REISSUE OF RECENT ARTICLES MAKING HISTORY COME NEWSLETTER ALIVE PRESENTS THE EXPLOSION IN 1917 THAT LEVELED HALIFAX
Driver Billy Wells was opening a fire hydrant at the time of the blast. He recounted the day’s events for the Mail Star, in its edition on 6 October 1967:
…That's when it happened ... The first thing I remember after the explosion was standing quite a distance from the fire engine ... The force of the explosion had blown off all my clothes as well as the muscles from my right arm...
Badly injured, Billy was then nearly drowned as the tsunami came over him. He explained:
...After the wave had receded I didn't see anything of the other firemen so made my way to the old magazine on Campbell Road ... The sight was awful ... with people hanging out of windows dead. Some with their heads off, and some thrown onto the overhead telegraph wires ... I was taken to Camp Hill Hospital and lay on the floor for two days waiting for a bed. The doctors and nurses certainly gave me great service.
The blast was the world’s largest pre-atomic explosion. Parts of the Mont-Blanc ( ship ) were blown 1,000 feet into the air, some coming down over 3 miles away. The water in the harbor evaporated, and the inrushing sea caused a tsunami 60 feet high which swept into the town of Halifax.
The cloud from the explosion rose over 20,000 feet, and the blast destroyed or damaged every home and factory within a sixteen-mile radius – a total of 12,000 buildings. The explosion was felt in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, about 130 miles to the north and even as far away as Cape Breton Island, over 200 miles to the east. In Halifax, over 1,700 people were killed instantly and probably over 9,000 injured.
As World War I raged in Europe, the port city of Halifax bustled with ships carrying troops, relief supplies, and munitions across the Atlantic Ocean. The harbor at Nova Scotia comprises an inner basin able to accommodate more than 100 ships, and invisible from the open ocean (and from enemy submarines). The narrow entry passage is flanked by industrial and cargo handling facilities. In the First World War (as well as the Second), Halifax Harbor was a major venue for assembling convoys from America to Europe.
On the morning of December 6th, 1917, the steamship Mont-Blanc left its mooring in Halifax harbor for New York City, inbound from the Atlantic with war material for France, it entered the Halifax Harbor Narrows. The Norwegian ship Imo left Bedford Basin, outbound for New York to load supplies for occupied Belgium. In homes, schools, and factories lining the shores, people started a new day in a busy wartime port. When Imo crossed The Narrows and struck Mont-Blanc’s bow, worlds collided at the same time. What was the SS Mont-Blanc carrying?
Unbeknownst to others in the harbor, the Mont-Blanc was carrying 2,925 metric tons (about 3,224 short tons) of explosives—including 62 metric tons (about 68 short tons) of guncotton, 246 metric tons (about 271 short tons) of benzol, 250 metric tons (about 276 short tons)… Mont-Blanc’s holds were stuffed with explosive trinitrotoluene (TNT), guncotton and picric acid, as well as highly flammable benzol in drums on deck. Yet it flew no flag to indicate it was a munitions ship, due to fear of attracting the attention of patrolling German subs.
Collision and aftermath
The Pilot of the Mont-Blanc gave a single blast on the ship’s whistle to indicate (correctly) that the Mont-Blanc had right of way, which was answered by two from the Imo indicating she was not willing or not able to yield position. Angling towards the right (the near shore) Mont-Blanc again whistled, hoping that the Imo would do likewise and also steer to its right. The Imo again whistled twice. Hearing the series of blasts on the whistles and realizing a collision was about to take place many sailors gathered on nearby ships to watch. Both ships had cut their engines, but the forward momentum of each ship could not be overcome. A last-minute maneuver by the Mont-Blanc when she steered to port (left – away from the shore) seemed to have worked (the pilot was desperate to avoid grounding the ship as this was likely to detonate the explosives) and the ships started to pass each other. At this point, the Imo made a fatal mistake and reversed her engines. This caused the Imo’s bows to swing round and she carved into the side of the Mont-Blanc by about nine feet.
Compounding the mistakes already made, the Imo reversed, causing sparks to be created. This ignited vapor released from the damaged cargo and a fire broke out within the Mont-Blanc. Not surprisingly, the crew of the Mont-Blanc rapidly headed for the lifeboats in order to escape from the ship which was likely to explode at any moment.
The tug Stella Maris, under Captain Horatio Brannan, was towing a string of barges at the time of the collision; she responded immediately to the fire, and began dousing down the Mont-Blanc with her hoses.
The Mont Blanc was propelled toward the shore by its collision with the Imo, and the crew rapidly abandoned the ship, attempting without success to alert the harbor of the peril of the burning ship. Spectators gathered along the waterfront to witness the spectacle of the blazing ship, and minutes later it brushed by a harbor pier, setting it ablaze. The Halifax Fire Department responded quickly and was positioning its engine next to the nearest hydrant when the Mont Blanc exploded at 9:05 a.m. in a blinding white flash. A roiling cloud of hot gas rose high above the blast. Chunks and shards of the ship fell across an eight-kilometer range. Vaporized fuel and chemicals from the explosion fell as rain, coating people and wreckage with an oily film. Richmond and the Mi’kmaw community of Turtle Grove were struck by the full force of the blast. At least 9000 were injured and many more were made homeless. A supersonic blast wave killed more than 1,600 people instantly, destroying their internal organs or throwing them like rag dolls against brick and stone walls, fences and trees, or mortally wounding them with flying shards of glass, wood and metal. Buildings and houses were blown apart. Whole families were killed as their houses collapsed one story onto another. People were crushed and battered and slashed, on the street, in schools and factories, foundries, breweries, rail yards and dockyards.
Sailors on ships in the harbor were killed by the dozen in a hail of white-hot shrapnel. Aboard HMCS Niobe, Seaman Bert Griffith saw Mont-Blanc vanish, then was hurled on deck and “saw something coming, can’t describe it… There was an awful noise, [then] all kinds of things falling. It was shrapnel and bits of the side of the ship,” he wrote in a letter to his wife, quoted by his grandson John G. Armstrong in a 1998 article in The Northern Mariner.
Even in Lawrencetown, 20 kilometers away, people “felt something like a blow in the face and then a sort of recoil or pull back in the opposite direction,” wrote Graham Metson in The Halifax Explosion: December 6, 1917.
A 5,000°C fireball vaporized water around the Mont-Blanc and created a six-metre wave that roared across the harbor, flinging ships out of the water and sweeping sailors to their deaths. It swamped the land, climbing about 18 metros above the high-water mark, drowning blast survivors and causing more buildings to collapse like grain before a gust of wind, as one witness described it.
Mont-Blanc’s holds were stuffed with explosive trinitrotoluene (TNT), guncotton and picric acid, as well as highly flammable benzol in drums on deck. Yet it flew no flag to indicate it was a munitions ship, due to fear of attracting the attention of patrolling German subs.
The ship was a floating bomb, every substance in the cargo engineered to blow up, noted Laura M. MacDonald in Curse of the Narrows: The Halifax Explosion 1917. When the ships collided, Mont-Blanc’s hold was pierced, fire started and quickly spread, igniting vapors from the benzol. In minutes, the deck—and the drums of benzol—were engulfed in flames. When the benzol reached its boiling point, the drums began launching like a series of rockets into the air, trailing smoke and bursting into fire aloft.
The Explosion immediately disrupted communications linking North America, Nova Scotia, and the world overseas. Roadways, telegraph and telephone lines, submarine cables were disrupted by the blast. Rail links to the piers, and many of the piers themselves, were destroyed. The blast was powerful enough to transport a 1000-pound section of the Mont Blanc's anchor 2 miles away. Within and around the epicenter, the death rate was estimated to be 29 per 1000. Sixty percent of the deaths were male and 40% were female. Forty percent of deaths were under 20 years of age, 50% between 20 and 60, and 10% over 60. Data regarding injuries are limited; an estimated 20% of those permanently disabled were blinded by broken glass—they apparently had been behind windows watching the Mont Blanc in flames, when it exploded.
For 800 meters around the blast site, all the buildings were obliterated and everything within 1.5 kilometers was destroyed. The blast smashed railway cars and mangled the rails. Factories and foundries and houses collapsed. Farther away, roofs were torn off, chimneys collapsed. Glass shattered even in city neighborhoods farthest away. In Truro, N.S., nearly 100 kilometers away, hotel windows were blown out, buildings jarred, and items jostled from shelves. The explosion was heard in Charlottetown and on Cape Breton Island, nearly 300 kilometers distant—and far, far out to sea.
Workers who survived the blast rushed home only to find their houses gone, loved ones dead, dying, injured or missing. In the wreckage, coal- and wood-burning stoves had toppled and embers from furnaces scattered, setting houses and buildings afire.
“It is beyond me to describe the absolute terror of the situation,” wrote HMCS Acadia sailor Frank Baker in his diary, recently donated to the Dartmouth Heritage Museum. “For miles around, nothing but a flaming inferno.”
“Fires broke out on ships all around and hundreds of small crafts had been blown to hell. The sea presented an awful scene of debris and wreckage,” wrote Baker. “What…had been beautiful vessels were now terrible wrecks, their crews all dead and bodies, arms, etc. were floating around in the water.”
Rescue and Relief
People in the districts immediately surrounding the devastated area provided the first relief. Many first responders were soldiers and sailors from Canadian, British, and United States’ ships in port.
Trinidad-born Dr. Clement Courtenay Ligoure treated survivors from the ruined factories, railyards, and rehomesof the city’s north end for weeks after the blast. Denied privileges in the city’s medical facilities because of his race, he opened a private hospital. Dr. Ligoiure was a well-known public figure, recruiting for the No. 2 Construction Battalion and editing The Atlantic Advocate, one of Canada’s first magazines produced by and for people of color.
Six relief trains arrived from Nova Scotia and New Brunswick on the day of the blast. As news of the Halifax Harbor Explosion spread, people all over the world acted to relieve the mass suffering it had caused.
The Canadian Army Medical Corps helped American navy personnel convert the USS Old Colony into a floating hospital, and sailors sent ashore returned with injured. HMS Changuinola sent out rescue and work crews. The ship’s lieutenant rounded up four cutters to take the injured by water to docks closest to hospitals and soon tugs were doing similar duty, wrote Joseph Scanlon in an article in The Northern Mariner.
As the initial response played out, deputy mayor Henry Colwell (the mayor was out of town) knew help was needed to organize rescue efforts and make longer-range plans for survivors, soon to face the privations of winter. And to identify and bury the dead. Colwell turned to the military; 5,000 army personnel were stationed at the garrison, and there were hundreds of naval crew on ships and shore.
“For the Garrison, the explosion was in some ways their finest hour…and they proved their mettle under conditions as trying as anything experienced by their battle-hardened comrades,” wrote James F.E. White in The Garrison Response to the Halifax Disaster, 6 December 1917.
On the water, the Mont-Blanc’s captain ordered the crew, unable to fight the fire, to abandon ship. They shouted warnings as they rowed furiously for shore, but crews of vessels responding to render aid did not understand, nor did people ashore as the sailors raced for cover—because the words were spoken in French.
Aftermath
For some time there was a belief that the explosion was the work of German agents, and a Norwegian sailor on the Imo was arrested as he was thought to be German. The Captain of the Mont-Blanc was charged with manslaughter but was acquitted at his trial. In 1919 the Supreme Court of Canada ruled the Imo and Mont-Blanc were equally to blame for the tragedy.
There are a number of sites commemorating the explosion, the largest of which is the Halifax Explosion Memorial Bell Tower.
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