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The Day the Gazelle Blew Apart: Tied Valve, Vanished Engineer
The Day the Gazelle Blew Apart: Tied Valve, Vanished Engineer
The morning steam was a howl heard from a neighboring steamer's breakfast table, and one minute later both boilers exploded - hurling a fragment across the Willamette and killing at least 24 people. Who tied the safety valve shut to force speed, and how did the chief engineer disappear from a doomed deck before the blast?
In this episode, we tell what happened on April 8, 1854 aboard the new sidewheeler Gazelle, how the tied safety valve led to a catastrophic double boiler explosion, and why the surviving records still leave the…
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