USS Iowa gun turret explosion

Tom recalls the 1989 Iowa turret explosion (attributed at the time to a sailor in a failed relationship lighting off a powder charge inside a 16-inch gun). In 1985 Tom spent summers at David Taylor in Annapolis, where the Navy was trying to figure out how to repair the turret — but no one in 1985 knew how to make the welds being made in 1945. The repair was abandoned and all battleships decommissioned within five years.

[Tom hands the sample around with a rag.] You can pass it around with this old rag to keep from cutting yourself or scratching the table. That's the type of weld they used to put in armor plate on battleships. You don't use battleships anymore, but it wasn't that many years ago — twenty or twenty-five — there was the guy who blew up his partner on the Iowa. This seaman had a boyfriend, they broke up, and he wanted to kill his boyfriend, so he lit off one of the charges inside one of the sixteen-inch guns on the Iowa. Did a fair amount of damage when you light that off inside the gun turret.

1989 turret explosion. Navy could not repair because they had lost the heavy-section peening technology for 14-inch armor steel welds; the turret was abandoned rather than repaired. Used to teach the disappearance of mid-century heavy-section welding expertise.

I'm pretty sure it was back in the 80s — this may be before any of you were born — the USS Iowa battleship was down in Puerto Rico. Anybody know this story? No. So apparently they had a couple of gay sailors, and one of them had been jilted by the other, so he decides to blow up the turret that his former — I guess we call them partner — is in. He does, and it blows up the turret on the Iowa down in Puerto Rico — set off one of the 16-inch shell bags, or a couple of them. The U.S. Navy didn't know how to repair it.