page_title: USS Iowa turret explosion
section_title: Initial inquiries
hierarchical_section_title: USS Iowa turret explosion / Sandia investigation / Initial inquiries
caption_attribution_description: The U.S. Navy battleship USS Mississippi (BB-41) in the Mississippi River, en route to take part in Navy Day celebrations at New Orleans, Louisiana (USA), 16 October 1945. Note her anchors suspended below their normal stowed position at the bow.
context_page_description: On 19 April 1989, the Number Two 16-inch gun turret of the United States Navy battleship USS Iowa exploded. The explosion in the center gun room killed 47 of the turret's crewmen and severely damaged the gun turret itself. Two major investigations were undertaken into the cause of the explosion, one by the U.S. Navy and then one by the Government Accountability Office and Sandia National Laboratories. The investigations produced conflicting conclusions.
  The first investigation into the explosion, conducted by the U.S. Navy, concluded that one of the gun turret crew members, Clayton Hartwig, who died in the explosion, had deliberately caused it. During the investigation, numerous leaks to the media, later attributed to U.S. Navy officers and investigators, implied that Hartwig and another sailor, Kendall Truitt, had engaged in a romantic relationship and that Hartwig had caused the explosion after their relationship had soured. In its report, however, the U.S. Navy concluded that the evidence did not show that Hartwig was homosexual but that he was suicidal and had caused the explosion with either an electronic or chemical detonator.
context_section_description: Forty scientists from Sandia, led by Richard Schwoebel, began an independent technical inquiry into the explosion on 7 December 1989. In order to investigate the Navy's theory that an electronic or chemical ignition device had been used to cause the explosion, Schwoebel asked Miceli to examine the projectiles removed from Turret Two's left and right guns to compare with the one taken from the center gun. Miceli informed Schwoebel that both projectiles had been misplaced and he could not locate them.
  At a 16 January 1990 meeting with the Sandia scientists, Steve Mitchell, a technician from Indian Head Naval Surface Warfare Center, reported that his team had discovered that the propellant pellets making up the powder in Iowa's powder bags could fracture and give off hot fragments in drop tests, and that the fractured surface often had a burnt appearance and odor. At this point, according to Schwoebel, Miceli interjected and said, "This kind of thing can't be duplicated during the actual loading operation. This result is not relevant to the explosion." Mitchell added that his team had found it extremely unlikely that friction or static electricity could have ignited the center gunpowder bags. Tom Doran, a member of Miceli's team from Dahlgren, reported that his team had conducted tests to see if an overram could have caused the explosion, but revealed that the tests had used bags filled with wooden pellets with black powder pouches at the ends, not actual powder bags.
  Sandia investigators asked if two similar explosions on the battleship USS Mississippi could be related to the Iowa explosion. In 1924 and 1943, open breech explosions had occurred in the Turret Two center gun aboard Mississippi, each time killing most of the crewmen in the turret. Miceli's team responded that the explosions were not related, because the Mississippi incidents were not actual explosions, but "intense burnings" of the powder which resulted from different causes than the Iowa incident. A staff officer from Naval Sea Systems Command, Rear Admiral Robert H. Ailes, told Sandia that the Mississippi explosions "would not be discussed".
  Sandia's chemical and materials analysis group, headed by James Borders, investigated further the theory about a chemical igniter. Navy technicians stated that the discovery under the center gun's projectile's rotating band of minute steel-wool fibers that were encrusted with calcium and chlorine, a fragment of polyethylene terephthalate (commonly used in plastic bags), and different glycols, including brake fluid, hypochlorite, antifreeze, and Brylcreem together indicated the use of a chemical igniter. The Navy was unable to locate the steel-wool fiber evidence for Borders to examine. No untouched portions of the rotating band remained and Sandia was provided with a section to examine that had already been examined by the FBI. Borders' team examined the rotating band and did not find any traces of polyethylene terephthalate. The team found that the glycols present actually came from the Break-Free cleaning solution which had been dumped into the center gun's barrel to help free the projectile after the explosion. The team also found that calcium and chlorine were present in Iowa's other gun turrets and in the gun turrets of the other Iowa-class battleships, and that this was indicative of routine exposure to a maritime environment. Borders concluded that ordinary sources accounted for all of the "foreign materials" found by the Navy on the center gun projectile, and that the theory that a chemical igniter had been used to cause the explosion was extremely doubtful.
caption: USS Mississippi
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