Halifax

Much like Sarge, last week was back to the grind week for me.  Unlike him however, I am returning from a very nice two week vacation at various ports in the Canadian Southeast and American North East.  Sarge, during this time, was practicing for Halloween where he's going trick or treating as Popeye.  Muesli indeed!

In all seriousness, he's doing much better and we had a great, albeit short, time with them.

I'm also not going to regale you with how the shortened work week went when I returned to the saddle. (But...since you asked.  Fine actually, we had a team discussion on what they did not have appropriate permission levels to handle things while I was gone.  So an appropriate dry run for something that occurs in 40 work days.)

Nope.  It's another travelogue.

Hello....Anybody still there?

One of the things I really like about traveling with my wife and our friends (aka The Pharmacists) is we plan the trip, but that plan isn't set in concrete.  We do quite a bit of wandering around. That has led us to some spectacular discoveries over the years.

And it didn't fail us this trip either.

Our primary objective on our stop in Halifax was to take a "foodie" tour of the town, which we did, but that started in the afternoon.  To occupy the morning, we decided to hike to the Maritime Museum which was about a quarter mile from where the ship was moored.

Mrs J had heard they had a Titanic exhibit there and she wanted to see that. I was kinda "Meh" on that exhibit, but ships are cool. So....

Arrived and went through the Titanic exhibit and it was solidly ONG (Ok, Not Great).  They had an actual deck chair, but the rest was mostly models, and old photos.  

Source

They had a fairly interesting section that talked about how they had documented the descriptions of the bodies recovered.  The result there was that many bodies were identified and returned to Next of Kin, years after the fact.  As a Data Guy, I thought that was kind of cool. YMMV.

But Mrs J and the Pharmacists were entranced by the exhibit, so I wandered on ahead after deciding on a rendezvous place.  

Well, it seems the museum was hosting a display discussing the Halifax Explosion.  Not knowing anything whatsoever about this, I went inside.  

There went the rest of the morning.

Well it seems that on December 6, 1917, two ships collided in a portion of the Halifax Harbor known as "The Narrows".  One was a Norwegian ship, the SS Imo, carrying grain to Belgium.  The other was a French ship, the  SS Mont-Blanc, carrying ammunition to Europe.

Explosion took place inside the blue rectangle
Source

Due to a series of unfortunate events, the Imo was sailing on the wrong side of the waterway and neither Captain was willing to give way until too late.  The Imo hit the Mont-Blanc gashing her hull and splitting barrels of benzole, a highly flammable fuel.  Sparks from the collision ignited that fuel starting an uncontrollable fire.

The Captain of the Mont Blanc ordered the ship abandoned and the crew rowed to the opposite shore where all, save one, survived. The Imo was not so lucky.  Only 4 survived, two were undersea divers underneath the water.

Source

The ship drifted up against the docks and burned for about 20 minutes.  Just enough time to allow people to come and look at it.  Unfortunately, because of security concerns to protect the ship from U-Boats, very few people knew what the cargo was.

Source

Finally, about 9:05 in the morning, the ship exploded.  

Source

The exhibit stated that the force of the explosion was ~3 Kilotons.  I've sat alert with weapons that are measured in Kilotons, 3Kt would not have been the smallest of them.

Virtually all structures within a half mile radius were destroyed and 1600 people killed instantaneously.

Source

A large total, which could have...should have...would have been higher except for the actions of one man.  The ship was on fire very near the train station.  

Source

A passenger train due to arrive during that twenty minute window.  The dispatcher Vince Coleman was one of the few who knew the cargo of the Mont Blanc and stayed at his post telegraphing messages to get that train stopped.   His last message was "Hold up the train. Ammunition ship afire in harbor making for Pier 6 and will explode. Guess this will be my last message. Good-bye boys."

Source

Not only did the passenger train get stopped successfully, but that was the first indication the outside world had of the disaster.  Trains from all over were rerouted immediately to Halifax to bring supplies in and wounded out.

Mr. Coleman died at his post.

In a somewhat macabre portion of the exhibit was a box with glass eyes in it.  I stopped by to see what that was all about.  Evidently, one of the more common, if survivable, injuries incurred was blindness caused by looking at the light of the explosion.   An Ophthalmologist named George Cox removed 79 eyeballs during a 48 hour period after it.

A final factoid that I found interesting was that the Mont Blanc's 1140 lb anchor was found 2.35 miles from the site of the explosion.  Gardeners in the area still routinely find pieces of broken metal from the ships while digging in their gardens.

Source

All things I wouldn't have known if I hadn't wandered off from the group.

I found this computerized re-creation of the event educational.

Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halifax_Explosion
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OSuX9RvLq54
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2017/12/06/two-ships-collided-in-halifax-harbor-one-of-them-was-a-3000-ton-floating-bomb/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.d8f76952bab4
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/newly-discovered-diary-tells-harrowing-story-deadly-halifax-explosion-180964066/
https://maritimemuseum.novascotia.ca/what-see-do/halifax-explosion
https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/unearthed-first-hand-accounts-reveal-devastation-of-1917-halifax-explosion-1.2684931

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vince_Coleman_(train_dispatcher)