ON THE MORNING OF 11 SEPTEMBER 2001, TWO HIJACKED AIRCRAFT smashed into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City. First one, then the other tower collapsed. Before that happened, most of the people evacuated the two buildings, not in panic but, for the most part, slowly and efficiently. Even as they were doing so, emergency personnel, some assigned and many not assigned, arrived at the scene. Though an earlier somewhat similar incident showed the danger and futility of entering a flaming building, New York’s fire department sent firefighters up into the building. When communications broke down, many of those men died in the subsequent collapses. Hundreds of other people also responded, including medical personnel from city hospitals, and volunteers from as far away as Newfoundland. Because the incident made normal transportation impossible, scores of ferries and other boats began to move people from Lower Manhattan—though this was not part of any plan. The result was the largest evacuation by water since the British Army fled Dunkirk in 1940.
Much of this response was predictable. Today, it is well known that panic is rare in such incidents, and that people generally perform quite well. It is also well known that organizations do less well and that over-response by emergency personnel is normal. And it is known that, in times of crisis, emergent organizations take on tasks that were not planned for, just as the New York ferries did on 9/11. The reason this was predictable is that a number of scholars, many of them associated with the Disaster Research Center, at the University of Delaware, have systematically studied events like 9/11. Those studies have shown there are predictable patterns of behaviour in such incidents.
Most of this research has been done in the United States since World War II. But there was one major study published many years earlier. It was done by a Canadian Anglican priest, Samuel Henry Prince, and it was a study of Canada’s worst catastrophe, the 1917 Halifax explosion. The story of this event has been told many times, not just in Prince’s doctoral dissertation for Columbia University, but in novels, non-fiction accounts, and television documentaries. In one of Canada’s best-known novels, Hugh MacLennan’s Barometer Rising, the 1917 Halifax explosion figures strongly. Despite all this material, no one trained in the sociology of disaster has been to Halifax to re-examine those long-ago events in light of what we know today about the behaviour of individuals, groups, and organizations in times of disaster. This book tells the story of Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 1917. It does so using many previously untapped sources,1 and it puts that story into a context: the context of what we now know about disaster. It is the story of a catastrophe that, given the proportion of the community it affected, was far worse than the one that befell New York City in 2001.
Only two events in modern Canadian history involved more than 1000 deaths. Both occurred in the early part of the twentieth century within a span of five and a half years, and both involved a collision between two ships. Despite the enormous loss of life in both events, the first is largely forgotten and the second is well remembered. There are a number of reasons for this difference, but an important factor is that the second one—the Halifax explosion—involved Americans, and the first did not. To put it another way, the first has been lost to memory because it was not an important and continuing story for the US media, and it is often the American media that determine which world events make news.
The first incident occurred on the St. Lawrence River near Rimouski, Quebec, on 28 May 1914. In a dense fog, the Canadian Pacific steamship RMS Empress of Ireland collided with a Swedish coal ship, Storstad, at Father Point near Rimouski. The Empress sank in fourteen minutes, and 1102 people died, including 840 passengers—twenty-three more than the 817 lost when RMS Titanic sank in 1912. One reason why this event is so little remembered is that those who survived dispersed quickly after the incident. Another is that it took place just months before the First World War and was overshadowed by later events. It is mainly remembered by members of the Salvation Army: 148 Canadian Salvationists died with the Empress, including members of the Canadian Salvation Army band. The museum near Rimouski, with its Empress memorabilia, attracts few visitors. The most significant reason the Empress of Ireland is forgotten—as James Croall points out in his book, Fourteen Minutes—is that most people on board Empress were in second class or steerage. They were not rich and famous like some Titanic passengers: “the world was unlikely to pay the same attention to the deaths of a shipload of eastern European migrant workers that it had paid two years earlier to the snuffing out of a substantial part of the New York social register.”
The second incident occurred on 6 December 1917, and it involved two former passenger liners: a Norwegian ship, SS IMO,2 and a French ship, SS Mont-Blanc. To those watching—the collision happened on a clear day in the inner harbour of Halifax, Nova Scotia—the collision appeared innocuous. But Mont-Blanc was carrying a deadly cargo of gasoline and explosives, and roughly eighteen minutes after the collision she exploded with one-seventh the power of the first atomic bomb. The explosion left 1963 dead or dying and about 9000 injured—one-fifth of the city’s population. It led to more than 1000 fires, mainly in residential dwellings. It caused severe damage to ships in harbour.
One reason why the explosion has assumed such importance is that, until it occurred, the First World War seemed far away to North Americans. The Halifax explosion brought total war to North America. Another is that the explosion foreshadowed the atomic age and the mass destruction the new age brought with it. A third reason is that despite the massive death toll, there were thousands of survivors, both injured and uninjured, and thousands more who came to help. There were many people around to tell stories about what happened. However, there is a more important reason why the explosion has survived as a legend. Although it occurred in a Canadian city and involved no one who could be called famous or near famous, it did involve many Americans. There were American ships in harbour and nearby. There were American soldiers with the Canadian army in Halifax. Soon, there were American physicians, nurses, social workers, and construction teams pouring into Halifax. And with them, American journalists. There were also many Americans with a personal interest in Halifax because they came from Nova Scotia and family members were still there. Unlike the Empress of Ireland, the Halifax explosion was an American media event. Americans created its legend, and to a considerable extent that legend distorted the recollections of what actually happened.
Given the American experience with Vietnam and Iraq, and the widespread anti-war sentiment in both cases, it is hard to grasp the pro-war atmosphere in English Canada in 1917. When war broke out, the desire to get involved was so great that that when Colonel A.H. Borden organized the 85th Battalion CEF (Nova Scotia Highlanders) in Halifax, he was swamped with recruits. There were so many volunteers that four battalions were created of them—enough to form a full brigade. In rough terms, that means Borden set out to recruit 1000 men and ended up with more than 4000. Support for the war continued despite the stream of telegrams reporting deaths and the flow of injured soldiers into Halifax. The newspapers were full of reports that provided the names of the “glorious dead,” and those who spoke against the war or the way it was conducted were seen as traitors. The fact that there was significant opposition, even some anti-draft riots in Quebec, meant there was a strong anti-French feeling in English Canada—a feeling that explains some of what happened after the explosion.
There are a number of reasons for writing yet another book about the 1917 Halifax explosion. First, it is now possible—with the usual advantages of hindsight—to see that Halifax was a forerunner of what was to follow. Halifax was the first victim of the new weapons of mass destruction. What happened in the city was an accident, but it was an inevitable one, given the destructive forces that had been let loose. As we now know all too well, modern war, no matter how technically controlled, brings to civilians what the military likes to call “collateral damage.”
Second, there is a great deal of new material available. Archival material in Ottawa, London, Washington, and Paris is now public and reveals much about what happened that was previously unknown. In addition, material in archives in Maine, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island, as well as in various towns in Nova Scotia, such as Truro, Kentville, and Sydney, has also become available. It was never secret, but it is now easier to retrieve.
Third, as mentioned, over the past few decades we have learned to look at events like the Halifax explosion very differently. In both the United States and Canada, a group of scholars has begun to study human and organizational behaviour in disaster and has discovered that, even in the most catastrophic events, individual behaviour is both predictable and generally constructive. It is now possible to use this scholarship to put what happened in Halifax into focus, and to gain insight into other events similar in nature.
Fourth, there are many myths about what happened in Halifax, and not just myths about the way that people behaved. There are myths about the role of the Americans, especially the ones from Massachusetts—myths that are based on some wonderful things done by remarkable Americans, but myths that conceal the many problems Americans created as well. It is time to set the record straight and to give credit where it is due.
The fifth and perhaps most important reason for writing about the explosion is to give due credit to a remarkable Canadian scholar, Samuel Henry Prince, one of those present that dark day in Halifax. At the time of the explosion, Prince already had a B.A. and M.A. from the University of Toronto. Afterward, he would go on to complete a Ph.D. at Columbia in New York. His doctoral thesis was called “Catastrophe and Social Change,” and it was an analysis of the Halifax explosion. In his preface, Prince observes that he was working in uncultivated territory and challenged others to follow in his footsteps.
Prince is far better known now than he was when I started looking at him in 1987. Since then, Leonard Hatfield’s biography, Sammy the Prince: The Story of Samuel Henry Prince, has appeared, as well as Susan Dodd’s The Halifax Explosion: The Apocalypse of Samuel H. Prince, and my own articles, “Disaster’s Little Known Pioneer: Canada’s Samuel Henry Prince” and “The Man Who Helped Sammy Prince Write: Dwight Johnstone and the Halifax Explosion.” Both articles were published in the International Journal of Mass Emergencies and Disasters. In addition are two chapters in Ground Zero: A Reassessment of the 1917 Explosion in Halifax Harbour, one by Gillian Osborne and myself, “More Source Than Influence: Johnstone’s Contribution to Prince’s Dissertation,” and the other by Russell Dynes and E.L. Quarantelli, “The Place of the Explosion in the History of Disaster Research: The Work of Samuel H. Prince.” Yet, this book is the first attempt since 1920 to look at what happened in Halifax from the point of view of a disaster scholar.
Inevitably, this book draws on earlier works and on those who wrote them. One of the best accounts of the medical response is a novel, A Romance of the Halifax Disaster, by Lieutenant-Colonel Bell, the senior medical officer. His book is unremarkable as fiction, but it provides a view of the horror of catastrophic medicine. Also important are Hugh MacLennan’s personal reminiscences in a piece called “Concussion,” which he wrote for the Lower Canada College magazine, and Thomas Raddall’s autobiography, In My Time. Raddall tells how he, though a mere fourteen-year-old schoolboy, helped to set up the morgue at Chebucto School. There are the accounts collected by the official historian, Archibald MacMechan, and MacMechan’s personal diary, now in the Dalhousie University Archives and Special Collections. Equally important are the hundreds of other papers, articles, and books available on the subject of disaster. When Prince was writing, a century ago, he had the field to himself. Now that field is well cultivated (my own involvement started in 1970) and it seemed to me that it was time someone took a look at Halifax in the light of current knowledge.
Once I started, other reasons drove me on. There was the discovery of the Prince papers, the Johnstone manuscript, and Johnstone’s relatives. Dwight Johnstone was Prince’s closest friend—they had been at Wycliffe College together—and Prince drew heavily on Johnstone’s unpublished manuscript on the explosion when he wrote his thesis. That interest sharpened when Gillian Osborne, who discovered the Prince papers, and I went to visit Prince’s first graduate student, the Right Reverend Leonard Hatfield, and I learned that Hatfield and Prince had known my mother, Edna Young Scanlon, a woman who had a fascination with history and passed that on to me. In many ways, my mother lived Canadian history. She was born in Almonte, Ontario, in 1900. Her father served with the Lanark and Renfrew militia during the Fenian raids. Like many, she suffered as her classmates died in the First World War and when her Sunday school students went off to fight and die in the Second World War. Her deepest regret was that her financial circumstances never allowed her to go to Queen’s University to study history, though she did manage to work at night and earn her high school diploma at my own alma mater, Lisgar Collegiate Institute, in Ottawa. She was a remarkable human being.
The final spur came the day I discovered many of the Halifax papers originally kept secret—after all, they reflected a military catastrophe in the middle of a war. They were retained by persons in Canada’s Department of National Defence who felt the documents must be preserved for future scholars. One of those behind that decision was a man who had served Canada faithfully with the First Canadian Division, in World War I. A soldier who was awarded the Distinguished Service Medical and, having been twice mentioned in dispatches, the Oak Leaf Cluster and Bar. A sergeant major who ended the war as captain, and whose commitment to Canada was strong enough that he went overseas again in 1940 when he was fifty-five years old and still earning a disability pension from the First World War. He was my father, John James Scanlon.
A great many people have inspired me and helped me on the way to this book. My mentors include Ted Hodgetts and John Meisel, who taught me at Queen’s University where I first learned about communications; Vic Valentine, who got me interested in the literature that led to disaster research; my original colleague, Brian Taylor, who put up with me when neither he nor I knew very much about disasters; Burke Stannard of the Operations Research Establishment, Defence Research Board, who found my first research money; George Frame of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, who showed interest in what I was learning; Stuart Adam, then Director of the Carleton University School of Journalism, who put up with my unpredictable absences every time something went wrong somewhere and I wanted to see for myself; Enrico L. (Henry) Quarantelli and Russell Dynes, first at Ohio State then at Delaware, who encouraged me to go on and on—Dynes got me writing about Prince, and Quarantelli helped me to think like a sociologist. There was Charles Fritz, one of the truly great men in the field and yet so modest—when I first met him he asked me if I had time to have lunch with him. There are more recent friends and colleagues, like Ron Perry, one of the most supportive people I have ever had occasion to meet; and Bob Stallings, who encouraged me to think my historical dabblings were worthwhile.
They also include Hugh Gamble, who gave me a chance to share ideas with a whole generation of students at the Canadian Emergency Planning College, at Arnprior, Ontario; Ron Cripps and Lorraine Davies who never lost that faith; Tom George who helped me regain it. They also include the many students at Arnprior whose apparent interest in my research made me feel it was worth continuing. They include Mike Shaver at the Canadian Police College; John Bettridge, who helped me expand into England; Rob Flemming and his wonderful library in Mt. Macedon, Australia; Bruce MacFarlane, an endless source of information; and Bob Hiscott, a former researcher who went on to become a sociologist at the University of Waterloo.
More recently, they include David Farr, who hired me to teach at Carleton and has encouraged my forays into his field, history; and two other Carleton historians who shared with me their enthusiasm for Canadian history—Del Muise and Carman Bickerton. They also include Dave Goranson, whose boundless enthusiasm was contagious; David Flemming at the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic; and Pat Townsend at Acadia University in Wolfville, who not only found material in her own section of the university library, but also books and theses elsewhere relevant to the explosion. The minutes of Acadia’s board of governors showed, for example, that the president had gone to Halifax to assist with the rehabilitation and that the School for the Deaf and Dumb moved to Acadia. A thesis provided biographical information about George Graham, head of the Dominion Atlantic railroad, the man who walked 6.5 kilometres to Rockingham to send a message ordering a relief train. They also include all the wonderful people at the reference desk of the Ottawa Public Library who answer the phone so politely and patiently find answers to questions. They include my long-time friend and insurance agent, Doug Duclos, who helped open some doors in London.
There are many, many others. There is Barb Wilson, a classmate from Carleton, who first helped me find my way around the Library and Archives Canada; Kari Andreassen and her parents, who showed me around Sandefjord, Norway; my niece, Betina Scanlon, who helped me in Oslo; June Davidson from Dalhousie University, who let me put a note in her alumni publication; the late Carrie Best in New Glasgow; Howard Glube from California; my Parisian colleague Patrick Lagadec; Per Hunstok of Sandefjord, who gave me the photo of the beautiful painting done by his grandfather who lost an arm in the explosion; Al Chapman who helped research my chapter on rescue; George Scuthe, gone but never forgotten; my friends at Denton, Texas, and Delaware; all of the helpful staff at the Nova Scotia Archives, but especially Margaret Campbell. There is also Jane Kushna, who tracked down Red Cross documents in Virginia; and Les Copley and Pat Finn, who helped me find the time required to do the research. They also include my Spanish cousin, Justin Scanlon, who lived with me while this book was being written and listened usually quite tolerantly every time I wished to share an anecdote. There is also Alan Ruffman,3 who both sent me things and queried some things I said in various talks, forcing me to be certain I was accurate.
Most important, however, is the incredible devotion I had from a generation of Carleton University journalism students who put up with my anxieties and my determination as we churned out more than sixty studies of Canadian emergency incidents. Even though we often operated on a shoestring and many of them found my demands intolerable, they were so talented that we accomplished miracles. That is how I learned about disaster. I am amazed at the quality of our research when I go back and read some of our old studies.4 I was very fortunate to have been able to learn from such gifted people. I cannot mention or remember them all of them—and I apologize to all those left out—but they include the originals like Angela Ferrante, Lydia Dotto, Al Arbuckle, Sharon McKay, Cheryl Freedman, Alf Cryderman, Eleanor Sawyer, Susan Murray, Paul Palango, Marg Whitman Purdy, and Nick Walsh, and the ones who stayed around for years, like Debbie Sproat, Rudy Luukko, Jim Jefferson, Darlene Harapiak, David Tait, Al Farrell, Geoff Froggett, Scott McClellan, Kim Carter, Dan Conlin, Harvey Cashore, Ann Simard, Carmelina Prete, and above all Gillian Osborne and Angela Prawzick, who both stuck with me long after others moved on and, to my great satisfaction, are now professionals in emergency management.
I owe a special thanks to eight people. The most important is Gillian Osborne, whom I have already mentioned. Another is my former student, long-time colleague, and valued friend, Dan Pottier, always ready to listen when I was discouraged or otherwise. A third is Norma Rankin, who put up with my endless anecdotes and encouraged me. The fourth is my daughter, Lucy Scanlon, who travelled with me in the Maritimes, assisted with interviews of survivors, and who chased down data on the handling of bodies by interviewing people in the Toronto area. The fifth is Janet Kitz, who not only wrote Shattered City, her own excellent book about the explosion, but was kind enough to lend me her copy of the transcript of the Wreck Commission Inquiry. It allowed me to make major changes and improvements in many parts of the book. It also allowed me to have an extremely worthwhile conversation with Robert Power, a pilot with an intimate knowledge of Halifax harbour whose insights made me rewrite part of the conclusions.5
The sixth is another colleague, friend, and golf partner, Ross Eaman. He was the first to read my draft manuscript and suggest how I could turn good research into a coherent book. The seventh is John Sawatsky, an excellent journalist, a wonderful teacher and a friend who encouraged me to take the early retirement that was essential if this book was to ever appear. Without him, I know I would never have had the confidence required to tackle such a massive project. As he well knows, I wish I had followed his advice earlier. The last is my daughter Meaghan Scanlon. She did the fine editing for [the original 2007] manuscript and is the most conscientious nitpicking editor I have ever met.6 Any errors that remain are not her doing but mine and mine alone. She is also substantially responsible for a recent article comparing the literature on the explosion to what actually happened.
I owe, in short, a great deal to a great many people—and I know I have left some out—but I am sure all of them, including my sister, Kathleen Pedersen (née Scanlon), my wonderful Danish brother-in-law, Ingvard Pedersen, and my other children, James David Scanlon, Leslie Scanlon, Amy Boughner (née Scanlon), and my nine grandchildren will understand why this book is dedicated to a person who left his homeland so I could grow up in mine, who served his country so well, who, along with my mother, gave me a sense of and an interest in Canadian history—my father. I wish he and my mother were here to read this book. I know it would give them as much satisfaction as I have had in writing it.
T. Joseph Scanlon
Ottawa, 2007