By Dave Jensen, W7DGJ

In August of 1914, the Canadian Government decided that radio amateurs would have to disassemble their equipment and remove any transmitting or receiving apparatus from their homes. This was due to the onset of WWI, as Canada went to war with Germany three years earlier than the USA. [Later, the government in the States took similar actions as well.] Everyone assumed -- perhaps rightly so -- that in wartime there should be only one party responsible for the airwaves. The unfortunate result of this was that many communities lost a valuable asset . . . their emergency communication via radio, an “unwired” mode that can be so important when disaster strikes. It was left to telegraph stations to transmit across great distances and to call for help when needed.

That is, unless something terrible happens to the telegraph stations at the same time.

In December of 1917 that scenario came to pass in Halifax, Nova Scotia. An event took place there which taught the world how important it is to have radio communication up and running 24/7. It is simply impossible to know when and where disaster will strike.

Emergency communications will always be a key element for anyone who holds a mic or key in their hands.

Events Leading up to the World’s Largest Explosion

On December 1^st of 1917 the tramp steamer Mont-Blanc (registered out of Rouen, France) left New York City on its way to Halifax, Nova Scotia. "Tramp" steamers were steam freighters that didn't have a regular schedule -- they could be hired at any time by any party for any kind of transport. The Mont-Blanc was to join a convoy that would soon be headed to Britain, and her cargo was especially dangerous. Every single space on the ship contained barrels or crates of explosives bound for the war effort. This included TNT, picric acid, and guncotton down below, as well as barrels everywhere on deck containing the highly volatile and easily ignited hydrocarbons benzene and toluene. She was literally a floating bomb.

The Mont-Blanc arrived too late in the evening on December 5^th to enter the harbor as the submarine nets had been raised. Her captain, Aime Le Medec (see photo below) intended to put up for a few days in Halifax and meet his fellow travelers. While ships with dangerous cargo were generally not allowed into the harbor, those rules were for some reason relaxed on this day. On the morning of December 6th, the Halifax harbormaster sent a pilot onto the Mont-Blanc for the trip into the harbor. The first thing that pilot MacKay did upon learning of the Mont-Blanc’s cargo was to request special protective ships to accompany them on either side as they entered the narrows.

That protection never arrived.

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As captain Le Medec and his pilot began to move the Mont-Blanc into the Halifax harbor, another ship, the Imo, took leave of her coal tender to get a quick start out of Halifax. The captain of the Imo was in a rush as he had grown increasingly frustrated at how long it had taken for the Canadians to fill his coal bunkers. Everyone who witnessed the Imo's departure that morning testified later that the Norwegian ship left harbor at an excessive speed.

The Mont-Blanc was more than two kilometers away when the pilot spotted the Imo running at a good clip and in what looked like a route to a direct collision. While two kilometers sounds like a distance at which a correction could be made, this caused great concern to the crew of the Mont-Blanc. The Imo was nearly empty and running high in the water, and with its speed and the fact that it would be hard to control, the situation looked murky even at the distance the two ships were separated.

Other ships nearby moved out of the way, with passengers and crew lining the decks to see what was going on as the two ships, Mont-Blanc and Imo, had been exchanging blasts on their foghorns. Knowledgeable watchers knew that the Imo had refused to change course and that the Mont Blanc had requested to pass on the wrong side. Great numbers of people from the Richmond neighborhood came out of their homes to see what the commotion was all about in the harbor. Children were walking to school at this time and moved in closer to get to a better viewpoint. Workers at the Acadia Sugar Refinery, the "tallest building in Canada East of Montreal," came out on the tower's roof to view the Mont-Blanc changing course.

Have you ever been walking down the sidewalk when a stranger appears ahead and you move aside, only to find that person has also moved, and then the same thing happens again and it's almost like you are destined to bump into each other? That's what it was like for these two ships. To the hundreds of onlookers, the Imo looked as if it might just finally sneak by after some course corrections by both vessels. When they met, the ships seemed to be running almost parallel. Most thought that Captain Le Medec's last-minute change of course had saved the day. 

Errors Compounded -- the Dangers of Controlling an Empty Ship

An empty steamer, with nothing in its hold to help steady the ship, is the single-most difficult type of ocean-going vessel to control. Captain Haakon From of the Imo had to manage this difficult scenario as best he could. Unfortunately, as the ship drew up to the Mont-Blanc, From decided that he would apply power to his propellers. Instead of gently veering away from the other ship, his rapid change brought the bow of the Imo directly into the Mont-Blanc, creating a gash of two-to-three meters above the water line.

On board the Mont-Blanc, crew ran around the decks trying to bring dozens of broken barrels of benzene and toluene upright again. These barrels began to pour a dangerous liquid through every crack and crevice on deck and into the hold, soaking the hundreds of crates of TNT and other explosives that were stored below.

All was quiet for a few minutes -- that is, until the Imo reversed engines to pull her bow out of the other ship. Upon doing so, metal-on-metal scraping created sparks that ignited the dangerous fuels. Pitch black smoke began to rise from the Mont-Blanc and onlookers on all sides watched as Captain Le Medec ordered everyone into lifeboats and away from the scene as quickly as possible.

When the cargo exploded a few minutes later, it proved quite unfortunate for Captain From that the Imo did not do so as well.

A Blast that All Other Explosions Would Be Measured Against

In the film Oppenheimer, there's a scene in which the scientists developing the atomic bomb discuss the explosion at Halifax that day. Until Hiroshima, this was the blast upon which all explosives were measured for potential damage in an urban area. When the Mont-Blanc exploded, the core of that inferno inside the mushroom cloud contained temperatures exceeding 5,000 degrees Celsius. Instantly, there was no Mont-Blanc remaining . . .  it disintegrated into tiny chunks of hot, melted steel covered in a black oily substance. It was this gigantic blast of shrapnel that killed so many onlookers that morning within a moment or two of the explosion. It literally rained pieces of the Mont-Blanc for many kilometers around Halifax.

Everything within 800 meters of the Mont-Blanc was flattened, including hundreds of homes, schools, and factories. The ship's huge, half-ton anchor was carried more than two miles. The Acadia sugar plant lay in a pile of rubble, its workmen buried within. Windows blew out of homes in cities dozens of miles away due to the gigantic shock wave; a huge, billowing cloud of debris and smoke was visible to ships as far as 100 miles out to sea. In the book "Explosion in Halifax Harbor" by David Flemming, the author describes two young boys, Noble Driscoll and his brother Gordon, who were on their way to school when they stopped to watch the events unfold. The shock wave sent Noble flying over half a mile. He survived while Gordon's body was never found. Nearly 2000 people lost their lives that morning, with 6000 injured and 20,000 left without homes.

One minute before the blast, a lone telegraph operator managed to get a short message out about a fire in the harbor. Moments later, however, that station was wiped out along with everything else. It would be up to radio to let the world know that this tragedy had occurred. But with no amateurs on the air, how would this happen?

The HMCS Niobe

The Royal Canadian Navy wasn't formed until 1911, and in those early days had only a few ships spread between both West and East coasts. The HMS Niobe was one of two cruisers purchased from Britain and had been intended to patrol the entrance to the St. Lawrence River. Earlier she had been a part of the Royal Navy's 4th Cruiser Squadron which patroled the seas outside New York City. At the time of the Halifax Explosion, the Niobe had begun to wear out. Her funnels were found to be rapidly deteriorating, her boilers were worn and her bulkheads were in disrepair . . . hence, she was in harbor acting as a depot ship at the time of the explosion. Luckily for Halifax, there was a radio operator on board the Niobe. 

Mr. George Harris was the Warrant Officer and Telegraphist on the HMCS Niobe. At the time of the outbreak of fire onboard the Mont-Blanc, a half-dozen of the Niobe's crew left on its launch to aid the burning ship. Unfortunately, they were on board when the Mont-Blanc disintegrated in the explosion. George, however, had stayed behind to man the radio. He was going down an outside ladder at the time his crew members died in the explosion -- knocked off the ladder onto the deck, he immediately ran to the wireless cabin and found the equipment intact. His alert and call for help reached Camperdown Radio at Portuguese Cove at the approaches of Halifax Harbor, and was also copied by an American ship and others in the Atlantic, all of which turned towards Halifax. George's call for help allowed radio to, once again, shine as a key element of emergency communication.

As an aside, after the war George Harris was in charge of all the radio stations until shortly after WWII, including considerable time when George Harris issued all amateur radio licenses as well.

Nature Adds its Fury to the Mix

The sensational headlines shown in the Boston Daily Globe show that nature was not kind to Halifax in the days following the tragedy. A gigantic snow storm hit the area with blizzards that made it very difficult to continue the rescue operations . . . this only added to the numbers of dead and homeless. Another consequence of the enormous explosion in the harbor was a 15 ft. Tsunami which rose up after the displacement of water in the harbor. That wave traveled many miles and completely devasted a community of Mi’kmaq indigenous people, one that had been at that location for many generations. 

That tribe had always called the land on which Halifax was built "Kjiputuk, the Great Harbor." Before and after this awful event, the Mi’kmaq considered the region to be sacred. It holds a significant place in the Mi’kmaq culture -- they consider it to be "Amntu'kati," which means "a place of spirits." I'm sure that spirits of the Halifax explosion still haunt this beautifully reconstructed and important Canadian city.

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Please join us in the discussion attached to the article, see below. Questions to consider in the discussion: Does radio still have a place in emergency communications? Are there any modern examples of radio's importance to emergency communications that we can detail for readers of QRZ.com? For Canadians, please feel free to tell QRZ.com readers how the lessons of Halifax are taught in school, or point out any errors in our article. Thanks and VY 73,  Dave W7DGJ

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