Originally Posted by Lichen

It's not a boat.



Yes, they blamed it on a gay suicidal sailor.

But the general opinion is that the rammer was at fault for over ramming the gun powder bags. Let me explain.

Look at that simplified gun loading animation above.

The green thing is the projectile. The yellow things are gunpowder bags. each is rammed into the breach by that plunger that pops out from the left. A sailor controls that plunger thru hydraulic controls, he is called the 'rammer'.

After ramming the projectile, each of the powder bags is rammed. At the time of the explosion, the rammer on duty was new and had less than an hours practice ramming with dummy loads. He himself said that he was not ready for the real-thing, ramming live powder. He probably rammed one of the powder bags too hard or too fast, igniting them. The resulting explosion is what we saw in the iowa explosion video.