Guess you learned, and saw examples of, how large Corporate and Governmental organizations never acknowledge that they were at fault. But under duress, they immediately try to find scapegoats. These organizations are incapable of self investigation, as the lead investigator knows that if he finds any fault by the organization, his career is finished. And this was true for the Navy Chief investigator. He knew he had to produce an investigation that proved the Navy was faultless, cleaner than clean, bluer than blue, and all the fault was all with those troublesome E-3's and their rascally E-6's.
Reality was quite different. The turret crew was not fully trained or even experienced. It was interesting to find out turret crews did not have well planned, well provisioned, rigorous training courses. Training films were WW2 vintage and paper documentation were sparse. Seems turret training was ad hoc and rather informal. The rammer of the center gun had never before rammed gun powder bags, it was his first day, first time in ramming 500 lbs of gunpowder into a 16 inch gun. All the turret equipment was 1943 WW2 vintage, nothing had been replaced with modern equipment, controls, or wiring. As an example, there was a report that a WW2 era light switch had arced in the turret. If that electrical arc had ignited a powder bag, everyone in the turret would have died. Foreign object control was lacking, crew were bringing matches and lighters into the turret! The ram was a hydraulic mechanism, the oil filter was found full of particles, and another ram in that turret had previously jammed, only to release unexpectedly, and “take off”. The ramming mechanism did not have automatic stops, ram depth and speed depended on hand signals from other crew members. If the new ram man had a jam, and this would have been new and unexpected experience to him, and then, if he kept applying power to the rammer, it could have taken off creating an over speed, over ram accident. Whether that happened is unknown, but what is known is that the equipment was antique and deteriorating. Due to the dilapidated equipment, safety was compromised because the whole process was subject to errors, and the Navy was not providing tight oversight and management to ensure well trained and experienced crews in the turret. Even with the best trained crews, random equipment failures would have still happened. Those old battleships were worn out when they were put into moth balls, and it is evident that their refurbishment was nothing more than duct tape and bailing wire.
Navy leadership did not know that compression of the powder bags would create burning particles. The faster the ram speed, and the more the powder bags were compressed, the probability of gun powder bag ignition increased. Independent investigators calculated ignition probabilities. The Navy had not investigated the safety, the process, of turret operation prior to the explosion, to determine if the loading process was error prone or dangerous. It is likely the corporate memory of two WW2 era turret explosions had been forgotten, or excised from memory. The gunpowder used in these bags was a large stick powder, sometimes called pellets. The powder bags were divided into sections and to make the bag exactly 100 lbs, there was a “trim section”. This section, which was on the end of a powder bag, was filled with whatever weight of powder pellets necessary to bring the bag to 100 lbs. It turns out that these powder pellets would assume random orientations, random distributions, some orientations and distributions were highly likely to self ignite if compressed. Independent investigators calculated a 16% percent chance of ignition, given a high speed over ram event, from a random selection of five bag charges. The probability of igniting a five bag powder train with at least one bag with one to twelve trim bag pellets was nominally 0.087 (one in eleven) in a high speed ram.
Instead, of acknowledged any of this, the Navy decided to create a story that the Turret Chief had planted a bomb in the powder bags, to commit suicide.
And, then the Navy went after those who publicly disagreed with their fiction.
Remembering the USS Iowa explosion and aftermath
Back in 2010 I could tell from the TNO website (a Dutch munitions company) the shock of Dutch munitions rapidly deteriorating in the Middle East. Had to be a total surprise. The generations that fought Rommel at Tobruk were all gone, and the corporate memory was gone. For more than a half century the Dutch were making munitions for Dutch, or at least Europeans, in nice, cool and cold, Europe. Then the stuff is shipped to Saudi , the UAE, and Iraq, and munitions that should have had a 20 year storage life and it was going bad in years. Been a lot of changes on the TNO web page since 2010. It used to be English/Dutch, now all the english language materials on the TNO web site have gone to Dutch and the once open source information is behind firewalls. I suppose there is no profit in educating the masses.
The Naval Insensitive Munitions expert I met had a PhD in Chemical Engineering and really knew his stuff. Navy Insensitive Munitions personnel are obviously still proud of their knowledge and expertise. One of them created this web site:
The History of Insensitive Munitions
I look over this material, and it seems that the scope of their work is incomprehensible to most shooters, particularly the deniers who want their ammunition and gunpowder to be immortal.
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