Whipped Cream Difficulties

I was so busy yesterday that I missed this, but December 6th this year was the 100th anniversary of the Halifax explosion.

For some reason, I don’t think this is generally well remembered, outside of Halifax anyway. I knew about it at a fairly young age, but that was because I read a first-hand account of it in a really old “Reader’s Digest” that one of my grandparents had around the house.

Halifax was a pretty busy port in December of 1917. There was a war on, after all. On the morning of the 6th, the SS Imo (a Norwegian flagged ship chartered to carry relief supplies for Belgium, but empty at the time) struck the SS Mont-Blanc, a French flagged ship, in a narrow section of the harbor.

The Mont-Blanc was heavily loaded with high explosives for the war effort, and also barrels of benzol. It sounds like the initial collision was at low speed, and damage to both ships was minimal.

At first.

But the collision started a fire on the Mont-Blanc.

The commotion soon brought out crowds in the largely working-class neighborhood along the narrows. Some survivors’ accounts described the immediate aftermath almost as if it were a fireworks display, with exploding barrels of benzol bursting in the sky. Many people, to their later harm, peered down at the harbor from the hillside neighborhood through windows.

At 9:04:35 AM local time (according to Wikipedia) the Mont-Blanc exploded.

Vince Coleman, the dispatcher for the rail line that ran along the front, feared the worst and telegraphed a stop order to a train heading for the city: “Munitions ship on fire. Making for Pier 6. Goodbye.” He died almost immediately afterward. The city, which was a hub for undersea cables from Europe, lost all communications with the rest of the world.

Over 2,000 people were killed. Somewhere between 9,000 and 10,000 more were injured.

Plays, special exhibitions, films and events, as well as shop windows commemorating the anniversary, are spread throughout the city.

The shop windows are deeply ironic: an estimated 600 people were blinded by flying glass.

The explosion is estimated to have been the equivalent of 2.9 kilotons of TNT. (Little Boy, the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, had an estimated yield between 12 and 18 kilotons. Wikipedia gives an estimate for the Grandicamp explosion in Texas City of 2.7 kilotons equivalent, but hedges that a bit.) Before the atomic bomb, this was the largest man-made explosion in history.

The ship was completely blown apart and a powerful blast wave radiated away from the explosion at more than 1,000 metres (3,300 ft) per second. Temperatures of 5,000 °C (9,000 °F) 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. Mont-Blanc’s forward 90 mm gun, its barrel melted away, landed approximately 5.6 kilometres (3.5 mi) north of the explosion site near Albro Lake in Dartmouth, and the shank of her anchor, weighing half a ton, landed 3.2 kilometres (2.0 mi) south at Armdale.

The NYT has a good article up. Wikipedia entry.