AI
Wednesday, August 05, 2020 7:19:36 PM
Att crossball, Two ships collided in Halifax Harbor. One of them was a floating, 3,000-ton bomb.
"Terrible news: Massive explosion rocks Lebanon's capital Beirut, killing 78, and at least one Australian"
Video shows aftermath of Halifax Explosion of 1917
The Halifax Explosion of 1917 happened when a French cargo ship collided with another
ship on Dec. 6 in Halifax Harbour, killing more than 2,000 people. (Nova Scotia Archives)
By Steve Hendrix Dec. 6, 2017 at 8:00 p.m. GMT+11
On the bright, freezing morning of Dec. 6, 1917, a French captain steered his ship, the SS Mont Blanc, up the channel leading to the piers of Halifax, Canada’s major Atlantic port. Just after 8:30, as the ship steamed into the bottleneck between the ocean and the inner harbor, he looked up to see something that shouldn’t have been there: the SS Imo, a Norwegian freighter, heading straight toward him on his side of the skinny narrows.
The two massive ships blasted their whistles, attempted a few futile evasive maneuvers and then collided, bow to bow. It was not a fatal blow.
“In marine terms, what happened was a fender bender,” said historian Roger Marsters. “It was only the character of the cargo that made it what it was.”
What the Imo had rammed was a 3,000-ton floating bomb. The Mont Blanc was crammed with munitions, bound for the war raging in Europe. Its holds were crammed with 2,500-tons of TNT and picric acid. The decks were crowded with barrels of high-octane benzole.
The resulting blast was the biggest man-made explosion of the pre-atomic age, according to analysts. It devastated the busy port city, leveling more than a square mile of the waterfront, killing more than 2,000 people and injuring 5,000 more, almost 12 percent of Halifax’s population. The massive iron hull disappeared, blown into shrapnel that tore through neighborhoods miles from the harbor. A half-ton chunk of its anchor still lies where it landed 2.5 miles away. “Halifax” became the standard of blast comparisons for decades, unsurpassed as an explosive disaster until Hiroshima replaced it in 1945.
[...]
An area of more than a mile was leveled in the Halifax explosion and more than 1,600 houses
destroyed. (Bettmann Archive)
There is reportedly a single living survivor from the day of the blast, Marsters said, a 106-year-old woman. But the event is being well remembered with ceremonies, major exhibits and a new time-capsule to be buried near the waterfront.
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/
"Terrible news: Massive explosion rocks Lebanon's capital Beirut, killing 78, and at least one Australian"
Video shows aftermath of Halifax Explosion of 1917
The Halifax Explosion of 1917 happened when a French cargo ship collided with another
ship on Dec. 6 in Halifax Harbour, killing more than 2,000 people. (Nova Scotia Archives)
By Steve Hendrix Dec. 6, 2017 at 8:00 p.m. GMT+11
On the bright, freezing morning of Dec. 6, 1917, a French captain steered his ship, the SS Mont Blanc, up the channel leading to the piers of Halifax, Canada’s major Atlantic port. Just after 8:30, as the ship steamed into the bottleneck between the ocean and the inner harbor, he looked up to see something that shouldn’t have been there: the SS Imo, a Norwegian freighter, heading straight toward him on his side of the skinny narrows.
The two massive ships blasted their whistles, attempted a few futile evasive maneuvers and then collided, bow to bow. It was not a fatal blow.
“In marine terms, what happened was a fender bender,” said historian Roger Marsters. “It was only the character of the cargo that made it what it was.”
What the Imo had rammed was a 3,000-ton floating bomb. The Mont Blanc was crammed with munitions, bound for the war raging in Europe. Its holds were crammed with 2,500-tons of TNT and picric acid. The decks were crowded with barrels of high-octane benzole.
The resulting blast was the biggest man-made explosion of the pre-atomic age, according to analysts. It devastated the busy port city, leveling more than a square mile of the waterfront, killing more than 2,000 people and injuring 5,000 more, almost 12 percent of Halifax’s population. The massive iron hull disappeared, blown into shrapnel that tore through neighborhoods miles from the harbor. A half-ton chunk of its anchor still lies where it landed 2.5 miles away. “Halifax” became the standard of blast comparisons for decades, unsurpassed as an explosive disaster until Hiroshima replaced it in 1945.
[...]
An area of more than a mile was leveled in the Halifax explosion and more than 1,600 houses
destroyed. (Bettmann Archive)
There is reportedly a single living survivor from the day of the blast, Marsters said, a 106-year-old woman. But the event is being well remembered with ceremonies, major exhibits and a new time-capsule to be buried near the waterfront.
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/
It was Plato who said, “He, O men, is the wisest, who like Socrates, knows that his wisdom is in truth worth nothing”
Discover What Traders Are Watching
Explore small cap ideas before they hit the headlines.
