Laura M. MacDonald

From the disaster response list. Halifax harbor (that’s “harbour” in Canadian) is shaped a little like a dumbbell; there’s a broad outer harbor, a narrow strait (not surprisingly called “the Narrows” by locals) and another broad inner harbor. On December 6th, 1917, the neutral (Norwegian) steamship Imo started out of the inner harbor, on its way to New York to pick up Belgian relief supplies. At about the same time, the French Mont Blanc started in from the outer harbor, show more where it had been waiting for the submarine nets to open. The Imo was in ballast and high in the water; the Mont Blanc was carrying 2300 tons of picric acid, 10 tons of guncotton, 200 tons of TNT, and 30 tons of benzenes and chlorobenzene. You can probably already see where this is going to end up.


Both ships were under the control of experienced harbor pilots. Standard procedure called for ships to pass port to port. However, another ship had preceded Mont Blanc into the inner harbor, and signaled and received permission from Imo to pass on the wrong side. That left Imo poorly “set up”, on the north side of the channel, and on a head-on collision course with Mont Blanc . Neither the captain nor the pilot of the Imo survived, but apparently they wanted to hold their course and also pass Mont Blanc on the wrong side. Various signals were exchanged but either they weren’t understood or both pilots were obstinate. With only fifty yards separating the ships, and Imo holding her course, Mont Blanc finally turned to port.


Unfortunately I’m still a little confused about what happened next. As near as I can tell from author Laura Mac Donald’s account, both ships were almost stopped and parallel courses; in other words, Mont Blanc’s last minute maneuver was successful and if nothing else had happened the two ships would have passed safely, albeit so close that the crews could have exchanged unpleasantries. However, Imo threw her engines into full reverse, and she was so high in the water that she was uncontrollable. Mont Blanc also threw her engines into reverse as soon as she saw what Imo was doing, but I was too late; Imo’s bow swung toward Mont Blanc and her anchor fluke punched through Mont Blanc’s plating and ripped a gash as the Imo finally gathered sternway.


The CBC has an interactive reconstruction that appears to show things a little differently, with Mont Blanc making her turn a little too late and Imo ramming her while still moving forward. I suppose it doesn’t matter any more, but I’d still like to know exactly what happened.


The Mont Blanc caught fire almost instantly, and her crew abandoned ship, rowing frantically toward the north shore after dragging the captain (who wanted to go down, or in this case, up, with his ship) into a lifeboat. The Mont Blanc drifted south until running gently into one of the Halifax docks. She burned for about 20 minutes, setting fire to the docks and attracting spectators astonished by the sight of benzene drums blowing high into the air as the contents BLEVEd. Then the 3000 tons of high explosive on board the Mont Blanc detonated.


What happened next is sadly typical of explosions. One of a group of friends discussing the fire found herself alone and untouched while her companions just vanished. Bits and pieces of the Mont Blanc , including her anchor and stern gun, ended up miles away. A ferry boat captain who had been crossing the harbor found himself alone and naked on a hillside. The only motorized fire company in Halifax was just arriving at the docks when the ship went up; the only survivor was the driver, who found himself still clutching a piece of the steering wheel. A wave swept over the just flattened city and dragged bits and pieces of town and populace back into the sea as it receded. The entire crew of the Mont Blanc made it to safety, but one Haligonian in thirty died.


As you might expect, things were a little confused thereafter. Most of the survivors, even those who actually saw Mont Blanc explode, thought it was a German bombing attack. Every telephone and telegraph line was gone. However, two American warships coming off convoy duty heard the blast from 50 miles out to sea and turned toward Halifax, radioing Washington as details became available.


Aid started in from all over, getting as close to the city as possible before the stopping on blocked railroad tracks. Then a storm blew in and dumped 16 inches of snow on the ruins. By the time everything got sorted out, one doctor had done so much surgery that his scalpel wouldn’t cut any more. A whole trainload of doctors, nurses and supplies from Boston eventually made it through the snow and set to work; Halifax still sends Boston a Christmas tree every year in gratitude. American sailors patrolled the streets for the exhausted and depleted Halifax police force. And as is usual, too much of the wrong things turned up; another train of doctors from Rhode Island arrived and found themselves without much to do.


Rehabilitation eventually got under way; the bodies and body parts were buried (ironically, in the same cemetery that held Titanic victims from five years earlier). Many of the survivors were blind; they were watching the fire and the supersonic detonation wave scoured out their eyes before they even had a chance to blink. Others had little bits of glass, brick and miscellaneous debris periodically emerge from their bodies for years. The pilot and captain of the Mont Blanc were tried and acquitted. As of the publication date of this book (2005), there were still survivors receiving pensions from the Canadian government.


I was struck by the number of similarities between this disaster and the Texas City explosion of 1947. Both involved French ships; in both cases responders didn’t understand the dangers involved and were wiped out (by the rules at the time, a ship carrying explosive cargo like the Mont Blanc was supposed to fly a red warning flag, but that had been suspended during the war because it attracted undue attention from U-boats). In both cases, the surviving authorities seemed to pay undue attention to recovering bodies and not enough to recovering survivors. In both cases, rumors spread rapidly and interfered with recovery operations. Even the amount of explosive involved was roughly the same; I expect the reasons for the greater death count at Halifax than Texas City were the power of the explosives involved, the inclement weather that set in, and the more primitive medical technology of 1917 compared to 1947.


I found this well-written and useful. Although the author isn’t a disaster professional (she’s a television producer) she did her homework well; there’s even a whole chapter on explosives theory and the difference between deflagration and detonation. (The main flaw I find is that Mac Donald consistently refers to benzol and chlorobenzol rather then benzene and chlorobenzene; even that’s forgivable because those were the terms in use at the time – however, it might create confusion for somebody using a modern reference to look up chemical properties).


There’s no finger pointing, either; there’s some slight hints that Mac Donald, unlike the people of 1917, puts the fault on the Imo rather than the Mont Blanc, but there’s no journalistic sobbing of the kind that was so annoying in City on Fire. I also liked the follow up work; Mac Donald goes into some depth on long-term rehabilitation efforts, something that’s lacking in a lot of disaster books. Recommended. show less

The description of the time right before the impact and explosion was poignant because it appeared to happen in slow motion. The crews on ships and the local population had so little warning, so little expectation of what was possible that a number of people stood watching as the biggest conflagration in history transpired. The devastation was compounded by the blizzard that followed. The chapter on the nature of explosions was the most interesting as it described why and how the blast and show more chain of events happened as they did. Some may prefer the more literary Barometer Rising by Hugh MacLennan, but this is without doubt an superb account of the horrific event that was mind-boggling in its scope. show less

I had never heard of the Halifax disaster before, and even going into this book, I had no sense of the unparalleled destruction it caused. The explosion was massive, bigger than any explosion before it. The description of the damage it caused is now permanently etched into my mind. The physics of the explosion alone are mind-boggling - huge volumes of ocean water vaporizing, people being thrown a mile away from the air pressure, window shattering, buildings collapsing, etc.

This book gives show more you pretty much everything you need to know about the disaster: the climate in Halifax leading up to the explosion, the actual cause of the explosion, the immediate effects of the explosion, the large-scale, urgent need for medical treatment, the administrative fortitude required to mobilize resources after the disaster, the significant involvement from the people of Boston (and an explanation of how Boston gets its big Boston Common Christmas tree each year) the clean-up, the restoration, and the inevitable legal backlash. The book also follows a few specific individuals and families, all of whom had very different stories and experiences. It is a great book and an excellent history lesson.

A few notes on the book: First, you should not go into this if you are squeamish about medical trauma. The book follows an eye surgeon who came to Halifax to treat survivors who suffered eye injuries. Read this next sentence with caution: if you cannot read about eye removal and buckets of eyeballs, you should NOT read this book. Bear in mind that this explosion took place before the use and availability of ether was widespread.

The description of the two ships that collided to cause the explosion is arguably the worst part of the book. Unless you love maritime stories, the details about whistles and signaling direction and so on are boring and hard to follow. Skim this section if necessary. I did not feel I missed much, even though some of the details reappear in the lawsuit that followed the explosion.

Additionally, I cannot recommend the Kindle edition. It is littered with typos that appear to be the result of a sloppy digital format change, the footnotes aren't linked up well, and the pictures are hard to see.

Also, if possible, read this book over a short period of time. As fascinating as it was, I read it over the course of a few months and found it very difficult to keep some of the names straight. show less

It's a little unsettling to me that prior to reading Curse of the Narrows I had never heard of the explosion that caused so much devastation in Halifax, Nova Scotia on December 6, 1917. When the munitions ship, Mont Blanc, collided with the Belgian Relief vessel, Imo, on that fateful day none of the inhabitants in Richmond could have predicted the loss that their town would incur. I have to admit that at the outset of this book I was struggling to comprehend what was occurring as much of the show more language was 'nautical' in nature which I've always found confusing. However, once Mac Donald began discussing the 'human element' I was hooked. Basically, the entire town was decimated in a matter of moments and thousands were killed, injured, orphaned, and made homeless. Oppenheimer used the statistics from the blast to calculate the effects of an atomic bomb (and used these calculations to create the bombs used in Nagasaki and Hiroshima). One of the unique factors in this event was that there was an historian on the ground that immediately began rounding up accounts and taking interviews in order to preserve the details of the day and the days and months preceding it. I highly encourage any fans of history (in particular WWI-era) to give this book a try. Additionally, the Appendix and Notes at the end of the book were absolutely phenomenal which is always one of my favorite parts in any nonfiction work and if you aren't reading these I highly encourage you to do so. :-D show less