On the morning of December 6, 1917, the French cargo ship SS Mont-Blanc was making her way through the Narrows, the tight channel linking the outer harbour of Halifax, Nova Scotia, with Bedford Basin. Her holds were full of explosives bound for the war in Europe, among them picric acid, TNT and guncotton. Drums of benzol, a highly flammable fuel, were stacked on her deck.
Heading the other way was the Norwegian ship SS Imo, running out empty to pick up relief supplies for Belgium. A string of signals and maneuvers went wrong between the two vessels, and at around 8:45 a.m., Imo struck Mont-Blanc.
The collision itself was fairly mild. What mattered was the fire it started aboard Mont-Blanc. Her crew knew exactly what was below deck, so they abandoned ship and rowed hard for the far shore, shouting warnings that few people on land understood. The burning ship, with no one aboard, drifted toward Pier 6 on the Halifax side.
At about 9:04 a.m., she exploded.
The blast
The Halifax Explosion was the largest human-made explosion before the atomic age. Mont-Blanc was destroyed almost in an instant, and pieces of the ship were hurled long distances. Her anchor shaft came down kilometers away, and a piece of it is still on display at the spot where it landed.
The shock wave flattened much of Richmond, the working-class neighborhood in the city's North End. Across the harbour, the community of Dartmouth took heavy damage as well. Buildings fell in. Stoves tipped over inside homes and set them alight. Windows shattered all over the city.
The explosion also raised a tsunami in the harbour. The water surged over the shore and pulled people into the harbour.
The human cost
About 2,000 people were killed, and roughly 9,000 were injured. A great many of those injuries came from flying glass. The fire on the ship had drawn people to their windows and down to the waterfront to watch, so a large number of them were looking straight toward the harbour at the moment of the blast. Hundreds suffered eye injuries, and many were left permanently blind.
Thousands of people lost their homes. The following day a severe blizzard struck the city, which made the rescue work harder still and left survivors out in the cold.
Vince Coleman
One of the best-known stories from that morning concerns Vince Coleman, a train dispatcher at the Richmond railway station. When he learned that a burning munitions ship was drifting toward the pier, he stayed at his post long enough to tap out a telegraph message warning an incoming passenger train to stop. He was killed in the explosion.
His message is credited with helping to halt incoming trains, and Halifax still honors him today. Accounts vary on the exact wording of the message and on how many trains it affected. His role itself, though, is well documented by the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic and by historians.
The response from Boston
Word reached Boston quickly. Within hours a relief train had been organized and sent north carrying doctors, nurses and supplies, and it had to push its way through the same blizzard. Massachusetts kept sending aid in the weeks that followed.
Every year since 1971, Nova Scotia has sent a large Christmas tree to Boston by way of thanks. The tree is lit on Boston Common. Few disasters have left behind a gesture of gratitude that has lasted this long.
Who was to blame?
An inquiry, the Wreck Commissioner's Inquiry, opened within days. At first it blamed Mont-Blanc's captain and pilot, along with a naval officer responsible for harbour traffic. Those charges did not survive in court.
Later legal proceedings went all the way to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in London, which in the end found both ships at fault. In practice, no one was ever held criminally responsible.
Historians have also pointed to wider problems. In wartime, ships carrying explosives moved through a busy harbour under limited controls, and the public was told little about the risks.
What the disaster changed
The effects of the Halifax Explosion reached well beyond the city itself.
- Medicine. The sheer number of eye injuries helped push forward eye care in Canada. The Canadian National Institute for the Blind was founded in 1918, and the disaster is often cited as one of the influences behind it.
- Disaster response. The relief effort, including the work of the Halifax Relief Commission, became a case study in organized disaster response.
- City planning. The North End was rebuilt, in part with the Hydrostone district, a planned neighborhood of fire-resistant concrete-block homes that is still standing.
- Research. In 1920, a sociologist named Samuel Henry Prince published a study of the disaster, Catastrophe and Social Change, which is often described as one of the first academic studies of disasters.
Comparisons with atomic weapons
The explosion is frequently compared to the early atomic bombs. Its yield is commonly estimated at around 2.9 kilotons of TNT equivalent. The bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945 is usually put at about 15 kilotons. Those numbers help with a sense of scale, but they describe very different kinds of events, so they are best treated as rough comparisons.
How it is remembered
Halifax marks the anniversary every year. A memorial bell tower stands at Fort Needham, a hill overlooking the area where the explosion took place, and a ceremony is held there on December 6 at 9:04 a.m.
The disaster also points to something about wars that is easy to forget. The fighting at the front is only part of it. The ships, factories and harbours that keep a war supplied can be dangerous places in their own right, and the people who live beside them carry some of that risk.
What the record supports
- The time, place and ships involved are thoroughly documented.
- The death toll of about 2,000 is the figure most commonly cited. Some records from 1917 were incomplete, particularly for poorer neighborhoods and for the Mi'kmaw community at Turtle Grove in Dartmouth, which was destroyed.
- The yield is an estimate.
- Individual stories, such as Vince Coleman's, are well attested, though the details can differ from one source to the next.
Sources
- Maritime Museum of the Atlantic, Halifax, "Halifax Explosion" collection and online exhibits.
- Nova Scotia Archives, "Halifax Explosion" records.
- Library and Archives Canada, materials on the Halifax Explosion.
- Samuel Henry Prince, Catastrophe and Social Change (Columbia University, 1920).
- John G. Armstrong, The Halifax Explosion and the Royal Canadian Navy: Inquiry and Intrigue (UBC Press, 2002).
- City of Boston and Province of Nova Scotia, information on the annual Christmas tree gift.