T. Joseph Scanlon - Catastrophe: Stories and Lessons from the Halifax Explosion

Stories and Lessons from the Halifax Explosion

T. JOSEPH SCANLON

EDITED BY ROGER SARTY

Wilfrid Laurier University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada. This work was supported by the Research Support Fund.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Title: Catastrophe : stories and lessons from the Halifax Explosion / T. Joseph Scanlon ; edited by Roger Sarty.

Names: Scanlon, Joseph, author. | Sarty, Roger, 1952- editor.

Description: Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20200297503 | Canadiana (ebook) 20200297651 | ISBN 9781771123716 (softcover) | ISBN 9781771123730 (EPUB) | ISBN 9781771123723 (PDF)

Subjects: LCSH: Halifax Explosion, Halifax, N.S., 1917. | LCSH: Disaster reliefNova ScotiaHalifaxHistory20th century. | LCSH: Halifax (N.S.)History20th century.

Classification: LCC FC2346.4 .S33 2020 | DDC 971.6/22503dc23

Front-cover photo: Wrecked Homes Campbells Rd. Nova Scotia Archives Photo Collection. Front-cover map: Plan of the City of Halifax. Library and Archives Canada, e000000569.

Cover design and interior design by Michel Vrana.

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ON THE MORNING OF 11 SEPTEMBER 2001, TWO HIJACKED AIRCRAFT smashed into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City. First one, then the other tower collapsed. Before that happened, most of the people evacuated the two buildings, not in panic but, for the most part, slowly and efficiently. Even as they were doing so, emergency personnel, some assigned and many not assigned, arrived at the scene. Though an earlier somewhat similar incident showed the danger and futility of entering a flaming building, New Yorks fire department sent firefighters up into the building. When communications broke down, many of those men died in the subsequent collapses. Hundreds of other people also responded, including medical personnel from city hospitals, and volunteers from as far away as Newfoundland. Because the incident made normal transportation impossible, scores of ferries and other boats began to move people from Lower Manhattanthough this was not part of any plan. The result was the largest evacuation by water since the British Army fled Dunkirk in 1940.

Much of this response was predictable. Today, it is well known that panic is rare in such incidents, and that people generally perform quite well. It is also well known that organizations do less well and that over-response by emergency personnel is normal. And it is known that, in times of crisis, emergent organizations take on tasks that were not planned for, just as the New York ferries did on 9/11. The reason this was predictable is that a number of scholars, many of them associated with the Disaster Research Center, at the University of Delaware, have systematically studied events like 9/11. Those studies have shown there are predictable patterns of behaviour in such incidents.

Most of this research has been done in the United States since World War II. But there was one major study published many years earlier. It was done by a Canadian Anglican priest, Samuel Henry Prince, and it was a study of Canadas worst catastrophe, the 1917 Halifax explosion. The story of this event has been told many times, not just in Princes doctoral dissertation for Columbia University, but in novels, non-fiction accounts, and television documentaries. In one of Canadas best-known novels, Hugh MacLennans Barometer Rising, the 1917 Halifax explosion figures strongly. Despite all this material, no one trained in the sociology of disaster has been to Halifax to re-examine those long-ago events in light of what we know today about the behaviour of individuals, groups, and organizations in times of disaster. This book tells the story of Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 1917. It does so using many previously untapped sources, and it puts that story into a context: the context of what we now know about disaster. It is the story of a catastrophe that, given the proportion of the community it affected, was far worse than the one that befell New York City in 2001.

Only two events in modern Canadian history involved more than 1000 deaths. Both occurred in the early part of the twentieth century within a span of five and a half years, and both involved a collision between two ships. Despite the enormous loss of life in both events, the first is largely forgotten and the second is well remembered. There are a number of reasons for this difference, but an important factor is that the second onethe Halifax explosioninvolved Americans, and the first did not. To put it another way, the first has been lost to memory because it was not an important and continuing story for the US media, and it is often the American media that determine which world events make news.

The first incident occurred on the St. Lawrence River near Rimouski, Quebec, on 28 May 1914. In a dense fog, the Canadian Pacific steamship RMS Empress of Ireland collided with a Swedish coal ship, Storstad, at Father Point near Rimouski. The Empress sank in fourteen minutes, and 1102 people died, including 840 passengerstwenty-three more than the 817 lost when RMS Titanic sank in 1912. One reason why this event is so little remembered is that those who survived dispersed quickly after the incident. Another is that it took place just months before the First World War and was overshadowed by later events. It is mainly remembered by members of the Salvation Army: 148 Canadian Salvationists died with the Empress, including members of the Canadian Salvation Army band. The museum near Rimouski, with its Empress memorabilia, attracts few visitors. The most significant reason the Empress of Ireland is forgottenas James Croall points out in his book, Fourteen Minutesis that most people on board Empress were in second class or steerage. They were not rich and famous like some Titanic passengers: the world was unlikely to pay the same attention to the deaths of a shipload of eastern European migrant workers that it had paid two years earlier to the snuffing out of a substantial part of the New York social register.

The second incident occurred on 6 December 1917, and it involved two former passenger liners: a Norwegian ship, SS