USS Asphalt
Trefoil-class concrete barge
USS Asphalt (IX-153), a Trefoil-class concrete barge designated an unclassified miscellaneous vessel, was the only ship of the United States Navy to be named for asphalt. Her keel was laid down in 1943 at San Francisco, California, by Barrett & Hilp, Belair Shipyards. She was originally to be called ‘Quartz’, and was christened as such by Mrs. Reginald Pecknold. She was acquired by the Navy on 30 June 1944 through the Maritime Commission and was placed in service that same day.
Service history
Assigned to the Service Force, Pacific Fleet, as a floating provisions storage facility, she spent her brief career at forward bases, for the most part at Saipan, as a unit of Service Squadron 10. When a typhoon struck the anchorage at Saipan on 6 October 1944, Asphalt's anchor chains parted, and she was driven hard aground on a coral reef. The barge was then declared a total loss. After her cargo and machinery were salvaged, she was abandoned. Her name was struck from the Naval Vessel Register on 23 February 1945.
The public source identifies “USS Asphalt” as trefoil-class concrete barge. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Asphalt, Trefoil-class and concrete.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Dec 12, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q7867456. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1943, 1944 and 1945.
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This entry incorporates text from “USS Asphalt” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.