The Great Halifax Explosion

by John U. Bacon

  When the fire grew, the Orrs noticed their classmates and friends dashing down the hill past their new home to get a closer look. So strong was the Haligonians’ sense of security that when Barbara and Ian asked their mother if they could join them to see the burning ship for themselves, their mother gave permission, provided they wore their coats and boots and didn’t get too close.

  Barbara wanted to see if a neighbor friend would join her. Before Ian and Isabel went their own way, Barbara told them, “You go on if you like. We’ll join you in a minute or two.”

  Ian took little Isabel with him, and together they ran straight down Kenny Street toward the waterfront and the crowd around Pier 6. Barbara walked down to Mulgrave Park, which sat just across Campbell Road from Pier 6. She then started walking toward her friend’s house, her high-laced boots crunching the frosty grass, but she did not run. She was too absorbed by the fire rising higher and higher to go very fast.

  The fire roared so loudly, Barbara couldn’t hear anything else. Then, suddenly, the noise stopped. Barbara stood in the middle of the park lawn, mesmerized, and stared at the ship.

  “It was so still, so calm,” Barbara recalled. “This awful column of smoke went up. And then these balls of fire would roll up through it, and then they’d burst. But there was no sound. It was the strangest thing.

  “I stood spellbound in the middle of this field.

  “I thought, ‘Oh, something awful is going to happen.’ ”

  The onlookers, longshoremen, firefighters, and sailors didn’t know that the benzol on Mont-Blanc’s deck was seeping into the hold below. They didn’t know that, a week earlier in Gravesend Bay, stevedores had stored tons upon tons of TNT and picric acid down there. And they certainly didn’t know the fire they were watching on deck was heating up the volatile contents below, minute by minute. Most of the people who did know—Francis Mackey, Captain Le Médec, and his crew—were watching from behind a hill across the Narrows in Dartmouth.

  Lt. Commander James Murray was one of only four people in the Examiner’s Office who knew what Mont-Blanc was carrying, and the only one out on the water that morning. So when he saw that Mont-Blanc had caught fire, he immediately turned his boat, Hilford, back to Pier 9 near his office, hoping to send out a general warning by telephone—if he could get there before Mont-Blanc blew up.

  After docking Hilford at Pier 9, Murray started running up the jetty to his office, but he also sent one of his sailors to the railway dispatch office to warn them of trouble ahead. The sailor did as he was told. As chief clerk of Richmond railway yards William Lovett and train dispatcher Vincent Coleman were sitting at their desks talking about the ship in flames just 200 yards outside their window, their door burst open, giving them a jolt.

  “Everybody out!” the young sailor shouted. “Run like hell! Commander says that bloody ship is loaded with tons of explosives and she’ll blow up for certain.”

  William Lovett (not to be confused with Arthur Lovett, the customs officer who gave Imo clearance) immediately called Henry Dustan, the terminal agent of the Canadian Government Railways, in their new building a couple of miles away in South Halifax and said, “This is Lovett talking. There is a steamer coming into the wharf on fire, loaded with explosives. There is likely to be an explosion.”

  Coleman, who’d already been a hero that summer when he hopped onto a runaway engine and stopped it before it collided with a suburban train, commanded his staff to run for safety. Coleman led the way, until he remembered the overnight express train No. 10 from Saint John, New Brunswick, was scheduled to arrive at the North Street Station in Richmond, right by Pier 6, in just a few minutes, with 300 passengers.

  If Ernest Barss faced the horror of the Great War over several months, and the crew of Mont-Blanc wrestled with the Great War’s power for four days, Francis Mackey and Vincent Coleman both had to face life-and-death decisions in a matter of seconds. Mackey ultimately ran for the rowboat, but Coleman ran in the opposite direction. He stopped, turned back toward his office, and rattled off an urgent telegraph to the train station just 4 miles around the bend in Rockford, the last stop before Richmond’s North Street Station, hoping to stop the No. 10 train before it left.

  Coleman’s telegram, sent at 8:49, marked the first word to anyone outside Halifax of potential trouble ahead. But he didn’t know whether his message had been received, if it was passed on to the appropriate people, or if it would do anyone any good. But he was pretty sure it would be his last.

  “Hold up the train,” he wrote. “Ammunition ship afire in harbour making for Pier 6 and will explode. Guess this will be my last message. Good-bye, boys.”

  PART V

  9:04:35 A.M.

  Chapter 18

  One-Fifteenth of a Second

  At 9:04:35 a.m., while firefighters and crews from other ships battled the blaze, the fire on Mont-Blanc either penetrated the magazines storing the TNT and picric acid or finally nudged the temperature in the cargo hold just past the 572-degree-Fahrenheit threshold needed to detonate picric acid. Regardless, the result was the same.

  The instant Mont-Blanc’s cargo ignited, it started a chemical chain reaction an immense string of dominoes knocking the next one over in rapid succession, with each domino self-contained microscopic bomb that is the molecule of a high explosive.

  To try to grasp the magnitude of this unprecedented explosion, Robert MacNeil offers this simple comparison: when a rifle is fired, one ounce of explosive powder in the shell burns rapidly, fomenting hot gases. These gases expand, forcing the bullet out of the shell—and in a hurry. Mont-Blanc held the equivalent of 83 million ounces of gun powder, which did collectively what one rifle shell does, with 83 million times more force, shooting out in all directions at once.

  The detonation itself took one-fifteenth of a second, five times faster than the blink of an eye. The epicenter of the explosion instantaneously shot up to 9,000 degrees Fahrenheit, about six times hotter than molten lava.

  The explosion started in the gigantic steel casement of the cargo hold, which had been packed tight and was far too small to contain such an exponential expansion. The blast shot outward in all directions at 3,400 miles per hour, or four times the speed of sound. It tore through the ship’s steel hull like wet tissue paper, converting the vessel into a monstrous hand grenade. The heat vaporized the water surrounding the ship and the people trying to tie her up and put out the fire. The remains of these victims were never found because there were no remains to find.

  Small chunks of metal from the ship crashed through roofs, punctured other ships, and killed and maimed people both nearby and hundreds of yards away. Retired fireman John Spruin, the man who had heard the fire alarm, put on his old uniform, and driven his horse-drawn pumper to the site, was ripped apart by shrapnel and killed instantly.

  Mont-Blanc disintegrated, leaving only two recognizable parts: the anchor shank, which weighed half a ton and was found 4 miles away in the woods of the Northwest Arm; and an iron deck cannon, intended to protect the ship from U-boats, which landed 3 miles away in Little Albro Lake behind Dartmouth, with its barrel drooping like a warm candle.

  The explosion also produced something we recognize all too readily today: a mushroom cloud. The extremely high temperatures involved created a gas fireball filled with vaporized particles of the ship, the cargo, oil, coal, and humans, skyrocketing directly upward to form the stalk of the cloud, which rose 2 miles into the air. When the blistering-hot debris reached its zenith, they cooled, slowed down, and spread out, making it look something like a mushroom cloud, though it lacked the perfect symmetry nuclear bombs produce.

  The cloud was so big and thick that it made it seem as though dusk had arrived at 9:05 a.m. When the cloud could no longer hold the particles, it started shedding the oil and debris, which changed the color of the cloud from black to white.

  This attracted the attention of observers miles away, who were often unaware of the cloud’s significance. Rear Admiral B. M. Cha
mbers, who was saying good-bye to his wife outside their home near the Royal Artillery Park on the south side of the Citadel, heard the explosion and looked toward the Richmond docks. He noticed, “there, right in front of the house . . . was rising into the air a most wonderful cauliflower-like plume of white smoke, twisting and twirling and changing color in the brilliant sunlight of a perfect Canadian early winter morning.”

  Another wrote to an American friend, “The smoke cloud following the explosion was a wonderful spectacle and for a few minutes we never realized the seriousness of it.”

  The seriousness was clear enough to those beneath it. When the cloud released its contents—including the carbon by-products of the explosion, the fragments of bunker coal, and the steel pieces and particles of Mont-Blanc itself, plus tons of oil and airplane fuel—it created what witnesses described as “dark rain.” But anyone caught underneath the fallout could tell you it wasn’t water coming down but a thick, black precipitation of hot oil and soot, like liquid tar, mixed with heavy, scalding shrapnel that cut, burned, and blackened everything in its path.

  The eruption also sent ground waves through the bedrock at about 13,000 miles per hour, which caused bystanders to feel a “thump” and houses to shake. These were picked up by the stylus on the new seismograph at Dalhousie University, a mile and a half away. People in Sydney, Cape Breton, about 250 miles northeast, felt the mysterious shock. One hundred ten miles away in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, plates and glasses shook for a few seconds, as if from an earthquake far away.

  The explosion itself and the ground waves were quickly followed by the third force, air waves, concentric circles of gas bubbles racing outward from ground zero like those seen in 1950s instructional films about atomic bombs. This invisible force initially traveled at supersonic speeds before dropping to a sonic velocity of 756 miles per hour, similar to what atomic bombs generate.

  Ian Forsyth, a student at the Halifax County Academy, not far from the Citadel, felt two blasts as the school principal was reading Psalm 103.

  As a father has compassion on his children,

  so the LORD has compassion on those who fear him;

  for he knows how we are formed,

  he remembers that we are dust.

  The life of mortals is like grass,

  they flourish like a flower of the field;

  When they heard a “dull boom” coming from the north produced by the ground wave, “the principal looked up and we focused our eyes on him.” After a moment’s hesitation, he returned to Psalm 103.

  the wind blows over it and it is gone,

  and its place remembers it no more.

  A second later the air wave hit, throwing windows inward and bringing plaster down on the students.

  Although the air wave was invisible, its effects were not. As it moved out from the epicenter, the walls of air simply blew buildings apart, without leaving a trace. Also called shock waves, and concussions, they smashed the Halifax City Hall clock tower in the center of downtown, 2 miles from Pier 6, stopping its arms at 9:06. “The city hall itself is something of a wreck,” wrote Stanley K. Smith, the editor of the Saint John (New Brunswick) Daily Telegraph. “The face of the clock, though this building is over 2 miles from the scene of the explosion, is blown in and the hands register the hour and minute at which the horror fell upon the city.”

  Although the vibrations traveled more quickly through the earth than the air, the air blast created far more damage. “The enormous volume of gaseous products of the explosion,” the authors of Ground Zero write, “rushed outward from the doomed ship, pushing the air and water ahead of them.”

  Whatever the initial explosion had left intact, the shock wave seemed determined to finish off. Mont-Blanc’s concussion rushed outward from the epicenter at 2,100 miles per hour, seven times faster than the most powerful tornado. It shattered virtually every window in Halifax and blew out some as far as Truro, Nova Scotia, 50 miles away.

  Because of the speed and power of the shock wave blasting the homes, however, “shattered” isn’t quite the right word. Many witnesses said the windows—tens of thousands of them—simultaneously “popped” like plastic packing bubbles, sending daggers of glass inward toward the onlookers who had been watching the ship from their factories, schools, and bay windows. The last thing hundreds of people saw was the burning Mont-Blanc, followed by an incredible burst of white light, eclipsing everything else. The next second, their faces, eyes, and bodies were riddled with glass shards, leaving them bleeding, blind, or dead.

  When the powerful concussion collided with the slope of Richmond, it hit the ironstone and granite bedrock that lay just two feet below the topsoil and deflected upward toward Fort Needham park.

  On its way to Fort Needham, the blast wave picked up debris from crushed buildings—and often the people in or near them—and sent them up the hill. This “push broom” effect, in which the invisible air wave knocked down everything in its path including hundreds of homes, drove those pieces in a solid front to the next obstacle, plowing over the people in its way and then continuing toward its next target.

  For people still at home, their walls and windows came crashing in on them before they could comprehend what was happening. The blast struck when most homeowners in Halifax had just stoked their furnaces and finished making breakfast and coffee on their stoves, which provided more deadly raw materials for the shock wave to pick up and send hurtling into the next home. Fire never had a better friend than the air wave radiating outward from the explosion’s epicenter and igniting dry wooden homes filled with horsehair couches and varnished floors.

  The explosion, the ground waves, and the devastating air waves were quickly followed by a tsunami. The explosion created a bowl-shaped hole in the water, then sent gigantic waves in all directions.

  Some observers said the explosion literally parted the sea, momentarily exposing the harbor floor. This sudden displacement created a thirty-five-foot wave that crashed against Richmond thirty feet up the hill, flooding the foundations of all the buildings that had been torn open by the initial blast and the shock wave that followed. The tsunami then ran up the bedrock surface of the slope, rolling up the hill thirty feet more, flooding still more buildings and homes, and leaving people in its path thousands of feet from where they had been standing a few seconds earlier, trying to figure out what the hell had just happened—provided they had survived all that. While they were trying to put it all together, some were pulled back down the hill by the undertow, and drowned in the harbor.

  The shock waves and tsunami also went in the other direction across the Narrows, crashing against the Dartmouth shore a quarter-mile away. Phillip Mitchell, the grandfather of Ethel, who had danced on Highflyer the night before, lived in Dartmouth. When Mont-Blanc started burning, Phillip, who was lame, stood on the Dartmouth shore near an electric wire pole with a loose board at the foot of it. When the ship exploded, Phillip grabbed the board and held it over his head, which shielded him from the “black rain” that soon came down from the sky. Seconds later, the tsunami headed his way, still about twenty feet high when it hit Dartmouth. Mitchell dropped the board and wrapped his arms around the pole. The wave went way over his head, but as it receded he looked behind him to see that it had soaked the boxcar on the track twenty feet above him. The second and third waves followed, each smaller but still more than powerful enough to toss a man to the ground and pull him out to sea. Phillip kept clinging to the pole until the last wave passed, and he was still standing.

  The blast crushed about half of Dartmouth, including all of Turtle Grove, where the Mi’kmaq lived and which took the brunt of the tsunami. George Dixon worked at a small shipbuilding plant near the Mi’kmaq, where the tsunami rumbled toward him like boiling liquid filled with pieces of metal. Single-story homes were swamped from the roof to the basement.

  The Mi’kmaq homes were destroyed, killing at least nine people, including Jerry Lone Cloud’s two daughters. The village, whic
h he had been begging the government for months to move to a reservation, had effectively been wiped out. Starting with Halifax’s first battle against Louisbourg in 1758, every conflict between Europeans in North America had squeezed the Mi’kmaq onto smaller and smaller parcels of land, but the explosion and tsunami finally finished off their little village.

  When the black cloud fell to earth, the sun returned, exposing the truth of what the explosion had done. Pier 6 was gone, leaving only a bank of mud behind, while the materials that comprised Piers 7, 8, and 9 and the buildings near them had all been scooped up the hill. Trees and telegraph poles that ran along the railroad tracks around Richmond and Africville had been snapped like twigs and added to the pile.

  All told, the explosion turned two square miles of this calm, orderly, postcard-pretty town into a nightmare of chaos, destruction, and death in a split second.

  The explosion’s force threw railroad tracks into knots, crushed concrete factories, reduced wooden houses to kindling, and ripped open cement schools, brick churches, and stone houses. It destroyed 6,000 buildings, rendering 25,000 people—almost half the population of Halifax—homeless in one ear-splitting whoosh.

  The cataclysm killed 1,600 instantly. Some were destroyed on the spot, while others were thrown half a mile, often shot out of their shoes, which were left where they had been standing a moment before. At least 300 died when their homes, factories, or schools were demolished by the blast or the bubble. Corpses were scattered throughout the rubble as though a mannequin warehouse had been bombed, leaving bodies contorted in strange positions, often with their clothes torn off, and many missing arms, legs, or even heads.