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10/28/2003 Archived Entry: "Halifax Explosion"
December 6, 1917 dawned clear and sunny in Halifax. Before darkness fell, more than a thousand people would die, with another thousand to follow......In the early hours of Dec. 6, the Belgian relief ship Imo, rushing to leave the harbour, collided with the Mont Blanc, a French munitions ship carrying a cargo of extraordinarily destructive power; 600 barrels of aviation fuel and thousands of tons of TNT. The ensuing explosion leveled the north end of Halifax, leaving 2,000 people dead, 9,000 injured and hundreds blinded by flying glass...
...Some pieces were tiny; others were huge. Part of the anchor hit the ground more than 4 kilometers away on the far side of Northwest Arm. A gun barrel landed in Dartmouth more than 5 kilometers from the harbour...
...The explosion sent a white cloud billowing 20,000 feet above the city. For almost two square kilometers around Pier 6, nothing was left standing...
Buildings within a radius of half a mile of the explosion were totally destroyed and that up to one mile they were very largely rendered uninhabitable and dangerous. No section of Halifax city escaped serious damage…
More or less severe damage was caused as far away as Sackville and Windsor Junction, 9 or 10 miles (away from) the explosion… At Truro, 62 miles, and New Glasgow, 78 miles, the shock was sufficient to jar buildings very appreciably, and even to shake articles from shelves. Even as far away as Charlottetown, 135 miles, and North Cape Breton, 225 miles, the explosion was distinctly felt or heard.Source: Prof. Howard Bronson of Dalhousie University, in a paper for the Royal Society of Canada, 1918.
The Halifax explosion was the largest man-made explosion until nuclear bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It's amazing to me that so few people know about it; so few in Canada, let alone the rest of the world. I know about it because my grandfather is a survivor and he's told me stories about it. The explosion and it's aftermath are his first memories.
The CBC has been running a drama based on the fictionalized stories of some of the survivors and it's also got a documentary on tonight about the disaster. The Halifax Explosion web site on the CBC is also amazing - it has some great background material: clips from radio and film, old photographs and letters etc. I spent a couple of hours going through it last night. It's a fascinating story - even if you don't have any relatives that were there.
Photography credits:
Street of Destruction: The National Archives of Canada - C-003625B
Explosion Cloud: Maritime Museum of the Atlantic Collection, US National Archives - print # 16S-11-1S8A-1S