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bloodygranuaile) wrote2024-12-23 06:19 pm
bloodygranuaile) wrote2024-12-23 06:19 pm
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The opposite of a Christmas miracle
For reasons related to my current maritime disasters kick I vowed that this December I would finally read the copy of The Great Halifax Explosion that has been sitting on my shelf since January 2019. I first learned about the event when I visited Nova Scotia in 2017 and everybody was doing centenary stuff about it, and I am reminded of it every year when Boston gets its Christmas tree, which the Haligonians send us in thanks for our relief efforts. So I know the short version of the story pretty well but I wanted to read the book-length version, which is why I bought this book when I saw it in an airport, a place I almost never buy books.
The short version of the story is that at 9 o’clock in the morning on December 6, 1917, two ships accidentally bonked into each other in Halifax Harbor. This was not a very fierce crash and it would not have been a huge deal except that, Halifax Harbor being a major port in the World War One supply line, one of the ships was carrying six million pounds of explosives. The resulting blowup was the largest man-made explosion in history at the time and would retain that record for another almost thirty years until the US dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. This short version is very exciting but doesn’t contain any important lessons, other than maybe that it was very heroic for Boston to send so many doctors and nurses and blankets and hits of cocaine afterward.
The long version is a whole different story! In addition to the added human interest element, of which there is quite a lot–eyewitness accounts by survivors, photographs, a lot of historical context of the different neighborhoods in Halifax and Dartmouth–John U. Bacon spends a good amount of time giving a play-by-play account of every single safety regulation, norm, and best practice that was disregarded over the course of both ships’ journeys, starting with the Mont-Blanc’s unsuitability for the job it was doing and going through the inadvertent packaging of the Mont-Blanc into a perfect floating bomb, Halifax Harbor’s decision to rescind safety protocols like requiring munitions boats to fly a red flag, and the Imo’s Captain From’s impatient decision to blow out of Halifax Harbor at top speed in the wrong lane and play chicken with anyone coming the other direction. This book has lots of things it wants us to learn about the importance of safety regulations, which I agree is very important. It’s also genuinely thrilling reading–well paced, and you can see the disaster inching nearer with every corner cut. I also learned a lot about Halifax and the people who lived here, which as an idiot American I am in sore need of education on.
The explosion itself occurs about halfway through the book, and the second half describes in horrifying detail the immediate aftermath–told largely through the eyes of the ordinary survivors we’ve been getting to know in the first half–the relief and cleanup efforts in the following few weeks, and the later legal wrangling to determine blame, a series of four trials that started with the local Wreck Commission and ended up being appealed all the way to London. The descriptions of the medical relief efforts, from both the local and semi-local Canadian doctors who could make their way in that day and the US contingent sent by Massachusetts’ first experimental iteration of a disaster relief commission, are thorough, vivid, and incredibly nasty. I found it absolutely riveting but some readers might get squicked, so caveat lector if you are squeamish about gross medical stuff, especially eyeballs.
While I read this in December specifically to be seasonal, I did not expect the Christmas season connection to affect me as much as it did, especially reading it warm and cozy in my bed on a bitingly cold morning, reading about these poor folks whose windows had all been blown out of their houses trying stay warm through a particularly ill-timed blizzard. It manages to get all heartwarming at the end, so I guess it really is a Christmas book. It’s not one that could ever be made into a family holiday movie, though; too many people get their eyeballs removed.
The short version of the story is that at 9 o’clock in the morning on December 6, 1917, two ships accidentally bonked into each other in Halifax Harbor. This was not a very fierce crash and it would not have been a huge deal except that, Halifax Harbor being a major port in the World War One supply line, one of the ships was carrying six million pounds of explosives. The resulting blowup was the largest man-made explosion in history at the time and would retain that record for another almost thirty years until the US dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. This short version is very exciting but doesn’t contain any important lessons, other than maybe that it was very heroic for Boston to send so many doctors and nurses and blankets and hits of cocaine afterward.
The long version is a whole different story! In addition to the added human interest element, of which there is quite a lot–eyewitness accounts by survivors, photographs, a lot of historical context of the different neighborhoods in Halifax and Dartmouth–John U. Bacon spends a good amount of time giving a play-by-play account of every single safety regulation, norm, and best practice that was disregarded over the course of both ships’ journeys, starting with the Mont-Blanc’s unsuitability for the job it was doing and going through the inadvertent packaging of the Mont-Blanc into a perfect floating bomb, Halifax Harbor’s decision to rescind safety protocols like requiring munitions boats to fly a red flag, and the Imo’s Captain From’s impatient decision to blow out of Halifax Harbor at top speed in the wrong lane and play chicken with anyone coming the other direction. This book has lots of things it wants us to learn about the importance of safety regulations, which I agree is very important. It’s also genuinely thrilling reading–well paced, and you can see the disaster inching nearer with every corner cut. I also learned a lot about Halifax and the people who lived here, which as an idiot American I am in sore need of education on.
The explosion itself occurs about halfway through the book, and the second half describes in horrifying detail the immediate aftermath–told largely through the eyes of the ordinary survivors we’ve been getting to know in the first half–the relief and cleanup efforts in the following few weeks, and the later legal wrangling to determine blame, a series of four trials that started with the local Wreck Commission and ended up being appealed all the way to London. The descriptions of the medical relief efforts, from both the local and semi-local Canadian doctors who could make their way in that day and the US contingent sent by Massachusetts’ first experimental iteration of a disaster relief commission, are thorough, vivid, and incredibly nasty. I found it absolutely riveting but some readers might get squicked, so caveat lector if you are squeamish about gross medical stuff, especially eyeballs.
While I read this in December specifically to be seasonal, I did not expect the Christmas season connection to affect me as much as it did, especially reading it warm and cozy in my bed on a bitingly cold morning, reading about these poor folks whose windows had all been blown out of their houses trying stay warm through a particularly ill-timed blizzard. It manages to get all heartwarming at the end, so I guess it really is a Christmas book. It’s not one that could ever be made into a family holiday movie, though; too many people get their eyeballs removed.