THE STORY OF THE EXPLOSION CONTINUED TO LIVE ON IN THE memories of the survivors and in the stories passed down the generations. Many people can quote from memory the stories of the explosion their parents and grandparents told them. Although the exhibits about the explosion are not as popular as the ones on Titanic, thousands of people annually visit the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic and the Halifax Citadel, as well as the Dartmouth Heritage Museum, to learn about the explosion. In a Halifax residential area, they can see a heavy anchor shaft from Mont-Blanc that was thrown some four kilometres. In Dartmouth, they can see one of Mont-Blanc’s two cannons displayed in a local park. It was blown about 3.2 kilometres to Albro Lake and over time passed through a number of hands. For a while, it was in displayed in front of former Mayor A.C. Johnstone’s home. In 1967, Colonel Sidney C. Oland presented it to the local heritage museum.
The explosion also lives on in literature. The first and arguably the most significant Canadian historical novel, Hugh MacLennan’s Barometer Rising, is set around the explosion. There are at least three other novels, one short story, and Joan Payzant’s delightful children’s book, Who’s a Scaredy-Cat?, that use it as a setting. An A&E television special on the explosion draws a reaction every time it runs. There are also a number of significant works of non-fiction, including Michael Bird’s The Town That Died and Janet Kitz’s Shattered City—and new publications keep appearing. Alan Ruffman and Colin Howell had no problem finding enough material to fill Ground Zero: A Reassessment of the 1917 Explosion in Halifax Harbour25 in 1994. There is also a vignette that appears frequently on Canadian television that recounts Vincent Coleman’s fateful return to his telegraph key to warn incoming trains.
Many individuals performed remarkably well in the wake of the explosion. There were women such as Gladys Harris, who managed to help her four children escape from a wrecked house; Violet Smith, who, though seven months pregnant, found the strength to wrestle open a jammed door; Annie Greenough Chapman, who set aside her own concerns to rescue her infant child; and Gertrude McAuley, who threw herself over her father so he would not be hit on the head by flying debris. There were men such as J.J. Spruce, the gunner who suffered severe burns when he rushed into a burning house and rescued a ten-year-old child; Joseph Hinch, who, while on the way to his children, stopped to assist others and found time to splint the fractured leg of Sister Cecilia Lawrence; Charles Clark, the passenger on the Boston Express who used his meagre supply of brandy and the little first aid that he knew; Roy Laing, the bank teller who started directing military personnel when it was clear someone had to take a leadership role; William O’Reilly and the unknown warrant officer from Niobe who rescued some of those washed overboard by the tidal wave; and Commander John W. Hopkyns, the engineering officer of Highflyer, who put his men to work helping others in Dartmouth in what is often called the “best tradition of the service.”
There were the people who ignored the warnings of a second explosion to remain on duty or keep assisting others. These included Private W. Eisner, who remained at his post at the Wellington Barracks magazine; Mrs. Albert Sheppard, who kept funnelling medical supplies into the North End when others were fleeing and shamed men into sharing her bravery; Edith Bauld, Ralph Proctor, and C.J. Burchell, who all kept driving their cars as ambulances in and out of the North End; and the unknown firefighters who stayed on duty despite the same warnings. There were the volunteers who assisted with the gruesome tasks of amputation and enucleation (surgery to remove an eye) and with comforting the injured and dying, like Marjorie Moir, L.L. Maguire, and John Crerar MacKeen; Annie McIsaac at Mount St. Vincent, who used her clothing to bandage the wounded; Marylee MacAloney, the student from the Agricultural College, who despite her own illness helped at the Truro Court House until she was exhausted; and Dorothy McMurray, who spent the night at Camp Hill trying to comfort the afflicted.
There were also those with skills or in positions of responsibility who lived up to what is expected of such people, such as Avery DeWitt, the physician who risked his own health as he carried on for days assisting the injured and dying; Leo Tooke, the police officer who, though suffering from tuberculosis, remained on duty day and night at the morgue in the basement of Chebucto School; Henry Colwell, the quiet deputy mayor who put together a remarkable relief organization; and R.T. MacIlreith, who accepted the leadership role thrust upon him. There are all the physicians who attended the injured in their own homes, people like Captain A. McD. Morton, who not only assisted those who came to his home and later worked at Camp Hill, but even found time to end a gruelling day by helping set type at the newspaper so there would be at least some report of what had happened. Perhaps he was trying to find some way of doing something not directly related to the carnage around him.
There are the more obvious heroes, men such as Vincent Coleman, the telegraph operator; and James W. Harrison, the Furness-Withy manager who, after using his car to drive injured to hospital, boarded a boat loaded with explosives and persuaded others to assist him getting it towed away from the docks; as well as Thomas Davis and Robert Stone, the Royal Navy seamen who took the same risks when they boarded Musquash and later received the Albert Cross from the King because of the risks that they took. There were the people who, with remarkable insight, saw that others got the assistance they needed, people such as Clara MacIntosh, lady superintendent of St. John Ambulance, who conceived and directed the first canvass of the impact area, and the volunteers, mainly women and many of them Salvationists, who worked with her; Colonel Paul Weatherbe, the military engineer who designed a medical response system that is still impressive when viewed in the light of all we know today; and Fred Pearson, who realized there was something wrong with the way relief was being administered and managed to come up with a brilliant idea to make things better.
There were also those who did what anyone would have expected, and would have been embarrassed had someone tried to honour them for it, people such as George Graham, the head of the Dominion Atlantic Railway, who walked through the debris and the dead to send out the first appeals for assistance; W.A. Duff, the civil engineer who sent out the crucial messages calling for help, who got the rail line working to the south end, and who found time, even before that, to drive injured to hospital; Dr. C.C. Ligoure, who ignored the discrimination he had been subject to and treated all those who needed his help; H.D. Nicholas, the Pullman porter who helped Dr. Ligoure; and Major-General Thomas Benson, who never let the bureaucracy force him to blame others for the sufferings of his soldiers; and the prime minister, Sir Robert Borden, who, though in the middle of a bitter election campaign, cancelled his electioneering to be with the people he had represented in Parliament. There are also the scores of women and men and children whose names will never be known because no one recorded their acts of compassion or bravery, or whose names never made it to someone collecting accounts of individual behaviour, or someone writing a book about what happened.
Some people are remembered because stories about them were published at the time, or because Archibald MacMechan collected their accounts when he began work on his official history. Other accounts, however, were not recorded except in private memoirs, or were perpetuated only by word of mouth. They emerged as a result of the research for this book. This was especially true of those less prominent. A review of MacMechan’s work shows that his collection of anecdotes was somewhat selective: “Even though most of the destruction occurred in the North End, only twenty of his 122 personal narratives came from Northenders. By contrast, he took testimony from fifteen middle-class female volunteers, including nine Dalhousie students. MacMechan knew little about the North End, its people and its social life, and made no attempt to overcome his ignorance.”
The reviewer might have added that MacMechan did not even go to the North End to see for himself the impact of the explosion.
Even while admiring those who performed so well in the wake of the explosion—those whose names are well known and those whose stories are recorded for the first time in this book—it is hard to avoid thinking that what those people did would not have been necessary if only the Americans had not loaded Mont-Blanc with such a deadly cargo, if only the British had sent such a ship to a safe anchorage in Sydney instead of Halifax, if only someone had made certain that when Mont-Blanc entered harbour there was no outgoing traffic, if only Captain Aimé Le Médec had been in Halifax before and had known how safe it was close to the Dartmouth shore. While all those ifs are legitimate with the benefit of hindsight, it is surely more productive to ask whether our own communities are better prepared today than the authorities and the citizens of Halifax were in 1917. Rather than search for scapegoats, it is also more useful to ask: What does the explosion tell us about the way communities react to devastating events, and what lessons can we learn from the explosion that might make us better prepared today?
It is certainly true that in most Western countries communities are better prepared than Halifax was in 1917. Most communities have reviewed the threats that face them, and most communities have emergency plans to deal with those threats and test those plans on a regular basis. In fact, in many communities hospitals must test their casualty plans in order to remain licensed. There has been a vast improvement in warning systems, especially for environmental hazards, and those systems are tied into the communities that need the information. The Hurricane Warning Center in Miami, Florida, for example, is linked to emergency operations centres through the hurricane areas. Environment Canada was tied by computer to the Regional Roads department in the Regional Municipality of Ottawa-Carleton, and kept it fully informed about the series of severe storms that led to the 1998 ice disaster in Ontario and Quebec. There are signs of increasing attention to mitigation, first in the United States and now, with the power of the insurance industry behind it, in Canada. There are still problems, however, when legal requirements are not followed. After Hurricane Andrew, it was discovered that building codes were not being enforced. The same allegations surfaced immediately after the devastating earthquake in Turkey in 1999.
There are other concerns. For one thing, there is a lack of awareness of the need for public information about the nature of threats and about appropriate response. There have been some impressive achievements: the children’s television show Sesame Street has done some beautiful work on fires and hurricanes. Yet even today, individuals die in destructive incidents because they do not know what to do. Poor awareness can affect choices that may determine who lives and who dies. In the Tangshan earthquake in China, where at least a quarter of a million died, the chance of survival went up when people took immediate protective action, such as diving under a table or bed as soon as they felt the first tremor. In a tornado in the United States, many died because they tried to escape in their vehicles instead of remaining in their homes.
There is also a lack of awareness that disasters may come in different forms. In January 1998, an ice storm caused a buildup as thick as 110 centimetres on trees and power lines in eastern Ontario and in parts of neighbouring US states, leaving one-fifth of Canadians without power. Although most communities opened shelters, most victims preferred to stay at home, even when the temperature dropped to well below freezing. Disaster plans that assumed a site-specific incident, and that people in need of help would go to shelters, proved inadequate. In Ontario, the response was hampered by the fact the storm struck just days after a number of municipal boundary changes. Many community councils had yet to meet, let alone create emergency plans.
The story of Halifax confirms something that the late disaster scholar E.L. Quarantelli had argued for years: disasters are not large accidents but something different, and catastrophes are something different again. Emergency planners still keep planning for emergencies as if they will resemble air crashes, toxic spills, and train wrecks. They continue to be caught short when there is devastation over a wide area or when emergency services are themselves victims of the incident. They are never fully prepared to deal with thousands of dead. What happened in Halifax was very different from an air crash and very different from a tornado. The explosion not only damaged part of the city, it drastically reduced the city’s ability to respond.
Unfortunately, those like Quarantelli who study disaster predict the future will bring us more severe and different types of emergencies.26 There are many reasons to think such predictions are accurate. First, there are now more people living, and that means there are more people who can be affected by a disaster. Second, more of those people are living in urban areas, increasing the likelihood that when a disaster does occur it will hit a population concentration. Third, we are continually inventing new and dangerous things that can affect our survival. Fourth, events in one country can now affect other countries far away—Chernobyl is a good example. Fifth, our increased dependence on technology means we will experience new types of disaster—the 1998 ice storm is one example. Fifth, many disasters—such as volcano eruptions—occur at long intervals. We have now been living long enough in some areas, such as the Pacific Rim, the odds are increasing that we will be exposed to a devastating event. This is especially true for Canada and the United States.
Of course, many of the threats the future will bring will be so-called natural events—events caused by windstorms, including tornadoes and cyclones, and by floods, earthquakes, snow emergencies, and other types of weather phenomena, such as ice storms. Others will be human failures. However, it is becoming increasingly clear that the two are closely linked. For one thing, many so-called natural disasters are the result of human activity: destroy wetlands and you increase the chance of flooding; build homes on a flood plain and you increase the chance of widespread destruction during a flood. For another, there is now research that shows natural hazards create other types of problems, such as toxic spills—even though this often goes unnoticed.
Most important, what happened in Halifax in 1917 suggests it is very difficult to convince governments or individuals that there are threats to their communities—and to get them to do something. It is now known that there are major earthquake threats in Vancouver on Canada’s west coast and along the New Madrid Fault in the US Midwest. Still, most people think of California as the place at greatest risk in Canada and the United States. When incidents do occur, they seem to come as a surprise. People in Edmonton, for example, were in disbelief when in 1987 a tornado ripped apart the east side of their city and neighbouring Strathcona County, and people in Ontario and Quebec were astonished when in 1998 a series of ice storms caused devastation. The reaction was much the same in Kobe, Japan, and Tangshan, China, when earthquakes caused enormous devastation. In both countries, these communities were not thought to be high-risk locations. Yet devastating earthquakes have often hit Japan and China, ice storms are far from new phenomena in Ontario, and tornadoes are common in the Canadian prairies.
On a more positive note, the story of Halifax shows that no matter how ill-prepared people may be for disaster or catastrophe, they respond well when something happens. The belief that victims will be dazed and confused and unable to cope is a myth perpetrated by the media—and the media did perpetrate those myths after the explosion. The women of the North End, the passengers on the Boston Express, the individual soldiers, the sailors from the various warships in harbour, the Americans who came to assist—all show this. The way uninjured survivors looked after others, and the way rescue workers stayed on the job despite warnings of a second explosion, shows what scholars have established—panic is a myth. In addition, the explosion did not, as media stories often suggest, turn people into criminals. If there was any looting, it was minimal.
Today, the same positive community response occurs when an incident affects others. That was shown by how quickly small seaport communities around Peggy’s Cove, Nova Scotia, responded when a Swissair jet crashed offshore in September 1998, and how quickly effective links were made between fishing vessels, the Royal Canadian Navy, and the Canadian Coast Guard. The way individuals respond was shown by the way the occupants of the World Trade Center slowly but efficiently evacuated the towers on 9/11. Yet time and time again the response to major incidents—no matter how well meaning and how generous—is difficult to control. After the Tangshan earthquake in China, with a quarter of a million dead, one of the major problems was caused by the fact the Peoples’ Liberation Army responded in such large numbers that the soldiers blocked the access roads. Moreover, they arrived without sufficient water and became a strain on the devastated community. They created exactly the sort of problems that convergence created in Halifax more than eighty years earlier. There were similar problems in New York City after 9/11—local officials had to plead with well-intentioned outsiders not to come.
There is another lesson from Halifax that was not mentioned at the start, but is evident from the story that unfolded. Disasters and catastrophes do not strike everyone equally. Some people in society are more vulnerable than others. In Halifax, it was the poor who were the victims, not the rich. That is because the place where you live has an enormous impact on your exposure to threats. This lesson, too, is being continually underlined. Japanese research done after the devastating Kobe earthquake exposed the special problems of those who were hearing or visually impaired. The first group had problems hearing the announcements about victim services; the second had difficulty finding their way around a changed community. In addition, the story of the explosion shows that disasters and catastrophes generate both losers and winners. This is not, and is not meant to be, a condemnation of those who gain, but it is a fact. The merchants of Massachusetts, the ones who provided the furniture for the victims, were paid for their products. They were in every sense winners. The families in the North End who lost their homes, and quite often their breadwinners, were clearly losers.
While there is an outpouring of human kindness in the immediate wake of such events, before long there is increasing pressure for a return to the way things were before the incident. As chapters XIII and XIX show, there is also a return to the normal operations of bureaucracy. Everything must be accounted for, returned, or both. It would not do to let generosity go undocumented. In his dissertation, Samuel Henry Prince argued that catastrophes shake up society and lead to change. He said the Halifax explosion led to a great deal of mixing among the classes. The records do not support such a conclusion. Even at the height of the housing problem, few people in the wealthier parts of the city welcomed the poor into their homes. The poor shared accommodation with each other. The wealthier took in visiting physicians and nurses. It was not long before those who were least affected wanted to put the explosion behind them, which was why the willingness of the federal government to take over relief was so widely welcomed.
Finally, it must be clear from the experience in 1917 that, in the wake of human disasters, everyone wants to blame someone. In Halifax, the fingers finally pointed to the crew of Mont-Blanc. It should be evident now that even if Mont-Blanc’s captain, Aimé Le Médec, made navigation errors that led to the collision, neither he nor his officers were in any way responsible for the cargo Mont-Blanc carried or the way it was loaded. Nor did they have anything to do with the decision to come into Halifax or to anchor in Bedford Basin. Others—the Americans, the French, the Admiralty, and the authorities in Halifax harbour—made those decisions. These decisions were a direct result of the war. Given all-out war, the risks created by munitions traffic were to some extent understandable, as the spillover effects from modern bombing campaigns have shown so clearly—destruction that is now called “collateral damage.” Even if those risks were unavoidable, they could have been mitigated with a program of public-safety protocols in the event of a mishap. It is, of course, important to review events like the explosion and to learn from them. It is of less value to start finger pointing: disasters, like all complex events, never result from a single cause.
During the Second World War, when scientists from the Manhattan Project (builders of the atomic bomb) looked at what happened in Halifax, their interest was in physical destruction, not in individual, group, or community response. In retrospect, it might have been more productive if they had looked at what happened from a social-science viewpoint. For the response in Halifax—and the clear evidence that a civilian population can rebound under the most severe impact—could have helped military planners understand why the bombing of England, the bombing of Germany—even the firestorm in Dresden—would not be successful in destroying the will of a people. It seems this lesson has not been learned. The Second World War was followed by a massive bombing campaign against the North Vietnamese, yet the people of Hanoi and North Vietnam persevered. Even today, more than a century after the 1917 Halifax explosion, there are important lessons to be learned, and one of the most important is that people have astonishing resilience.