THE HALIFAX EXPLOSION OF 1917               

I doubt that there is anyone alive today that remembers the Halifax explosion when it occurred. My grandparents would have remembered it but only a year after the explosion occurred since they were missionaries deep inside of Nigeria at that time. My father would have remembered reading about it when was living in England as a 12-year-old child. My mother would have heard about when she was six years old while living with friends of my grandparents in Toronto. They are all deceased. I have to presume that anyone that is still alive when the explosion took place are at  least one hundred years of age in which there is about 450,000 of them still alive today world-wide. Some of them of them may have actually survived the explosion as one-year-old babies. It was a recent article that was published on December 1^st, 2017 in the Toronto Star and written by Bret Bundale and  others that reminded me of that horrific explosion. I am using some of their material to describe to you what happened that fateful day in Halifax which occurred on December 6, 1917, exactly one hundred years ago to the day this article was published.

A boy pressed his small face up to a cold window pane. It was an early winter morning, and two ships in Halifax harbour were exchanging a cacophony of horn blasts. Vessels use these loud whistles as they pass or approach one another. Little did he know that those two vessels that were heading towards each other would collide and it would result in an enormous maritime disaster for everyone in Halifax and the surrounding area. If the boy was still looking out of the window, he would have been killed or had his eyes punctured by the flying glass caused by the explosion.

The SS Mont-Blanc, which was a French cargo ship  that was  laden with  high explosives, collided with the Norwegian vessel SS Imo in the Narrows, which is a strait connecting the upper Halifax Harbour to Bedford Basin where many ships are moored. (SS means Steam Ship)

A fire on board the French ship ignited her cargo, causing a large explosion that devastated the Richmond district of Halifax. nearly 2,000 people were killed by the blast, debris, fires or collapsed buildings, and an estimated 9,000 others were injured. The blast was the largest man-made explosion prior to the development of nuclear releasing the equivalent energy of roughly 2.9 kilotons of TNT 

The Mont-Blanc was under orders from the French government to carry her cargo of high explosives from New York via Halifax to Bordeaux, France. At roughly 8:45 am, she collided at low speed, of approximately one knot (1.2 mph or 1.9 km/h), with the empty   Imo, ship that was chartered by the Commission for Relief in Belgium to pick up a cargo of relief supplies in New York. The resulting fire on board the French ship quickly grew out of control. Approximately 20 minutes later at 9:04:35 am, December 6, 1917, the SS Mont-Blanc exploded.      

Nearly all structures office buildings and homes alike within an 800-metre (half-mile) radius, including the entire community of Richmond, were obliterated.

As smoke rose into the air, similar to smoke emerging from a volcano, the pressure wave  snapped trees, bent iron rails, demolished buildings, grounded vessels, and scattered fragments of Mont-Blanc for kilometres. Hardly a window in the city proper survived the blast. Across the harbour, in Dartmouth, there was also widespread damage. A tsunami created by the blast wiped out the community of Mi'kmaq First Nations people who had lived in the Tufts Cove area for generations.

The exact number killed by the disaster is unknown. The Halifax Explosion Remembrance Book, an official database compiled in 2002 by the Nova Scotia Archives and Records Management, identified 1,950 victims.  As many as 1,600 people died immediately in the blast, tsunami, and collapse of buildings. The last body, a caretaker killed at the Exhibition grounds, wasn’t discovered until the summer of 1919. An additional 9,000 were injured. 1,630 homes were destroyed in the explosion and fires, and another 12,000 damaged; roughly 6,000 people were left homeless and 25,000 had insufficient shelter. The city's industrial sector was in large part gone, with many workers among the casualties and the dockyard was heavily damaged, 

Relief efforts began almost immediately, and hospitals quickly became full. Rescue trains began arriving from across eastern Canada and the north-eastern United States, but were impeded by a blizzard. Construction of temporary shelters to house the many people left homeless began soon after the disaster. The initial judicial inquiry found Mont-Blanc to have been responsible for the disaster, but a later appeal determined that both vessels were to blame. 

An estimated $35 million in damages resulted ($569 million today). About $30 million in financial aid was raised from various sources, including $18 million from the federal government, over $4 million from the British government, and $750,000 from the state of Massachusetts. (Bless the people of that state)                

The City of Dartmouth was not as densely populated as Halifax and was separated from the blast by the width of the harbour, but it still suffered heavy damage. Almost 100 people were estimated to have died on the Dartmouth side. Windows were shattered and many buildings were damaged or destroyed, including the Oland Brewery and parts of the Starr Manufacturing Company. The Nova Scotia Hospital was the only hospital in Dartmouth and many of the victims from Halixax and Dartmouth were treated there.  

There were small enclaves of Mi'kmaq in and around the coves of Bedford Basin on the Dartmouth shore. Directly opposite to Pier 9 on the Halifax side sat a community in Tufts Cove, also known as Turtle Grove. The settlement, dating back to the 18th century, had been a subject of controversy because white settler landowners wanted to remove the Mi'kmaq residents. In the years and months preceding the explosion, the Federal Department of Indian Affairs had been actively trying to force the Mi'kmaq to give up their land, though this had not occurred by the time of the explosion.  

The fire aboard Mont-Blanc drew the attention of many onlookers on both sides of the harbour. The physical structures of the settlement were obliterated by the explosion and tsunami. While a precise Mi'kmaq death toll is unknown, records show that nine bodies were recovered, and the settlement was not rebuilt in the wake of the disaster. The Halifax Remembrance Book lists 16 members of the Tufts Cove Community as deceased, although not all the dead listed as in Tufts Cove were Indigenous. Their survivors were housed in a racially segregated building under generally poor conditions and eventually dispersed around Nova Scotia.    

The black community of Africville, on the southern shores of Bedford Basin adjacent to the Halifax Peninsula, was spared the direct force of the blast protected by the raised ground to the south. However, Africville's small and frail homes were heavily damaged by the explosion. Families recorded the deaths of only five residents. Africville received little of the donated relief funds and none of the progressive reconstruction invested in other parts of the city after the explosion. Racism was prominent in those years.

Many people in Halifax at first believed the explosion to be the result of a German attack. The Halifax Herald continued to propagate this belief for some time, while suggesting that Germans had mocked victims of the explosion.

While John Johansen, the Norwegian helmsman of the Imo, was being treated for serious injuries sustained during the explosion, it was reported to the military police that he had been behaving suspiciously. Johansen was arrested on suspicions of being a German spy when a search turned up a letter on his person, supposedly written in German. It turned out that the letter was actually written in Norwegian,

Soon after following the explosion, most of the German survivors in Halifax had been rounded up and imprisoned. Eventually the fear dissipated as the real cause of the explosion became known, although rumours of German involvement persisted. The war with Germany ended eleven months later.

What was learned later was what really occurred just before the collison of the two ships.

The Imo was granted clearance to leave Bedford Basin by signals from the guard ship HMCS Acadia at approximately 7:30 on the morning of December 6 with Harbour Pilot, William Hayes on board. The ship entered the Narrows well above the harbour's speed limit in an attempt to make up for the delay experienced in loading her cargo. 

The Imo approached the American tramp steamer, Clara  that was  being piloted up the wrong (western) side of the harbour. The pilots agreed to pass starboard-to-starboard. Soon afterwards though, the Imo was forced to head even further towards the Dartmouth shore after passing the tugboat Stella Maris, which was travelling up the harbour to Bedford Basin near mid-channel. Horatio Brannen, the captain of Stella Maris, saw the Imo approaching at excessive speed and ordered his ship closer to the western shore to avoid a collision between the two ships.

Francis Mackey, an experienced harbour pilot, had meanwhile boarded the Mont-Blanc on the evening of  December 5, and had  asked about ‘special protections’ such as a guard ship, given the SS Mont-Blanc's cargo, but no protections were put in  place.

The Mont-Blanc started moving at 7:30 am on December 6^th and was the second ship to enter the harbour as the anti-submarine net between Georges Island Pier 21 had already opened in the morning.  

The Mont-Blanc headed towards Bedford Basin on the Dartmouth side of the harbour. Mackey kept his eye on the ferry traffic between Halifax and Dartmouth and other small boats in the area.

 He first spotted the Imo when she was about 0.75 miles (1.21 km) away and became concerned as her path appeared to be heading towards his ship's starboard side, as if to cut him off his own course. Mackey gave a short blast of his ship's signal whistle to indicate that he had the right of way, but was met with two short blasts from the Imo, indicating to the approaching vessel that it would not yield its position.

The captain ordered the Mont-Blanc to halt her engines and angle slightly to starboard, closer to the Dartmouth side of the Narrows. He let out another single blast of his whistle, hoping the other vessel would likewise and move to starboard, but was again met with a double-blast from the Imo as to say it wouldn’t do what was requested by the other ship.

Crewmen on nearby ships heard the series of signals and realizing that a collision was imminent, gathered to watch as the Imo bore down on the Mont-Blanc. Though both ships had cut their engines by this point, their momentum carried them right on top of each other even at their slow speeds.

Unable to ground his ship for fear of a shock that would set off his explosive cargo, Mackey ordered his ship to steer hard to port and subsequently his ship crossed the Norwegian ship's bows in a last-second bid to avoid a collision. The two ships were almost parallel to each other, when the Imo suddenly sent out three signal blasts, indicating the ship was reversing its engines. The combination of the cargo-less ship's height in the water and the transverse thrust of her right-hand propeller caused the ship’s prow to swing into the French vessel's No. 1 hold on her starboard side.

The collision occurred at 8:45 am. While the damage to the Mont Blanc was not severe, it toppled some of its barrels that broke open and flooded the deck with benzol gasoline that quickly flowed into the hold. As the Imo's engines kicked in, she quickly disengaged, which created sparks inside the Mont-Blanc's hull. These ignited the vapours from the benzol. A fire started at the water line and travelled quickly up the side of the ship as the benzol spewed out from crushed drums on the Mont-Blanc's decks. The fire quickly became uncontrollable.

Surrounded by thick black smoke, and fearing that the flammable gasoline and explosive contents of the ship would explode almost immediately, the captain ordered the crew to abandon ship. That was a very smart decision on his part since to remain on board the ship would be fatal to him and his crew.  

Meanwhile, a growing number of Halifax citizens gathered on the street or stood at the windows of their homes or businesses to watch the spectacular fire. That was very stupid on their part.

 The frantic crew of the Mont-Blanc shouted from their two lifeboats to some of the other vessels that their ship was about to explode, but they could not be heard above the noise and confusion. The lifeboats made their way safely across the harbour to the Dartmouth shore as their abandoned ship continued to drift and beached herself at Pier 6 near the foot of Richmond street.

While towing two barges at the time of the collision, Stella Maris responded immediately to go to the fire,  by first anchoring the barges and then steaming back towards Pier 6 to spray the burning ship with their fire hose. The tug's captain, Horatio Brannen, and his crew realized that the fire was too intense for their single hose and backed off from the burning SS Mont Blanc.

They were then approached by a whaler from HMS Highflyer and later a pinnace (a light boat propelled by oars or steam) belonging to HMCS Niobe. Captain Brannen and Albert Mattison of the Niobe agreed to secure a line to the French ship's stern so as to pull it away from the pier to avoid setting it on fire. The five-inch (127-millimetre) hawser (rope) initially produced was deemed too small and he ordered for a ten-inch (254-millimetre) hawser.  It was at this point in time that the blast occurred.

At 9:04:35 am, the out-of-control fire on board the Mont-Blanc finally set off her highly explosive cargo. The ship was completely blown apart and a powerful blast wave radiated away from the explosion at more than 1,000 metres (3,300 ft) per second. Temperatures of 5,000 °C (9,030 °F) and pressures of thousands of atmospheres accompanied the moment of detonation at the centre of the explosion. 

White-hot shards of iron fell down upon Halifax and Dartmouth. The Mont-Blanc's forward 90 mm gun, its barrel melted away, landed approximately 5.6 kilometres (3.5 mi) north of the explosion site near Albro Lake in Dartmouth, while the shank of the ship’s anchor, weighing half a ton, landed 3.2 kilometres (2.0 mi) south at Armdale. Needless to say, there was nothing left of the Niobe or its crew. No one that close to such a blast would even be aware as to what had just happened to them as their deaths would be instantaneous.

The blast killed all but one on the whaler and everyone on the pinnace and 21 of the 26 men on Stella Maris which ended up on the Dartmouth shore, severely damaged. The captain's son, First Mate Walter Brannen, who had been thrown into the hold by the blast, survived, as did four others of the Stella Maris.  All but one of the Mont-Blanc crew members survive because of its captain’s wise decision to leave the ship before it exploded.

The blast travelled through the earth at nearly 23 times the speed of sound and was felt as far away as Cape Breton (207 kilometres or 129 miles) and Prince Edward Island (180 kilometres or 110 miles). Windows nearly 100 kilometres away were cracked.

An area of over 160 hectares (400 acres) was completely destroyed by the explosion, while the harbour floor was momentarily exposed by the volume of water that vaporized. A tsunami was formed by water surging in to fill the void, rose as high as 18 metres (60 ft) above the high-water mark on the Halifax side of the harbour. The Imo was carried onto the shore at Dartmouth by the 15-metre tsunami. Drowning survivors of the blast and bodies near the shore were swept out to sea.

Over 1,600 people were killed instantly and 9,000 were injured, more than 300 of whom later died. Every building within a 2.6-kilometre (1.6 mi) radius, over 12,000 in total, was destroyed or badly damaged. Hundreds of people who had been watching the fire from their homes were blinded when the blast wave shattered the windows in front of them. Stoves and lamps overturned by the force of the blast sparked fires throughout Halifax, particularly in the North End, where entire city blocks were caught up in the inferno, trapping residents inside their houses making it impossible to be rescued.  

Firefighter Billy Wells, who was thrown away from the explosion and had his clothes torn from his body, described the devastation survivors faced.  He said, "The sight was awful, with people hanging out of windows dead. Some with their heads missing and some thrown onto the overhead telegraph wires." He was the only member of the eight-man crew of the fire engine Patricia to survive.

Large brick and stone factories near Pier 6, such as the Acadia Sugar Refinery, disappeared into unrecognizable heaps of rubble, killing most of their workers.  The Nova Scotia cotton mill located 1.5 km (0.93 mile) from the blast was destroyed by fire and the collapse of its concrete floors. The Royal Naval College of Canada building was badly damaged, and several cadets and instructors were seriously maimed.

Local author and historian Dan Soucoup said. “That night, a blizzard blanketed the city with more than 40 centimetres of snow. It got cold and the snow buried bodies. The next three days were a horror story, They found children two or three days later huddled and frozen to death in the snow."

The death toll could have been worse had it not been for the self-sacrifice of an Intercolonial Railway dispatcher, Patrick Vincent (Vince) Coleman, operating at the railyard about 750 feet (230 m) from Pier 6, where the explosion occurred. He and his co-worker, William Lovett, learned of the dangerous cargo aboard the burning Mont-Blanc from a sailor and began to flee.

Coleman remembered, however, that an incoming passenger train from Saint John, New Brunswick, was due to arrive at the railyard within minutes. He returned to his post alone and continued to send out urgent telegraph messages to stop the train. Several variations of the message have been reported, among them this from the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic: "Hold up the train. Ammunition ship afire in harbor making for Pier 6 and will explode. Guess this will be my last message. Good-bye boys."

Coleman's message was responsible for bringing all incoming trains around Halifax to a halt. It was heard by other stations all along the Intercolonial Railway, helping railway officials to respond immediately. Passenger Train No. 10, the overnight train from Saint John, is believed to have heeded the warning and stopped a safe distance from the blast at Rockingham, saving the lives of about 300 railway passengers. Coleman was killed at his post as the explosion ripped through the city. He was honoured with a Heritage Minute in the 1990s and inducted into the Canadian Railway Hall of Fame in 200. What took them so long?

First rescue efforts came from surviving neighbours and co-workers who pulled and dug out victims from buildings. The initial informal response was soon joined by surviving policemen, firefighters and military personnel who began to arrive, as did anyone with a working vehicle; cars, trucks and delivery wagons of all kinds were enlisted to collect the wounded A flood of victims soon began to arrive at the city's hospitals, which were quickly overwhelmed. The new military hospital, Camp Hill, admitted approximately 1400 victims on December 6.

Young children struggled to comprehend being suddenly orphaned. Wives mourned their husbands, killed instantly in harbourfront factories. Soldiers grappled with the insurmountable trauma of watching homes burn to the ground, families still inside, the scent of burning flesh in the air.

A soldier walking through the flattened Richmond neighbourhood a day after the explosion heard a faint whimper coming from a burned-out house. He walked through the charred debris and there, protected under an ashpan, he found a baby girl. The 23-month-old orphan, nicknamed 'Ashpan' Annie, was burned but alive.

In some cases, entire families were killed. In others, one survivor lived on. One woman, Mary Jean Hinch, lost 10 children and her husband in the explosion. Pregnant and alone, she was rescued after being pinned under lumber for 24 hours. She and her unborn son were the only survivors in her family.

Stories of the disaster got out, generosity flooded in. Children in Brantford, Ont., gave up their Christmas presents to raise money for the children of Halifax, donating $15,000 for relief efforts. People in Truro, Nova Scotia lined the tracks at the rail station waiting to help the waves of refugees that arrived from Halifax in need of food and shelter.

The city's hospitals were inundated with wounded survivors and several emergency medical stations were set up in schools and clubs. Although aid arrived from across Canada and the United States—particularly Boston, a city Nova Scotia still thanks every year with a Christmas tree—many of the first medical responders on the scene hailed from nearby communities. Doctors, nurses and firefighters from across the Maritimes showed up to take on the harrowing task of aiding the injured.

George H. Cox, a doctor and eye specialist from New Glasgow, about 150 kilometres northeast of Halifax, arrived at the Rockingham train station outside Halifax the next day. With the tracks into the city destroyed, he trudged through deep snow to Camp Hill Hospital. Men, women and children lined the corridors, many with glass, pottery, brick, mortar and nails stuck in their eyes. He quickly realized that the large number of ocular injuries required his expertise. He worked for 40 hours straight removing eyes. He had a bucketful of eyes. He then slept for three hours and then continued treating his patients.

Halifax's mortuaries were also overwhelmed. Bodies, charred and frozen, were stacked like firewood outside funeral homes. Many unidentified corpses were stored in a school basement. Funerals went on for weeks, and services for the unidentified bodies drew thousands of mourners. Some surviving family members couldn’t recognize their deceased loved ones.

As the body count climbed, bereaved locals, politicians and newspaper editors began questioning the cause of the blast and demanding to know who was responsible for the calamity. Details of the collision emerged during a judicial inquiry and legal proceedings, although few got the answers they were seeking.

“The Mont Blanc did have the right to the channel. But the SS Imo was stuck on a course it couldn't get out of,” according to Joel Zemel, an author and historian. “By the time they realized it, it was too late to avoid an accident. Everything that could go wrong did go wrong.”

The initial investigation pinned the blame on three men—the Mont Blanc's captain, its pilot and the Royal Canadian Navy's chief examining officer in charge of the harbour. Given the Mont Blanc's explosive cargo, it was said that the burden rested with its crew to avoid a collision at all costs. I am not convinced that the Mont Blanc's crew could have done anything to prevent the collision or the explosion. 

In the end, the Supreme Court of Canada and the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in London found both the Mont Blanc and Imo were equally to blame for the navigational errors that led to the crash. However, no one was ever convicted for the disaster.

However, questions persisted, like why the crew of the Mont Blanc didn't scuttle the ship, or steer it out to sea. They were criticized heavily for being cowards. But it would have taken six hours to sink the boat. They only had 10 seconds, not 19-and-a-half minutes to react. It would have been impossible to change the course in time.

As an aside, in 1954 when I and 800 other sailors were on HMCS Ontario, (an eleven ton warship) our ship was temporarily stuck on a sandbar in the middle of a very wide river heading towards a major city in Argentina when a huge freighter rammed into our ship’s stern, damaging one of our two props.  The freighter was at fault since our ship couldn’t move out of the way. Fortunately,  The impact actually moved us off the sandbar.

The Mont Blanc’s cargo included liquid and dry picric acid, TNT, gun cotton, benzol and other ammunition. The ship was a floating bomb. The crew could have tried to warn other ships and the city  however, they didn't want to die. It was run for their lives.

I am not convinced that warning the city of the potential danger of an explosion would have made that much of a difference.  How would the city officials get the message to the thousands of people living in the city before the ship exploded? The crew had every right to flee the ship as quick as they could when they ealkized the explosion was imminent.  

Despite the enormity of the catastrophe, Halifax was forced to slowly pick up the pieces and move on. Swaths of the city had been levelled, and rebuilding was necessary to assuage the misery and anguish of survivors. Tents on the Commons had given way to rows of wood and tarpaper tenements near the current site of the Halifax Forum, but more permanent homes were desperately needed to be built.

Prime Minister Sir Robert Borden promised the full resources of the federal government would be placed at the city's disposal, said Barry Cahill, author, researcher and member of the Halifax Explosion Advisory Committee.

He said that nearly $30 million was set aside for the Halifax Relief Commission to assist with medical care, rebuild infrastructure and establish pensions for injured survivors.

One of the commission's lasting legacies is Canada's first public-housing project, the Hydrostone Development not far from the blast site itself. They had the good sense to retain a famous English town planner, Thomas Adams. The English-style garden suburb he designed was completed in 1920.

As homes, churches, schools and factories were rebuilt; Halifax residents pushed the terror of the explosion to the back of their minds, in part out of necessity. With hard times facing them ahead, they struggled to get on with their lives. Fortunately for them, the Great Depression hadn’t arrived as of then.  It would come to them eleven years later.

There were many other ships exploding after the Halifax Explosion but none of those later explosions did the same kind of damage and bring about the same loss of life like the one in Halifax that occurred in 1918.