As was the case with the City Point explosion, a government board of inquiry came to the wrong conclusion. At City Point, the cause was "contraband labor" smoking near the munitions vessel. In the Chenango incident, the cause was bad boilers built by incompetent contractors.
The National Academy of Sciences’ Committee on the Explosion on the United States Steamer Chenango
During the Civil War the Government ordered the construction of 27 light-draft side-wheel steamers, intended for use as gun-boats. Among these was the Chenango. These vessels were known as “double-enders,” or “double-bowed,” from the circumstance that they were fitted with a bow and rudder at each end. The Chenango was built at a private shipyard in New York. The boilers were constructed at the Morgan Iron Works and were of a kind known as the Martin boiler, which had vertical tubes. A large number of vessels in the Navy were fitted with boilers of this type, while others had boilers with horizontal tubes, opinion being divided as to the relative merits of the two forms.
The Chenango was delivered at the Brooklyn Navy Yard early in 1864 and placed in command of Lieutenant Fillebrown. On the afternoon of April 15 the vessel left the Navy Yard for Sandy Hook to join the Onondaga for blockade service. She steamed slowly past Governor’s Island and entered the Narrows, when one of her boilers exploded, scalding thirty-two of the crew of whom twenty-eight died.
This terrible accident “appalled the whole country,” and an inquest was immediately held in New York to ascertain if possible the circumstances under which it occurred. A very large number of witnesses were examined, and the testimony given occupies 141 printed pages. The jury was unable to agree and two verdicts were rendered, the majority holding that the accident resulted from “the bursting of one of the boilers, which was caused by a greater tension exerted on the boiler than it could bear, the result of the unproper bracing,” while the minority asserted that the boiler “exploded from low water and superheated steam.”
The specification for the boilers were prepared by the Navy Department, while the boilers themselves, as already mentioned, were built at private iron works in New York. It is probable that the majority verdict was unacceptable to the Navy Department because it could be interpreted as implying that the specifications were faulty. Doubtless on this account the Department, on April 30, 1864, through its Assistant Secretary, authorized the President of the Academy to appoint a committee to make an independent investigation of the cause of the accident. He appointed J.F. Frazer, Fairman Rogers and L.M. Rutherfurd on May 2, 1864, as the committee. The committee visited the Brooklyn Navy Yard and made a painstaking examination of the boi8lers, “one of the committee having entered the boilers and made a minute and thorough examination of their internal condition.” The detailed report submitted on August 5, 1864, contains the following conclusion; “The committee are unanimously of opinion that the rupture of the shell of the boiler of the Chenango was caused by the insufficiency of the vertical stays, by which the top of the boiler was fastened to the tube-boxes to withstand the pressure for which the boiler was intended, and that these stays were both deficient in number and injudiciously arranged,” and again “the committee are of opinion that the boiler was not braced in accordance with the specifications, and that this difference was the cause of the disaster.” [Rep. Nat. Acad. Sci. for 1864, p. 13.] This report clearly throws the main responsibility for the accident on the private constructors rather than on the engineers of the Navy Department, through it would seem that the Government inspectors were not entirely absolved thereby. As a slight concession to the makers of the boilers, the committee in closing points out a certain fault in the specifications which they had corrected.