May 26, 1954 while cruising off Narragansett Bay fluid in a catapult on the USS Bennington CVA-20 exploded.
This set off a series of secondary explosions which killed 103 of the crew. An additional 201 were wounded in the blast. This was the second time a ship named Bennington had exploded. On July 21, 1905 the gunboat USS Bennington PG-4 exploded in San Diego killing sixty-two, the cause was a boiler explosion. The explosion on Bennington CVA-20 was the largest peacetime disaster in U. S. naval history to this date.
|
