Halifax Explosion

Dartmouth lies on the east shore of Halifax Harbour, and Halifax is on the west shore. By 1917, "Halifax's inner harbour had become a principal assembly point for merchant convoys leaving for Britain and France." Halifax and Dartmouth had thrived during times of war; the harbour was one of the British Royal Navy's most important bases in North America, a centre for wartime trade, and a home to privateers who harried the British Empire's enemies during the American Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, and the War of 1812.

The completion of the Intercolonial Railway and its Deep Water Terminal in 1880 allowed for increased steamship trade and led to accelerated development of the port area, The British garrison left the city in late 1905 and early 1906, and the Canadian government took over the Halifax Dockyard (now CFB Halifax). This dockyard later became the command centre of the Royal Canadian Navy (RCN) on its founding in 1910.

Just before the First World War, the Canadian government began a determined, costly effort to develop the harbour and waterfront facilities. The outbreak of the war brought Halifax back to prominence. As the RCN had virtually no seaworthy ships of its own, the Royal Navy assumed responsibility for maintaining Atlantic trade routes by readopting Halifax as its North American base of operations. In 1915, management of the harbour fell under the control of the RCN; by 1917, the naval fleet in Halifax was growing, including patrol ships, tugboats, and minesweepers.

The population of Halifax/Dartmouth had increased to between 60,000 and 65,000 people by 1917. Convoys carried men, animals, and supplies to the European theatre of war. The two main points of departure were in Nova Scotia at Sydney on Cape Breton Island and Halifax. Hospital ships brought the wounded to the city, so a new military hospital was constructed.

The success of German Untersee-boat attacks on ships crossing the Atlantic Ocean led the Allies to institute a convoy system to reduce losses while transporting goods and soldiers to Europe. Merchant ships gathered at Bedford Basin on the northwestern end of the harbour, which was protected by two sets of anti-submarine nets and guarded by patrol ships of the RCN.

The convoys departed under the protection of British cruisers and destroyers. …

The Norwegian ship SS Imo had sailed from the Netherlands en route to New York City to take on relief supplies for Belgium, under the command of Haakon From. The ship arrived in Halifax on 3 December for neutral inspection and spent two days in Bedford Basin awaiting refuelling and supplies. Though she had been given clearance to leave the port on 5 December, Imo's departure was delayed because her coal load did not arrive until late that afternoon. The loading of fuel was not completed until after the anti-submarine nets had been raised for the night. Therefore, the vessel could not depart until the next morning.

The French cargo ship SS Mont-Blanc arrived from New York late on 5 December, under the command of Aimé Le Medec. The vessel was fully loaded with the explosives trinitrotoluene (TNT) and picric acid, the highly flammable fuel benzol, and guncotton. She intended to join a slow convoy gathering in Bedford Basin readying to depart for Europe but was too late to enter the harbour before the nets were raised. Ships carrying dangerous cargo were not allowed into the harbour before the war, but the risks posed by German submarines had resulted in a relaxation of regulations.

Navigating into or out of Bedford Basin required passage through a strait called the Narrows. Ships were expected to keep close to the side of the channel situated on their starboard ("right"), and pass oncoming vessels "port to port", that is to keep them on their "left" side. Ships were restricted to a speed of 5 knots (9.3 km/h; 5.8 mph) within the harbour.

Imo was granted clearance to leave Bedford Basin by signals from the guard ship HMCS Acadia around 7:30 on the morning of 6 December, with Pilot William Hayes on board. The ship entered the Narrows well above the harbour's speed limit in an attempt to make up for the delay experienced in loading her coal. Imo met American tramp steamer SS Clara being piloted up the wrong (western) side of the harbour. The pilots agreed to pass starboard-to-starboard. Soon afterwards, Imo was forced to head even further towards the Dartmouth shore after passing the tugboat Stella Maris, which was travelling up the harbour to Bedford Basin near mid-channel. …

First rescue efforts came from surviving neighbours and co-workers, who pulled and dug out victims from buildings. The initial informal response was soon joined by surviving policemen, firefighters, and military personnel who began to arrive, as did anyone with a working vehicle; cars, trucks and delivery wagons of all kinds were enlisted to collect the wounded. A flood of victims soon began to arrive at the city's hospitals, which were quickly overwhelmed. The new military hospital, Camp Hill, admitted about 1,400 victims on 6 December.

Firefighters were among the first to respond to the disaster, rushing to Mont-Blanc to attempt to extinguish the blaze before the explosion even occurred. They also played a role after the blast, with fire companies arriving to assist from across Halifax, and by the end of the day from as far away as Amherst, Nova Scotia, (200 kilometres or 120 miles) and Moncton, New Brunswick, (260 kilometres or 160 miles) on relief trains. Halifax Fire Department's West Street Station 2 was the first to arrive at Pier 6 with the crew of Patricia, the first motorized fire engine in Canada. In the final moments before the explosion, hoses were being unrolled as the fire spread to the docks. Nine members of the Halifax Fire Department lost their lives performing their duty that day.

Royal Navy cruisers in port sent some of the first organized rescue parties ashore. HMS Highflyer, along with the armed merchant cruisers HMS Changuinola, HMS Knight Templar, and HMS Calgarian, sent boats ashore with rescue parties and medical personnel and soon began to take wounded aboard. A US Coast Guard cutter, USRC Morrill, also sent a rescue party ashore. Out at sea, the American cruiser USS Tacoma and armed merchant cruiser USS Von Steuben (formerly SS Kronprinz Wilhelm) were passing Halifax en route to the United States. Tacoma was rocked so severely by the blast wave that her crew went to general quarters. Spotting the large and rising column of smoke, Tacoma altered course and arrived to assist rescue at 2 pm. Von Steuben arrived a half-hour later. …

The exact number killed by the disaster is unknown. The Halifax Explosion Remembrance Book, an official database of the Nova Scotia Archives and Records Management, identified 1,782 victims. As many as 1,600 people died immediately in the blast, tsunami, and collapse of buildings. The last body, a caretaker killed at the Exhibition Grounds, was not recovered until summer 1919. An additional 9,000 were injured; 1,630 homes were destroyed in the explosion and fires, and another 12,000 damaged; roughly 6,000 people were left homeless and 25,000 had insufficient shelter. The city's industrial sector was in large part gone, with many workers among the casualties and the dockyard heavily damaged.

A mortuary committee chaired by Alderman R. B. Coldwell was quickly formed at Halifax City Hall on the morning of the disaster. The Chebucto Road School (now the Maritime Conservatory of Performing Arts) in Halifax's west end was chosen as a central morgue. A company of the Royal Canadian Engineers repaired and converted the basement of the school to serve as a morgue and classrooms to serve as offices for the Halifax coroner. Trucks and wagons soon began to arrive with bodies. Arthur S. Barnstead took over from Coldwell as the morgue went into operation and implemented a system based on the one his father, John Henry Barnstead, developed to catalogue the dead in the aftermath of the Titanic disaster of 1912. Many of the wounds inflicted by the blast were permanently debilitating, such as those caused by flying glass or by the flash of the explosion. Thousands of people had stopped to watch the ship burning in the harbour, many from inside buildings, leaving them directly in the path of glass fragments from shattered windows. According to an article in the British Journal of Ophthalmology, ophthalmologists responding to the disaster performed 249 enucleations; 16 people had both eyes removed.

An estimated CA$35 million in damage resulted (CA$727 million today). About $30 million in financial aid was raised from various sources, including $18 million from the federal government, over $4 million from the British government, and $750,000 from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

Dartmouth was not as densely populated as Halifax and was separated from the blast by the width of the harbour, but still suffered heavy damage. An estimated 100 people died on the Dartmouth side. …

Many people in Halifax first thought the explosion to be the result of a German attack. The Halifax Herald continued to propagate this belief for some time, reporting, for example, that Germans had mocked victims of the explosion. While John Johansen, the Norwegian helmsman of Imo, was being treated for serious injuries sustained during the explosion, he was reported to the military police as behaving suspiciously. Johansen was arrested on suspicions of being a German spy when a search turned up a letter on his person, supposedly written in German. The letter turned out to have been written in Norwegian. Immediately following the explosion, most of the German survivors in Halifax had been rounded up and imprisoned. Eventually, the fear dissipated as the real cause of the explosion became known, although rumours of German involvement persisted.

A judicial inquiry known as the Wreck Commissioner's Inquiry was formed to investigate the causes of the collision. Proceedings began at the Halifax Court House on 13 December 1917, presided over by Justice Arthur Drysdale. The inquiry's report of 4 February 1918 blamed Mont-Blanc's captain, Aimé Le Médec, the ship's pilot, Francis Mackey, and Commander F. Evan Wyatt, the Royal Canadian Navy's chief examining officer in charge of the harbour, gates and anti-submarine defences, for causing the collision. Drysdale agreed with Dominion Wreck Commissioner L. A. Demers' opinion that "it was the Mont-Blanc's responsibility alone to ensure that she avoided a collision at all costs" given her cargo; he was likely influenced by local opinion, which was strongly anti-French, as well as by the "street fighter" style of argumentation used by Imo lawyer Charles Burchell. According to Crown counsel W. A. Henry, this was "a great surprise to most people", who had expected the Imo to be blamed for being on the wrong side of the channel. All three men were charged with manslaughter and criminal negligence at a preliminary hearing heard by Stipendiary Magistrate Richard A. McLeod and bound over for trial. A Nova Scotia Supreme Court justice, Benjamin Russell, found no evidence to support these charges. Mackey was discharged on a writ of habeas corpus and the charges dropped. Because the pilot and the captain were arrested on the same warrant, the charges against Le Médec were also dismissed. …