in 1917, the waterfront areas of the City of Halifax in Nova Scotia, Canada and its neighbouring community of Richmond, along with the waterfront area of the cross-harbour town of Dartmouth were devastated when the French Merchant ship Mont-Blanc, chartered by the French government to carry munitions, collided in a narrow section of the harbour with the Norwegian ship Imo, chartered by the Commission for Relief in Belgium to carry relief supplies.
In the aftermath of the collision,
Mont-Blanc caught fire and exploded, killing an estimated 2,000 people and injuring over 9,000. The explosion caused a tsunami wave in the harbour, and a pressure wave of air that snapped trees, bent iron rails, demolished buildings, grounded vessels, and carried fragments of the Mont-Blanc for kilometres.
This was the largest artificial explosion until the first atomic bomb test explosion in 1945 and still ranks high among the largest artificial non-nuclear explosions.
Human loss and destruction
While it is unknown exactly how many deaths resulted from the disaster, a common estimate is 2,000, with an official database totaling 1,950 names made available through Nova Scotia Archives and Records Management in the Book of Remembrance.[1] As many as 1,600 died immediately in the blast, the following tsunami, and collapsing of buildings, with an additional 9,000 injured, of which 6,000 were seriously injured. 1,630 homes were completely destroyed in the explosion and ensuing fires, with 12,000 more houses damaged, leaving roughly 6,000 people homeless and without shelter, and 25,000 without adequate housing. The dockyard and industrial sector was in large part gone, with many workers among the casualties.
The explosion killed more Nova Scotians than World War I itself. Detailed estimates showed that among those killed, 600 were under the age of 15, 166 were labourers, 134 were soldiers and sailors, 125 were craftsmen, and 39 were workers for the railway.
Many of the wounds were also permanently debilitating, with many people partially blinded by flying glass. Thousands of people had stopped to watch the ship burning in the harbour, with many people watching from inside buildings, leaving them directly in the path of any flying glass from shattered windows. Roughly 600 people suffered eye injuries in the explosion, 38 of whom permanently lost their sight. The large number of eye injuries led to better understanding on the part of physicians, and with the recently solidified Canadian National Institute for the Blind, they managed to greatly improve the treatment of damaged eyes. The leaps and bounds made in eye care because of this disaster is often compared to the huge increase in burn care knowledge after the Cocoanut Grove Fire in Boston. Halifax became known in subsequent years for its international reputation in care for the blind, accounting for the larger proportion of patients.
According to estimates, roughly US$35 million in damages resulted (this estimate is given in 1917 dollars — calculated for inflation to 2007, this amount equals roughly US$500 million).
On December 1, 1917,, the French naval ship Mont-Blanc, a 3,121-ton, 97.5 metre long by 13.7 metre freighter, departed New York City to join a war convoy assembling in the Bedford Basin (Halifax). The vessel did not fly warning flags for its dangerous cargo in order to avoid being targeted by WWI German naval forces, who had sunk many of the newer, faster ships, leaving less than ideal vessels to aid in war efforts. It carried on board 2,653,115 kilograms (2,653 tonnes) of explosives. The cargo would have been valued at US$3,601,290 in 1917 (upwards of US$60 million today), and consisted of the following:
* 223,188 kilograms benzol
* 56,301 kilograms of nitrocellulose (guncotton)
* 1,602,519 kilograms of wet picric acid
* 544,311 kilograms of dry picric acid (highly explosive, and extremely sensitive to shock, heat and friction)
* 226,797 kilograms of TNT
