Nova Scotia (39 page)

   
Loyal to their jobs, many ferry workers saw the importance of
their task to keep people moving that day and stayed on rather than
going home to check on their own families.

   
Dartmouth too took a heavy hit. Companies such as the Starr
Manufacturing Company were destroyed or extensively damaged. The
small Mi’kmaq community of Turtle Grove in Tuft’s Cove took the
full force of the blast and
disappeared.   

Human Pain, Human
Compassion

At
the Royal Naval College in the Dockyard, a class overlooking the
harbour had been watching the burning *
Mont Blanc
when
the window shattered and sprayed glass into the faces of the unwary
students. While the njunior class on the far side of the building
escaped serious injury, the building shook hard as wood and plaster
smashed down around them. Cadet Orde, Petty Officer King and
Captain MacKenzie received serious damage to their eyes from the
flying glass.

   
It was a bloody, ravaged crew of cadets who marched
themselves first to the Naval Hospital, then the Military Hospital
on Cogswell and finally to the Camp Hill Hospital seeking medical
help. At every stop the scene was one of overcrowding. Hospital
staff tried desperately to move out anyone who was not seriously
injured – this mainly included those not dying of bleeding or in
need of removal of a severely injured eye. Petty Officer King had
succumbed to shock and appeared to be dead to the examining medical
staff. He was sent to an emergency morgue at Chebucto School, where
he awoke and grabbed a passing soldier, who was thoroughly
shocked.

   
Families near the hospital took in strangers in need of a
place to stay close to medical services. MacMechan reported the
typical case of a widow, herself badly wounded by glass, who lived
near the hospital with her twos daughters. Her home had sustained
major damage and most of the windows were shattered, but she
readily volunteered to take care of a wounded stranger with serious
eye injuries who required hourly medical attention. She and her
daughters gave up their bedrooms to this man and his parents who
arrived to care for him while they “slept where they
could.”

A Train Ride into Hell

The night express train from Saint
John was a fortunate ten minutes late coming into the Halifax North
End station, missing the full impact of the blast that devastated
the station that was so close to the harbour. Even at its location
in Rockingham, the train nearly derailed. Windows broke but there
were few injuries. As they drew nearer the city, the train slowed
and injured people came seeking assistance. More than 200 explosion
survivors were loaded on board where passengers tore up table
cloths and bed sheets to make bandages for all the bloody
wounded.

   
Other passengers left the train to search for
survivors in the burning houses, sometimes rooting through rubble
with their bare hands or using train axes, saws or boards to pry up
fallen walls. One of the passengers was Colonel E.C. Phinney, who
organized rescue crews that saved between forty and sixty
Haligonians. They went from house to house as the fires raged.
Phinney himself saw a boy with a rivet though his right eye and two
shrapdnel-like pieces of metal from the
Mont Blanc
imbedded in his chest and thigh. Although the young man’s
death was imminent, he told Phinney quite clearly that he was in no
pain.

   
The conductor, J.C. Gillespie, took on coal and water and
then headed the train for Truro with one doctor, Major DeWitt from
Wolfville, on board. De Witt began to perform operations as they
trundled along, removing irreparable eyes with forceps and
scissors. In Truro most of the doctors had been dispatched to
Halifax and DeWitt had to rely on himself and the few other doctors
arriving from rural areas. He worked for five days, nearly nonstop,
day and niaght, before returning home to Wolfville with a hand
infection and totally exhausted, only to find he was needed in
nearby Camp Aldershot for more surgery.

A City on Fire

The
Wellington Barracks, up the slope from the Dockyard, was hit hard
by the blast. It contained an ammunition magazine, and many feared
it too would set off a second explosion. Lieutenant C.A. McLennan
pulled together sixteen *men to put out the fire that had begun
there. He discovered that a 300-kilogram chunk of the
Mont Blanc
had slammed into the iron fence around the magazine.
But he also noticed damage to the magazine itself. The furnace room
adjacent to the ammo had a smashed door and roof. The damage had
allowed the spread of the fire that had been burning in the furnace
and indeed a second major blast could have sent another shudder of
great intensity through this part of the city. McLennan, assisted
by Private W. Eisnor, put out the fire with extinguishers and
staved off another potential calamity.

   
At the North Ordinance, another depository of ammunition,
nearby fires on land and shipboard prompted the military leaders to
order their men to start dumping ammunition into the harbour. They
did this for a while, until some felt it was too great a waste of
good materials, so they piled it by the water’s edge just in case
they had to dump it in the drink.

   
Fires burned everywhere and no city fire
department could have been equipped to control the flames. The fire
engine
Patricia
had gone to aid the
Mont Blanc
only to be decimated when the blast hit, killing all
but one of the men aboard. William Wells was thrown from the
driver’s seat still clutching the steering wheel, slammed into a
post and was nearly drowned by the ensuing wave that rushed up the
slopes of Halifax.

   
There was not much wind but fires spread nonetheless from the
ruins of many houses and buildings in flames. While Halifax
firefighters did what they could to save the lives of anyone left
in buildings, they were soon aided by firemen who raced to Halifax
from as far away as Amherst, Springhill, Truro and New
Glasgow.

False Rumours and a Trail of
Blood

By ten a.m. that same morning,
rumours spread that a second explosion from one of the ammunition
magazines was inevitable and this ignited a panic in civilian and
military circles. Everyone was instructed to evacuate both Halifax
and Dartmouth. As MacMechan stated, “There was nothing vague about
the rumour. The definite statement was conveyed by soldiers through
the streets.” They went door to door and turned back the curious
onlookers and would-be rescuers headed to the most damaged parts of
the city. Houses were to be abandoned in favour of open spaces,
where one would at least not be killed by falling buildings. Having
just witnessed the most horrific event of their lives, most
Haligonians followed orders.

   
The sites for assembly were the Commons, Point Pleasant Park,
the sides of Citadel Hill, Halifax Golf Club, the sporting field at
Dalhousie University and the locale of today’s Armdale Rotary. The
Armoury building at the corner of Cunard and North Park was a focal
point for both rescue parties and for channelling human traffic to
the supposedly safe areas.

   
Was the evacuation order a mistake? In the sense that many
victims trapped in buildings would not be saved, yes. But even
though the second explosion did not occur, the cautionary move may
have made perfectly good sense at the time. In his report,
MacMechan tried to get at the root of the evacuation orders and
found it unclear as to which officer had issued the statements. “A
heavy responsibility rests on the officer who gave them,” he says.
Perhaps the details were covered up, once the order was discovered
to be a mistake. Nonetheless, soldiers travelled about town
insisting that people leave their homes and most
obeyed.

   
MacMechan goes so far as to call the second alarm a “second
disaster.” Bedridden old people, as well as the sick and injured,
were forced to go out into the open, where many were laid down on
the ground. Certainly some of the explosion victims died as a
result of being moved out into the cold. As one observer stated
about the path of travel to any of the open-air gathering points,
“The route could be traced by the trail of
blood.”

Chapter 34

Chapter 34

The Walking Wounded

By eight o’clock at night on the
day of the explosion, a city of tents was set up on the Commons as
temporary housing, but most of the explosion refugees were
reluctant to stay there. Many preferred to return to their oawn
damaged houses or stay in public buildings. It was December, after
all, and despite the military warnings and the intended goodwill,
to many Haligonians, it still seemed to make good sense to get
inside.

   
There was a general feeling of terror that a second blast
might equal or exceed the first. No one in Halifax or Nova Scotia –
or the world for that matter – had ever experienced a blast of such
proportion. This fear hung around for a day or more, sending people
out wandering the streets or even walking miles into the
countryside to get away from the danger zone. The streets
themselves were scenes of horror, with anguished wails of pain
coming from the blinded or maimed victims stumbling around. Men,
women and children with bums and gashes were a common sight on the
streets. Everywhere, people ewere trying to help the victims. The
shock of the blast had not stunned most Haligonians enough to
suppress their feelings of compassion.

Survivors Seeking Help

The
stories of the survivors are well-documented, thanks to MacMechan’s
records and the research undertaken by numerous writers, including
Janet Kitz, author of
Shattered City
. The
event left powerful haunting memories for the children living near
the harbour. Pearl Hartlen was nine at the time of the explosion.
Her house collapsed and her unconscious mother was buried under the
debris. According to MacMechan, she dragged her mother to safety
and, when her mother’s dress caught on something, Pearl had to rip
the cloth with her teeth to free her. Agnes Foran, twelve, lived on
Merkel Street in Halifax. She was looking through the front windows
with her mother when the glass shattered, knocking them both to the
floor. Agnes led her now-blinded mother downstairs and then
returned for her baby brother. She could find no one in the
neighbourhood to help and waited until her father arrived at 1:30
in the afternoon to take them to the hospital. It wasn’t until
later that afternoon that a huge glass fragment in Agnes’s stomach,
which required removal and twenty-nine stitches, was
discovered.

   
Kids who were in school fared better than those at home on
those days, but the Bloomfield School, situated close to the
harbour, was pretty hard hit. At St. Joseph’s School near the
Wellington Barracks, the attic roof toppled on a grade-eight class
below and then crashed onto the floor below that. Sister Maria
Cecilia McGrath was entombed with most of her class in the wreckage
and yet most of them emerged relatively unscathed. She somehow
managed to locate her students by groping along what was left of
the floor joists. She then led them out the window and helped them
climb down one and a half storeys. Other students were rescued by
soldiers. By the time Sister Maria left the school and went to
check on her own home, she saw her mother engulfed in the flames of
her house.

   
As a result of the Halifax Explosion, 25,000 people were
without shelter and more than 6,000 had their homes completely
destroyed. The damage was estimated at $35 million in 1917 dollars.
Official claims suggest there were 1,963 killed and 9,000 injured,
although these figures are considered low and not necessarily
accurate. Many of those on ships in the harbour had simply
disappeared without a trace. Some estimate the death toll closer to
3,000, but a final and absolute statistic will probably never be
known.

   
As was so often the case in Nova Scotia history, weather was
to further complicate an already catastrophic circumstance brought
on by man. December 6, a Thursday, was sunny and calm, but it
snowed that night and by the next morning the weather had turned to
a frigid blizzard with forty centimetres of snow. It snowed all day
Friday and Saturday and on Sunday gale winds splattered the city
with freezing rain, turning the streets to sheets of ice. On
Monday, December 10, more snow returned with high winds. All of
this hindered the efforts of rescue workers and aid volunteers
trying to make their way to Halifax and out into the streets to
help the multitude of victims.

   
People from across Canada and beyond were ready and willing
to lend what assistance they could, despite the weather. The Red
Cross in Saint John was the first to assemble major outside
assistance, gathering medical supplies and volunteers and putting
them on a train for Halifax. The Ottawa Red Cross shipped down
eight train cars full of clothing.

   
Relief trains from Truro, the South Shore and the Annapolis
Valley brought medical help and supplies. Moncton and Charlottetown
sent supplies and personnel and more assistance was on its way from
Massachusetts, Maine and Rhode Island. Financial aid even found its
way here from Australia and New Zealand. Two ships from Boston soon
headed north with glass, building materials and twenty-five
glaziers aboard to try and repair some of the damage to
homes.