Halifax Explosion Quotes

It doesn't matter now that they lived and died, but rather did they make a difference?

His manner of dealing with explosives also caused her consternation. On one occasion Helen joined Parsons and Forman on one of their recreational skyrocket launching trips in the desert. Sitting in the back seat of the car, she lifted up a rug covering the floor to find it had been hiding sticks and sticks of dynamite, no doubt taken from Halifax by Parsons. Nervously leaning forward to the front seat where Parsons and Forman were sitting, she asked whether the explosives were safe. As the truck bumped heavily along the desert road, Parsons turned to her with an amused grin and told her not to worry: “The detonator’s in the front seat.

assumed everyone

For many of us, the act of waiting is among our most lasting and evocative memories. Some travelers, like my husband when he was a boy, were lucky enough to wait for ferries, where there were always the sound of ships, the small of the sea, and the sight of wheeling gulls. He remembers plain wooden benches and the sound of voices and feet echoing from hard wooden floors and walls. The cheerful newsstand was the colorful central presence in these austere stations, before plastic and the paperback explosion. Waiting for the Dartmouth-Halifax ferry in Nova Scotia, he marveled at the size of the Buffalo Sunday Times, and bought the first issue of the New Yorkers, with Eustace Tilley on the cover. Waiting, as well was travel, can broaden the mind.

in World War I, Canada lost 60,000 young men, from a total population of 7 million. If the United States had lost a similar ratio in Vietnam, it wouldn’t have lost 58,000 men but 1.7 million—or almost thirty times more.

Put it all together, and the power of Mont-Blanc’s cargo works out to about 3 kilotons of TNT—or about a fifth of the 15 kilotons the “Little Boy” atomic bomb unleashed on Hiroshima.

The Red Baron and his eighty combat victories in the sky pale in comparison to legendary U-boat captain Lothar von Arnauld de la Perière and his 194 sunken ships.

Mont-Blanc was chugging up the coast, burrowing through the deep waves kicked up by a coastal storm and weighed down with 6 million pounds of high explosives to attack German soldiers.

But by making the last-minute decision to store most of the fuel on the deck and the TNT and picric acid below, the crew had unwittingly constructed the perfect bomb, with the easy-to-light fuse on top, and the most explosive materials trapped in the hold below.

In the wake of tragedy, people are often tempted to tell the mourners “Everything happens for reason,” “It will all work out for the best,” or “This is all part of God’s plan.” Reverend Swetnam, a devoted man of the cloth, was having none of it. “If this was the work of God,” he said, “I’ll tear off this clerical collar.

The Mortuary Committee would be burdened with many unenviable tasks, but the first was straightforward: instead of storing the corpses at a half dozen locations around town, which made it more difficult for soldiers to transport the bodies and record-keepers and families to find them, they needed to select a single building to house an official, temporary morgue. They quickly settled on the Chebucto Road School, which, despite its broken windows, had a lot to recommend it: it was large, it could be quickly cleared out and converted to its new purpose, and it was close to Pier 6, minimizing the transport of corpses and travel for their relatives. The committee also needed a place that could keep bodies for as long as possible, giving them the best chance of being identified. They designated the upper floors for offices and the wide-open, cooler basement for the bodies, which they planned to lay in rows and cover with sheets. The Royal Engineers quickly fixed up the damaged school, covered its windows, and cleaned the space. As soon as people learned of the location, bodies began to pile up outside the building, stacked two and three high until morgue workers could retrieve them. The Relief Committee also dispatched crews of volunteers to put out fires and turn off water mains, faucets, and spigots, and to pick up the dead—tagging their names, when they knew them, to the victims’ wrists, or simply attaching a number when they didn’t—loading them onto rudimentary flat wagons dozens at a time. They soon learned to conduct this dispiriting job late at night so as not to offend the friends and relatives of the deceased. But because everyone could hear the horses’ hooves each night, the rolling midnight morgue was a poorly kept secret, one that woke many Haligonians whose homes still lacked windows.

Sailors on nearby ships heard the series of signals and, realizing that a collision was imminent, gathered to watch as SS Imo bore down on SS Mont-Blanc. Though both ships had cut their engines by this point, their momentum carried them right on top of each other at slow speed. Unable to ground his ship for fear of a shock that would set off his explosive cargo, Mackey ordered SS Mont-Blanc to steer hard to port and crossed the Norwegian ship's bows in a last-second bid to avoid a collision. The two ships were almost parallel to each other, when SS Imo suddenly sent out three signal blasts, indicating the ship was reversing its engines. The combination of the cargoless ship's height in the water and the transverse thrust of her right-hand propeller caused the ship's head to swing into SS Mont-Blanc. SS Imo's prow pushed into the French vessel's No. 1 hold on her starboard side.

At 9:04:35 am, the out-of-control fire on board SS Mont-Blanc finally set off her highly explosive cargo. The ship was completely blown apart and a powerful blast wave radiated away from the explosion at more than 1,000 metres per second. Temperatures of 5,000 °C and pressures of thousands of atmospheres accompanied the moment of detonation at the centre of the explosion. White-hot shards of iron fell down upon Halifax and Dartmouth. SS Mont-Blanc's forward 90 mm gun, its barrel melted away, landed approximately 3.5 miles north of the explosion site near Albro Lake in Dartmouth, while the shank of her anchor, weighing half a ton, landed 2 miles south at Armdale.

On December 6th, 1917, during the First World War, Halifax was devastated by one of the worst explosive disasters in history. At the time, Halifax’s harbour was crowded with Allied cargo and military vessels carrying weapons and explosives destined for the battlegrounds of Europe. On the morning of December 6th, a Norwegian ship collided with a French vessel filled with explosives in a body of water that connected the Halifax Harbour and Bedford Basin. The collision sparked a fire on the French ship, that led to a massive explosion. The result was the biggest man-made explosion before the development of nuclear bombs. A large part of Halifax was devastated, with many people killed and buildings destroyed.

Tragedy comes quick and loud, while the small acts of decency that follow come slowly and quietly.