I watched the DVD of the exceptional and intense film, Flight 93, last night about the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania on 9/11. A couple of weeks ago, I posted photos of Gulport’s damage a year after Katrina. The second aniversary of the tsunami in the Far East that killed 200,000 is coming soon. Horrific events with different causes from recent history. But we forget or don’t know about other events from the past equally devastating. Here’s one from WWI.
On the morning of December 6, 1917, two passenger trains en route to the port city of Halifax, Nova Scotia were stopped in response to a brief, cryptic telegraph message sent from Halifax station: “Munition ships on fire. Making for Pier 6. Goodbye.” The ship described in the message was the French munitions ship Mont-Blanc, which was adrift in Halifax harbor, burning, and loaded with almost 2,700 tonnes of explosives intended for use in the first world war which was then raging in Europe.
At 9:04 AM, after having weathered the inferno for twenty minutes, Mont-Blanc’s massive and unstable cargo finally exploded. The resulting blast was enormous. A cubic mile of air was consumed by the terrific explosion, whose force was sufficient to annihilate the Mont-Blanc and push the sea away, exposing the harbor floor for an instant. An estimated 1,000 people were killed instantly by the blast, which tore buildings to pieces and shattered every window within fifty miles. Flying glass and splintered wood caused numerous gruesome injuries throughout the city as the pressure wave shredded many of the city’s wooden structures. Doors were blasted open, and wood stoves were toppled, touching off fires throughout the city. The intense heat of the explosion caused cyclones around the harbor, wreaking further destruction.
One of the Mont-Blanc’s cannon barrels was thrown three and a half miles, and her 1/2 ton anchor was later found two miles in the opposite direction. The event would hold the record as the most powerful man-made explosion for the next twenty-eight years, when it was bested by the the first atomic bomb test explosion in 1945.
Interesting, Uncle Dave. I had never heard of this.
Reminds me of the Texas City disaster 3 decades later.
Was there any possibility that sabotage was involved?
Probably not, unless the other captain who wouldn’t yield was up to something.
I guess I should have read the whole article before commenting. 🙂
We read a novel based on this event in High School, here in Canada. Very sad event.
Canada Post also has ads on TV talking about the event and the Morse code message to stop the train. It’s one in a series they have on Canadian Heros.
There was a liquified natural gas (LNG) explosion during WW II, in Cleveland. The LNG, being heavier than air, sank into the city’s sewers, then exploded. Not nearly as big or as damaging as the Halifax explosion, but it’ s the reason a lot of people are still leery of storing LNG near populated areas.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleveland_East_Ohio_Gas_Explosion
It is easy to forget some of the “big ones”, since our school system doesn’t really cover them – at least in any detail.
My wife and I were visiting the Galveston area, a couple of years ago, and noticed all the copies of Isaac’s Storm on prominent display… Quite an interesting read, about a disaster I was completely ignorant of.
http://www.randomhouse.com/features/isaacsstorm/
As Frank mentioned, reading about the Texas City disaster in City on Fire was also an eye-opener.
http://tinyurl.com/klkg2
Harbor explosions are especially violent because the water beneath the ship blows downward into a spherical dish shape, water being mostly incompressible, which then reflects some of the shockwave back upwards. This is used by torpedo designers, to break the keels of ships with relatively minor weapons charges. I have seen it also happen on boggy ground, waterlogged and swampy, when a farmer using gelignite nobs to clear a pasture of old tree stumps, lifted one the size of a small house a hundred feet into the air. Blasting above water is dangerous.
The world’s third plague pandemic began in 1894 in China and Hong Kong. Called the Modern Pandemic, it quickly spread throughout the world, carried by rats aboard steamships. From 1894 through 1903, plague-infested ships had brought the disease to 77 ports in Asia, Africa, Europe, North America, Australia, and South America. In India alone, plague killed about 13 million people. In the year the pandemic started, scientists discovered the cause of the disease, and established that rats and their fleas were the carriers.
http://www.bookrags.com/research/plague-enve-02/
10 years…With a World population just over 1billion. About 0.1%..
SORRY,
My math is off, its 1.0%
A distant relative of mine survived the Titanic only to die in the Halifax explosion. (!) (A lot of the Titanic survivors and the dead settled down in Halifax.)
RBG
Yep, I also thought of Texas City. There another French flagged ship carrying 7,700 tons of ammonia nitrate blew up at the dock. By reading the linked article above, I suppose it was not as big a blast as the Mont-Blanc explosion.
Here is the Wikipedia entry:
http://tinyurl.com/nl9ag
why is it that you americans cannot comprehend a disaster in another county, and have to make it close to home to understand (Texas)!!!
I will mention something many may not know.
The OLD steam engines they used before about 1900, and some after, were notorious for blowing up, going amuck, and just sinking boats.
They dint have decent pressure release valves. Same with some of the first trains.
This caused the war in Cuba, and it took about 100 years to find out that the boiler blew up, insted of cuba sinking it.
My dad was in the Merchant Marines in WW 1 and his ship departed Halifax port 7 days before the explosion – I guess that’s why I’m here.
Of interest is the fact that the pension paid to survivors is tax-free in Canada. Even if a survivor moves to another country – Canada tries to make sure that the Halifax Survivors’ Pension is not taxed in the new country of residence.
Pandemics, are worse now then they were 100 yrs ago, more then 50 years ago, more then 30 years ago.
Wait for the next one, one from the past hasnt finished yet. Aids/HIV..
Hugh MacLennan wrote “Barometer Rising”, set in Halifax prior to and following the explosion.
If you can find it, it’s worth the read.
14 why is it that you americans cannot comprehend a disaster in another county, and have to make it close to home to understand
I think we can comprehend them on their own, but Uncle Dave’s comment “But we forget or don’t know about other events from the past…” does invite comment on other disasters.
Especially when it is about events we Amercians are not reminded of in our “teach the test” education system.
An example:
When I had been in the Navy for about 12-years, one of the officers I worked with made a comment regarding how ignorant a lot of the mouth-breathing new recruits were.
To prove his point, he asked one of the new guys when the Civil War was fought…
Here is the officer’s side of the conversation:
You graduated from High School a year ago?: When was the Civil War fought?
Can you guess within a 5-year range? A 10-year range?
I’ll give you a hint: at the beginning of Lincoln’s Gettysburg address he states “Four score and seven years ago…”
I’ll give you another hint, a “score” is 20-years.
So, if it was 4 x 20 = 80, + 7 = 87-years after the Declaration of Independence, what year was his speech?
1776 plus 87 is…?
14. why is it that you americans cannot comprehend a disaster in another county, and have to make it close to home to understand (Texas)!!!
Er, was that directed at me? I am perfectly capable of comprehending this disaster no matter where it happened. After reading the article, I thought it was inherently similar in many regards to the Texas City explosion. I was not trying to say that the Halifax disaster was any less horrific or significant. I just thought if someone found Halifax of historical interest then they might also be interested in Texas city.
Methinks thou doest protest too much. Lighten up, dude.
sargasso_c, to take your comment further… The scientists working on the Manhattan project used data collected from the Halifax explosion to maximize the damage done by the atomic bombs, they were baffeled at the time as to why the damage was so great from the explosion, but made the connection about the distance above “ground” the explosion took place, and the resultant reflective shock wave. From there, they calculated the precise distance above ground to detonate the atomic bombs dropped on Japan for maximum damage.