Halifax Explosion 90 Years Ago Still Teaches

Ninety years ago today, a blast that set off 400,000 tons of TNT -- the strongest explosion known until the atomic bomb -- obliterated Halifax Harbor in Nova Scotia. It happened because a World War I French munitions ship collided with a Norwegian vessel in a waterway known as The Narrows. It was an accident, but 2,000 people died and about 9,000 were maimed. The accident taught the Red Cross and other emergency workers a lot about dealing with major catastrophe. This article first appeared in The Press Republican in Plattsburgh, New York.

Horrendous Tragedy Met With Quiet Heroism

At 9:05 a.m. December 6, 1917. Dishes rattle in the cupboards of the MacDougall home in Nova Scotia. Family members don’t know it yet, but the tremors are from a blast a hundred miles away in Halifax. An accident has set off 400,000 pounds of TNT fueled by other volatile substances. In time, it would be known as the most powerful man-made explosion before the nuclear age. Its devastation perhaps exceeds that of more famous civic calamities — the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake or Great Chicago Fire of 1871 — with more than 2,000 fatalities, 9,000 maimed and wounded and two square kilometers of buildings leveled. The MacDougalls, who one day became the grandparents of Jeanie Roberts, an upstate New York Red Cross director, find telegraph and telephone communication severed. Train service, too, is canceled, but William MacDougall, a crane operator for Canadian National Railroad, is asked to report to work. He is issued two bottles of brandy to help him cope with what he is about to see ...

It was an accident linked to a war on another continent. A loaded French munitions ship collided with a Norwegian vessel setting off for New York to pick up World War I relief supplies.
At 7:30 a.m. on a cold, clear December morning, the French ship Mont Blanc crept into Halifax’s Bedford Basin to wait for her convoy. To do so, it had to pass through a tight neck of water between Halifax and Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, known as The Narrows. The relief ship Imo sailed out of the harbor at a fast clip.
Although proceeding slowly, the Mont Blanc had not been flying a regulation red warning flag indicating her dangerous cargo. The ships’ crews failed to understand each other’s signals and intents several times. Finally, the Imo’s panic reversal of engines caused its bow to swing right and strike the Mont Blanc.
The collision cut a hole in the ship’s side, missing the TNT, but hitting picric acid stored directly beneath drums of benzol. Sparks from the collision started a fire.
In addition to the 200 tons of TNT, the ship carried 2,300 tons of wet and dry picric acid, 10 tons of gun cotton and benzol that weighed in at 35 tons, an extraordinary explosive cocktail.
Well aware of the potential of its ship’s cargo, the crew of the Mont Blanc immediately abandoned ship. As they rowed toward Dartmouth in lifeboats they waved frantically and screamed warnings toward those on shore. They were not understood.
One woman looking out on the bay with her baby in her arms was astonished when one of the sailors clambered up the shoreline hill, grabbed her child and ran for the bushes. His action probably saved their lives.
Propelled toward Halifax by the impact of the collision, the ship drifted to rest at busy Pier 6. Its flames grew. People, including many children on their way to school, continued to come down to the pier to watch. Others stood at the windows of their homes overlooking the bay.
The Halifax Fire Department responded quickly, but was just positioning an engine at a hydrant when the Mont Blanc disintegrated in a blinding white flash. It was 9:05 a.m.
Three hundred twenty five acres of the city’s industrial north end was laid waste. More than 1,900 people died instantly. Among the 9,000 or so injured, eye damage was horrifyingly widespread. Shattering glass — hardly a pane remained intact anywhere in Halifax or Dartmouth — pierced and cut with astonishing severity. Two hundred fifty eyes were so damaged they would need to be removed. Thirty seven people were left completely blind. Twenty-five limbs had to be amputatedand bewilderment prevailed in the city as survivors began to try to cope in the aftermath. Parents and children were separated.
According to the Nova Scotia Museum in Halifax, 1,600 homes were destroyed and 6,000 people left without shelter.
Since the area used wood and coal as heat, many furnaces continued to burn after homes were gone.
Oily soot got into wounds.
There were rows and rows of babies in emergency shelters that nobody claimed.
And the next day, 16 inches of snow came down on the devastation.
For Jeanie Roberts of Plattsburgh, New York, a native of Halifax, the World War I-era tragedy has both a personal and professional connection.
She is proud to know that her grandfather MacDougall helped with the relief effort. He never talked about it, but she knows the gentle man who used to give her great big peppermints on Sunday and fill a well in her porridge with molasses, did his part with quiet dedication.
As a crane operator, he very likely helped in excavations that turned up some grisly sights.
His daughter, Roberts’s Aunt Sheila, believes the experience traumatized him, but, like those who never talk about their combat duty, he didn’t come home with the gory details.
Stories of the explosion were inevitable, however, as Roberts grew up.
Her friend, Ann, told of her grandmother, only 8 or 9 at the time of the explosion. She was watching from her home’s French doors and windows overlooking Bedford Basin. Part of the hull of the exploding ship hit the front of her house, breaking all the glass. Like so many, she lost an eye.
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As executive director of the North Country Chapter of the American Red Cross, Roberts has studied how the community administered disaster relief and how Halifax coped.
The disaster gave rise to triage, the method of sorting victims by the intensity of their medical need.
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Word of the explosion reached Boston the same morning. By nightfall, a train loaded with relief supplies, medical personnel and members of the city’s Public Safety Committee, left for Halifax.
The American Red Cross pitched in with it’s first international relief effort, Roberts said. It sent a train-load of first-aid supplies and living necessities.
Help poured in from all over the world.
Nearby areas in Nova Scotia responded with astonishing speed. When they heard of overcrowded hospitals and shelter, they opened all possible buildings to the disaster refugees. Some were put on trains to other cities.
"Doctors and nurses worked tirelessly into the night for days and days," Roberts said.
The MacDougall family lived in Stellarton, where Roberts’s father, aunts and an uncle lived as children. Aunt Shelia grew up to be a nurse, Roberts said, and told her she remembers the first time she gave an antibiotic — many years after the tragedy.
"I realized then why so many people died," Roberts said. “They didn’t have drugs to fight infection.”
Within two months, 1,500 victims had been buried, many unidentified. Other victims were discovered in the spring, when excavation was easier.
Some 3,000 homes were repaired in the first seven weeks. In the following cold month of January, the construction of temporary apartments went up at the rate of one every hour. A relief committee provided clothing, money and furniture, and it continued in existence for nearly 59 years.
The Canadian government sent $18 million immediately; Britain contributed $5 million.
But that Massachusetts relief train, with its unstinting volunteers — and $750,000 in donated money and goods — remains a generosity that still touches the hearts of Halifax residents, survivors and their children and grandchildren.
Each Christmas, a huge tree glitters in Boston’s Prudential Plaza — a gift from the people of Halifax.
sees her native city, a city she lived in for 20 years, as setting a brave example of human tenacity. It rebuilt. It recovered. And it changed.
The community came together — in much the same way Plattsburgh reacted during a recent Ice Storm; the way New York City pulled together after 9/11. “Positive things come from that,” she said. “It changes the way you move forward."
In rebuilding 328 houses closest to the explosion, Halifax designed forward-thinking, living space.
The houses were built from cement blocks known as hydrostones and had gardens with trees in front and modern plumbing and electricity. The area, known as the Hydrostone, is considered one of the more attractive and desirable residential areas in the city. There is a lesson here, Roberts says.
The quality of life we have here is not an accident. It’s something we all work at. Fifty years from now, the quality of life will be what we made it today."
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In 1951, William MacDougall died. Aunt Sheila found the two bottles of brandy, dated 1917, in the back of his closet. He never opened them.
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