Both of those ships were around when I flew in the Navy. My old A-7E Corsair II is either on a stick in front of air bases, parked in aviation museums, or retired to the boneyard in Arizona. And now they're sinking ships that used to be part of my carrier battle group! Man oh man, where'd I put that Geritol? Well heck, at least I can dive them someday.
I had exactly the same thought - those are not supposed to be "old" ships. Life gets strange after you cruise past 40.
With regard to Essex class carriers, Yorktown, Intrepid Hornet and Lexington are museum ships, the Oriskany has been reefed and the rest have been scrapped. The Essex class were not well suited to handling larger aircraft like the F-4 and A-6. Consequently, as the F-8 and A-4 passed out of service, and as things started to wind down in South East Asia reducing the need for additional carriers to supplement the later supercarriers, the modernized Essex class carriers were quickly retired from both attack and ASW roles. By 1976 only the Lexington remained in service as a training carrier.
Most Essex class ships were scrapped very quickly while a few lingered in various reserve fleets for another 20 years.
Ship and date sold for scrap:
Franklin, August 1966
Tarawa, October 1968
Leyte, March 1970
Boxer, February 1971
Phillipine Sea, March 1971
Princeton, May 1971
Valley Forge, October 1971
Lake Champlain, April 1972
Wasp, May 1973
Bunker Hill, May 1973
Antietam, February 1974
Randolph, May 1975
Essex, June 1975
Ticonderoga, September 1975
Hancock, September 1976
Bon Homme Richard, March 1992
Bennington, January 1994
Shangri-la, August 1998
So in short, there are no more Essex calss carrier to reef - unless they sink one of the current museum ships. The golden opportunities for Essex reefing programs would have been in the early to mid 1970's (which would have also been pre-EPA/expensive cleanup costs) and the 1990's.
Some of the current name/class confusion however may be due to a few of the unmodernized Essex class ships being used as amphibious assault ships in the 1950's and 60's. These were retired and followed by the Tarawa class LHD's in the 1970's - the USS Tarawa (LHA-1) (having the same name as the CV-40 Tarawa Essex class carrier scapped in 1968) and the later Wasp class LHD's, 5 of which share names with previous Essex carriers. A sloppy reporter could easily get things confused.
The good news is that some of the Tarawa class amphibious assault ships may eventually be candidates for reefing as will eventually the Wasp class ships.
