The Birmingham age-herald., 1903-08-02

From the Cleveland Plain Dealer.
 It takes a pretty strong strong crane to Tiff 122 GOO pounds of solid metal. and it would not be pleasant to be standing un- der If anything happened to give. There were no cranes at the Brooklyn navy yard strong enough to give the officers and men working thereabouts comforting as surance that nothing would give, so they had to secure a special wrecking crane lefore the first step of all in the complete overhauIing of the battleship Iowa could be undertaken, says the Brooklyn Eagle.
 The first step of all was finally success fully accomplished last week. It vas the removal from and the replacement in her forward turrets the remains of the great Pinch gun which exploded with such fatal results off Pensacola on Good Friday. That was about the nest serious aecicent that ever happened to one Of ou" battleships. The Iowa was at target prae- tice in the gulf Tho forward port l2-ineh gun had been loaded to fire Its Drojectile was bomb, supposed to explode at Ito wards by means of a time fuse. It eNplod- ed instead the instant the gun was fired, wreclxing more than twelve fees of ehe great guns length, ripping T. into frag- ments, sending these fragments weighing, some of them, a ten saen, high into the air, and dropping them onto the vessel again 10 crash through the spar and gun decks of the great battIeship as if they rad been so much pas,c9oacj to crush tie liyfs out of three Iuen sentad at mess on the third deck, and seriously injure five more, and then .o splinter iner way through this deck 70 the armorc1 prote1t- i've deck. where th,ck steel plates stopped the terrible missiles from cutting down the machnistr and Trmsn nelow
 There was no explana.ie the aeci- dent at the time. Subsequent investigation leaves 1t unexplained. Lieutenant Reed, the officer in cha5ge of Inc t,irret hhd in- spected 1t just before Grng- t was m good condit .on and had Deer n.ed dozen times within as many uays. S1rc defect "in the shell or fuse 's the ariJ possible way of acou iti1s for i. The great barrel was br1lSen en jnA. above .s long end joint. and tha- t'.r.vs-fput sec ton of heavy riiled steel shattered into fragments The men who were in she turret working the 5 m ware unhnrt and hardly reaiize,, that aigtfi"s had hap pened The concussi.n was but little more than usually accompanied the gums dis cndTEes ] ne OHt3 tLH1JftliAn NiS III lHe fact that five minutes later it would have killed many more than it dil, for dinner call had just sounded and the men were all pouring down to the mess room. La ter on when the Iowa was ordered to Brooklyn for repairs. 1t was found that the whole vessel had been much more wrecked and strained by the force of the explosion than had been at all realized. and that nothing short of complete overhauling would render her thoroughly fit. So the Iowa, ''the pride of the navy" 'the greatest fighting ship of them all,p was oredred out of commission indefi- nitely and has been pretty thoroughly 
 The first step in overhauling was, of course. getting out the old gun. And that proved something of 2 problem. The Iowa's tirret Is of rather different con struction from those of the older vessels which have heretofore been in the navy yard for repairs. and it took some time to loosen the top of the turret Moreover. 1t is not every day that one of those great naval guns is replaced, Had 1t been all there. the gun proper would nave been thirty-eight fet long. It's bore would have weighed in itself 101,OO0 pounds. and it's jacket, which 1t wore on the occasion of its first and last shore leave, weighed an additional 21.Qpo pounds.
 It was an anxious moment when all the great cables were adjusted and the en-