I'll See You In Halifax
My Canadian friends will certainly sip their Molsons and roll their eyes politely at my sudden enlightenment to a compelling piece of their history, but I'll admit, in my 32 years I'd never heard of the Halifax Explosion of 6 December 1917. Not once, never. No teacher ever mentioned it - I would have remembered. My brain always latches on vividly to stories of great disasters, and this was one of the most terrible disasters to befall a western city - ever. It was a terrible bookend to the Galveston Hurricane of 1900 - but Halifax was a city destroyed by fire instead of water and wind.
Briefly, here's what happened:
At the height of World War I, Halifax, Nova Scotia is one of the busiest, economically booming ports on the Atlantic Seaboard. Port regulations are few and relegated to an honor system, even though this was five years after the Titanic disaster. The laissez-faire approach to traffic management led to a collision between two ships. One of these ships was a Royal Navy munitions transport vessel, filled to capacity with the most lethal explosives available at the time. To avoid any detection by German ships, the munitions ship gave no outward evidence of its cargo.
The munitions ship caught fire, and hundreds of people from Halifax and the surrounding towns and settlements ringed the harbor to watch the burning ship. Only a handful of people knew what was on the ship, and though many tried to warn the spectators, it was to little avail.
Without warning, the ship exploded with unimaginable force, shattering its steel hull into thousands of pieces and wiping much of Halifax, Dartmouth, and the surrounding communities literally off the map. It is estimated nearly 1,000 people died instantly from the force of the blast - still the largest non-nuclear man-made explosion known in human history. Entire families were wiped out in an instant. The blast itself was 1/2 mile in diameter. The explosion was heard and felt up to 200 miles away.
Much of the damange came from flying glass, blinding those spared in the blast. The force of the explosion was so great that it sent a tsunami wave out across the harbor, inundating much of the blast area in several feet of freezing water. The next day, the entire area was hit with a blizzard. Eventually, nearly 3,000 people died as a result of the Halifax Explosion. And have you ever heard of it?
There's much more to the story, and I'll spare you my recount in favor of far superior ones at the CBC and the Wikipedia. But an interesting side-note - this is why I love the associative nature of the web. I came upon this story like so:
Looking for some advanced RSS readers, I try out Amphetadesk, which is bundled with a huge opml file of feeds. One of these feeds had a link to a website that is assembling a directory of bloggers along with their years of birth, in the hopes of painting a picture of the Internet as an age-diverse place. Looking up their oldest members, I found the blog of 94-year-old Donald Crowdis, one of the world's oldest known bloggers and - the Wikipedia says - one of the few remining survivors of, yep, the Halifax Explosion of 1917.
.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halifax_explosion
http://www.cbc.ca/halifaxexplosion/index.html
Briefly, here's what happened:
At the height of World War I, Halifax, Nova Scotia is one of the busiest, economically booming ports on the Atlantic Seaboard. Port regulations are few and relegated to an honor system, even though this was five years after the Titanic disaster. The laissez-faire approach to traffic management led to a collision between two ships. One of these ships was a Royal Navy munitions transport vessel, filled to capacity with the most lethal explosives available at the time. To avoid any detection by German ships, the munitions ship gave no outward evidence of its cargo.The munitions ship caught fire, and hundreds of people from Halifax and the surrounding towns and settlements ringed the harbor to watch the burning ship. Only a handful of people knew what was on the ship, and though many tried to warn the spectators, it was to little avail.
Without warning, the ship exploded with unimaginable force, shattering its steel hull into thousands of pieces and wiping much of Halifax, Dartmouth, and the surrounding communities literally off the map. It is estimated nearly 1,000 people died instantly from the force of the blast - still the largest non-nuclear man-made explosion known in human history. Entire families were wiped out in an instant. The blast itself was 1/2 mile in diameter. The explosion was heard and felt up to 200 miles away.
Much of the damange came from flying glass, blinding those spared in the blast. The force of the explosion was so great that it sent a tsunami wave out across the harbor, inundating much of the blast area in several feet of freezing water. The next day, the entire area was hit with a blizzard. Eventually, nearly 3,000 people died as a result of the Halifax Explosion. And have you ever heard of it?
There's much more to the story, and I'll spare you my recount in favor of far superior ones at the CBC and the Wikipedia. But an interesting side-note - this is why I love the associative nature of the web. I came upon this story like so:
Looking for some advanced RSS readers, I try out Amphetadesk, which is bundled with a huge opml file of feeds. One of these feeds had a link to a website that is assembling a directory of bloggers along with their years of birth, in the hopes of painting a picture of the Internet as an age-diverse place. Looking up their oldest members, I found the blog of 94-year-old Donald Crowdis, one of the world's oldest known bloggers and - the Wikipedia says - one of the few remining survivors of, yep, the Halifax Explosion of 1917.
.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halifax_explosion
http://www.cbc.ca/halifaxexplosion/index.html
Labels: halifax_explosion halifax
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