Comments on: The Halifax Disaster

By: Coyoty

Coyoty — Wed, 06 Dec 2023 23:24:04 +0000

Concerned by the lack of updates from JarvisLoop for the last 3 years, I checked the web and found that as of August 2023, he was still around.

By: JarvisLoop

JarvisLoop — Sun, 06 Dec 2020 23:46:24 +0000

Another year, thank God.

By: JarvisLoop

JarvisLoop — Sun, 29 Dec 2019 03:06:31 +0000

I am here.

By: Colin Roald

Colin Roald — Mon, 09 Dec 2019 16:45:04 +0000

To everyone blithely blaming everything on Imo:
* It’s captain died in the explosion, so he couldn’t be shot for it.
* The ship was under control of the harbour pilot at the time anyway. He also died in the explosion.
* Yes, Imo was travelling too fast, having been delayed by coaling and then the closure of the submarine boom.
* It was forced into the wrong channel by reasonable decisions to avoid first American tramp steamer SS Clara (also being piloted up the wrong side of the harbour) and then a tugboat crossing the harbour midchannel.
* No one knows why Imo wanted to keep her course in the immediate run-up to collision, because everyone on board died.
* Meanwhile, Mont Blanc was wildly, horrifically overloaded with all manner of explosives. You haven’t heard of picric acid not because it’s less powerful than TNT–it’s actually more powerful–but because it’s too unstable for anyone to use anymore.
* Mont Blanc should have had a guardship and should have been flying red warning flags to warn the harbour of the danger she carried. People were worried about making her a target for submarines, but once inside the harbour’s anti-submarine nets that should no longer have been an issue.
* In Halifax, the Dominion Wreck Commissioner’s judgment at the time was that “it was the Mont-Blanc’s responsibility alone to ensure that she avoided a collision at all costs” given her insane cargo. There was only one party to the collision who knew what they were risking.
* Subsequent appeals to the Supreme Court of Canada (19 May 1919), and the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in London (22 March 1920), determined Mont-Blanc and Imo were equally to blame for navigational errors that led to the collision.
* People still argue about it a hundred years later. Two thousand people died, and there were lots and lots of mistakes made.

By: JarvisLoop

JarvisLoop — Sat, 07 Dec 2019 01:44:30 +0000

And yet another year? Very soon, I won’t have many “another years” to comment.

By: JarvisLoop

JarvisLoop — Thu, 06 Dec 2018 23:58:34 +0000

A year has passed already?

Incomprehensible.

By: jarvisloop

jarvisloop — Thu, 07 Dec 2017 01:21:56 +0000

And I thought that I had read all DI entries. Somehow, I missed this one. Moreover, the story is completely new to me.

Mr. Bellows, thanks for furthering my education.

By: Radser

Radser — Mon, 28 Aug 2017 01:02:22 +0000

When I was 6 years old I lived in Mill Valley, CA, roughly 40 miles from Port Chicago. My mother picked me up after school and when we arrived home we found all the ashes from the fireplace scattered across the living room. We could not understand the mess as neither of us knew about the Port Chicago explosion, but learned of it as soon as the radio was turned on. The pressure wave had come down the chimney and blown the ashes entirely across the room. Quite amazing for an explosion 40 miles away and terrible.

By: David

David — Fri, 27 May 2016 05:20:44 +0000

I became fascinated by this, as my brother lives in NS, and I visited Halifax last year (who authorised that eye-sore of a communications building!?).
I watched an episode of ‘Bomb Hunters’ yesterday, and I was startled to hear it state that this was a WW2 explosion!
Perhaps I mis-heard.

By: Karl

Karl — Sat, 23 Feb 2013 05:49:03 +0000

If you are ever in Halifax and want to find the best viewing plane of where the accident happened you need to go to the monument at Fort Needham park in the North end. From there you can picture everything, and behind you is the Hydrostone, the first federally funded housing project to house displaced residents form the halifax explosion. Today the Hydrostone is one of the most coveted neighbourhoods in the city.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hydrostone