Mrs. Moir asked them to wait, then walked upstairs. When she got to the guest room door, she was afraid to wake Barbara. But when she opened the door slowly and quietly, she found Barbara wide awake, and happy to have her thoughts interrupted.
“They are taking people to hospital, dear,” Mrs. Moir said. “And we think that you should be seen by a doctor as soon as possible.”
Orr, still weak and confused, was relieved to have someone else make the decisions. The men from Boutlier’s carried Orr to their truck, where she recognized the name on the side because the store delivered fish to the Orrs, too. It provided a little comfort to see something familiar, a slim bit of evidence that perhaps not everything had been destroyed.
When Mrs. Moir watched Barbara be loaded onto the truck, still redolent from its fish deliveries, she was close to tears. The truck made its way gingerly through the streets of Richmond, trying not to jostle its passengers while avoiding the destroyed homes and factories, the dead bodies and body parts, and the people trying to make their way through the mess, usually in shredded clothes.
Boutlier’s Fish Truck dropped Barbara Orr off at Camp Hill Hospital, whose entrance was now clogged with wagons, trucks, and cars trying to deliver many times more victims than the 240 veterans the hospital had been designed to help. Because Orr was in much better shape than those around her, many of whom were near death, she waited for some time before two soldiers put her on a stretcher, carried her just inside the entrance, and set her down in a corridor surrounded by other victims, where she fell unconscious. When she awoke, the patients around her seemed unnaturally still.
“Then I realized there was something funny about the people,” she said. “Most of them were dead.”
Because she had been left among the lost causes, no soldiers, nurses, or doctors had bothered to come through her corridor looking for patients. When she finally saw a young orderly walking by, she called out for help. The orderly jumped, startled to hear a voice among the dead and dying.
“I’ll be back in a minute,” he promised her.
He returned with a helper to carry her stretcher up to a long ward filled with beds, a scarce commodity. After they helped her into one of the few still available, someone washed and treated her burned leg. But her injury was clearly not life-threatening, so the rest of her head and body, covered in greasy filth, would have to wait. She was ignored for days.
“I was shy, scared, and wouldn’t like to ask,” Orr recalled. “I don’t think I had anything to eat. Nobody paid any attention. You just laid there and hoped that somebody would come that knew you. That’s just the way you went.”
When Barbara Orr awoke on Thursday morning, December 6, 1917, she had been surrounded by nine family members from three generations in a beautiful new home. The Orrs’s dreams were coming true, and the future was bright.
But as the sun set on that surreal day, she had to face the possibility that her grandparents, her father, her mother, and her four sisters and brothers, including twelve-year-old Ian, who had ventured down to the docks for a closer look with Isabel, were all dead. She feared that she might have been right, after all, and she would have to make her way in the world without them. Barbara lay quietly in her narrow bed, feeling deeply alone, wondering what would happen next. Who would come for her?
At Camp Hill Hospital, Barbara Orr’s heartbreaking story did not qualify as exceptional.
As great as the losses were throughout Halifax and Dartmouth, they would have been much worse had it not been for the selfless souls who stayed at their posts during the panic and beyond to help others, despite the obvious danger. It would be just as foolish to judge those who followed orders to find higher ground as it would be to forget those who ignored that command so they could help others in immediate need, such as the volunteer firemen who stayed behind to battle the flames. Hospital staff overwhelmed with incoming patients didn’t budge, and the linemen working on the torn network of cables kept at it, restoring limited service by 1:00 p.m. that day, and clearing 200 lines by that night.
One of the more stirring examples came from the Children’s Hospital. After receiving orders to evacuate, the superintendent, whose face had been seriously cut by flying glass, told her staff: “No one shall leave this building. It would mean the death of many of the children if they had to be moved to the Commons, and it is the duty of everyone to stand by our post, and if it should be that we are to die, we will die at our post.”
After the panic, some of the Driscolls returned to their home: Noble, Al, and older brother Cliff; their five-year-old brother Art; and their mother and father, whose eye was filled with glass shards and covered with a bandage. They all huddled around the family’s kitchen stove, which sat against their home’s one remaining wall, trying to stay warm.
Since Noble and his younger brother Gordon had been playing in the backyard before leaving at different times for school that morning, the family held out hope that Gordon was alive. Cliff decided to go looking for him. He returned with no news of their little brother, good news about an option to get help faster, and sad news about a neighborhood friend.
He told his family the story he had heard about Vincent Coleman, who had decided to return to his post to try to stop the No. 10 coming in from Saint John. They were saddened to hear that their friend almost certainly died in the explosion, but were heartened by his bravery on such a horrible day. There were still good people out there—lots of them, it would turn out. While the stories of loss and horror traveled fastest, the competing tales of decency and bravery were beginning to catch up.
Cliff had also heard of a means for them to get help. Not long after the explosion, he’d been told, the conductor of the No. 10 train rolled slowly into Rockingham, a Halifax suburb just north of Africville. Given the rubble and the severe damage to the rails ahead, the conductor decided to stop there. He concluded that the most effective way for him to contribute was to let his passengers off there, then fill his train with the injured and homeless in Halifax and take them to other towns back up the line, around the province.
“Come on,” Cliff urged. “There’s room for you, too.”
The family agreed. Mrs. Driscoll carried five-year-old Art while the others walked. They left their one-walled home and walked up the tracks to Rockingham, while discussing how to find Gordon.
When the Driscolls approached the train, they encountered the passengers from Saint John, New Brunswick, who’d just gotten off. They were aghast by the tattered survivors walking past them, like new recruits watching grizzled veterans emerge from the trenches and pass them without a word. If the signs of destruction in Rockingham impressed the newcomers, they were hardly noticed by survivors like the Driscolls, who knew far worse lay behind them.
The family settled into a compartment, with Art lying limp on his mother’s lap, barely conscious. While Cliff helped the other passengers board the train, the two younger Driscoll children, Noble and Al, complained of hunger. Mrs. Driscoll and a neighbor on board recalled that they had Christmas cakes in sealed tins back home, and asked Cliff to fetch them before the train departed. He returned triumphant, bearing two large containers. Noble, Al, and Lou greedily gulped down the sweet cake.
At 1:30, the conductor pulled out of Rockingham for a slow, two-hour trip to Truro. He messaged the station in Truro, about 60 miles away, to tell them to expect the first train of Halifax refugees.
Major de Witt, a Wolfville doctor, had been on a train heading to Halifax for a conference when it stopped in Rockingham. Fortunately, he had his medical bag with him. When he saw the victims boarding the train in Rockingham, he decided to stay aboard and treat the most urgent cases first, including two eye removals performed on the rocking train with only his basic instruments.
At Windsor Junction, 10 miles from Halifax, another doctor and a nurse boarded: Major de Witt’s father and sister. While they were getting on, Cliff Driscoll got off to look for their little brother back in Halifax.
Wi
th every Halifax facility overwhelmed with patients, the trains continued to send injured and homeless victims to Truro for medical attention and safe, secure homes to spend a few nights, while towns in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and beyond were sending relief trains into Halifax filled with doctors, nurses, and medical supplies.
At 3:30 p.m. that day, the Driscolls’ train slowly eased into Truro. Although the medical professionals and hundreds of volunteers in Truro were ready to receive the train, nothing could prepare them for what they saw. A young Truro teacher named Josephine Bishop described the scene in a letter to her mother in Digby, Nova Scotia.
“I hardly know what or how to write my heart is so full,” Bishop wrote. “Yesterday morning we were pursuing the even tenor of our ways when an awful calamity happened in our midst. School had just assembled and I was reading the Bible when two awful explosions shook the building with great force,” even though it was some 60 miles from Pier 6. She is probably describing the sensation of the ground wave, followed by the air wave. “Thought at first that the Germans must have opened fire on Halifax. It proved to be as bad or even worse.”
She was most affected by the children, “black as coal and horribly disfigured,” including an infant who had lost both parents and both eyes. “So many little children injured, and their parents gone.”
The seriously injured, including Mr. and Mrs. Driscoll and Art, were taken to the courthouse, Truro’s fire hall, the civic building, and the old William Street school, which had all been prepared by the locals to serve as medical shelters while the train was coming from Halifax. The healthier survivors were invited by Truro residents to stay in their homes, including Noble and Al Driscoll, who jumped at the chance to spend a few nights at an experimental farm. Before they hopped onto the horse-driven cart to take them there, however, Noble realized that the Christmas cake he’d eaten so eagerly did not mix well with the soot and oil on his hands, face, and mouth, which the cake had probably delivered to his stomach. He had to find a bathroom to get rid of his lunch.
When they boarded the cart, the boys could not see anything in the complete darkness of their long, bumpy ride. But when they reached the house, they received a hot meal and a hot bath to get the grime off their skin and hair. The boys were pleasantly surprised to find that the house had hot water gushing from the taps—a luxury in 1917, as was the double bed with clean, white sheets that they shared.
They were too tired to talk much before falling fast asleep.
PART VI
HELP
Chapter 23
No Time to Explain
The explosion instantly established Halifax as one of North America’s worst disasters, putting it on a short list with the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, the Johnstown Flood of 1889, the Galveston hurricane of 1900, and the Great San Francisco Earthquake of 1906.
The Great Chicago Fire consumed 2,000 acres, destroyed some 17,500 buildings, and left a third of the city’s 300,000 residents homeless, killing 300. But thanks to strong leadership and visionary planners, Chicago came back stronger than before, confirmed by the 1893 World’s Fair, which attracted 21 million visitors.
In 1889 in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, several days of heavy rain brought tragedy when the dam at Lake Conemaugh finally broke, sending a gigantic wave of water and smashed houses hurtling toward the blue-collar town below, killing more than 2,000 people. When some victims sued the country club where the Carnegies, Mellons, and other local millionaires vacationed, which owned the faulty dam, the courts ruled it was “an act of God.”
By the turn of the twentieth century, Galveston, Texas, had been the state’s biggest city in three of its first five decades. But after a 1900 hurricane killed a third of the 38,000 residents, the deadliest natural disaster in U.S. history, Galveston never recovered, ceding its throne to the upstart Port of Houston.
Six years later, in 1906, the people of San Francisco were awakened at 5:12 a.m. when a massive earthquake ripped the earth open from Oregon to L.A., swallowing thousands of San Francisco’s buildings, rupturing water pipes and gas lines, and lighting fires across the city. The quake left 200,000 homeless and 3,000 dead. In the immediate aftermath, Oakland’s population doubled, but San Francisco’s rebuilding program caused an economic boom and lured its residents back, and then some.
Four very different events—a fire, a flood, a hurricane, and an earthquake—created four very different disasters, with a lot in common: poor preparation usually coupled with a natural disaster, resulting in massive destruction of property, infrastructure, and human life. How the cities emerged afterward depended almost entirely on the quality of their leadership, community spirit, and a little luck.
On that basis, Chicago and San Francisco engineered the most robust recoveries. Even Johnstown’s population tripled after the flood, and didn’t start its long descent until heavy industry faded and the town suffered its third major flood in 1977. But Galveston never recovered, dropping from leader to footnote. Still, it responded better than Vanport, Oregon, a city constructed to house workers for the World War II effort. It was briefly Oregon’s second-largest city, with 50,000 people, until a broken dam wiped out all of its homes in 1948. The citizens never bothered to rebuild it, which is why you’ve probably never heard of Vanport, Oregon.
Halifax’s losses of land, property, and lives put it squarely in the middle of this pack. Its disaster was entirely man-made, but its fate would depend on the same factors that determined the future for its peers: leadership, community spirit, and a little bit of luck.
Survivors often suffered from shock. They had just seen their city turned inside out, their homes crushed, and their loved ones dismembered, decapitated, and blown apart. Many were convinced that the Germans had attacked them and worse was coming. But even in a city consumed by chaos and paranoia, thousands of Haligonians put aside their fears and got to work helping those who could not help themselves.
Firemen, policemen, and soldiers seemed to appear all over town to do whatever they could, from putting out fires to extracting survivors to getting them help as fast as they could. Individuals like Joe Glube and businesses like Boutlier’s Fish Truck put their cars and horse-drawn carts to use picking up victims to take them to hospitals. Packed as they were, they usually represented the victims’ best chance.
With the phones and cables down, hospitals could not contact their doctors and nurses. But the medical professionals didn’t need to be called to know they were urgently needed. They packed their medical bags with all the supplies they had, walked down to the nearest hospital, and offered their help unconditionally—then started the toughest, longest, and most important shifts of their lives.
Within hours of the explosion, amid burning buildings, broken water mains, and gas pipes, and the nauseating smell of smoldering human flesh, the all-female Halifax Red Cross fanned out to tend to the wounded, whom they found strewn about every city block.
In a town suddenly facing severely limited resources, including doctors, nurses, hospital beds, and drugs like anesthesia, the entire city, from the soldiers to the surgeons, was now practicing triage. They had to make thousands of snap decisions about who needed help the most, who could wait, and who was in such bad shape that saving them would cost the lives of five others who required less extraordinary measures. The wartime rules of triage applied here: comfort for the helpless, care for those who might pull through. If a patient was between these two states, managing to just hang on, they were probably on their own. If they endured long enough, they might get the help they needed to survive. If they didn’t, their death only confirmed that the medical staff had made the correct, if difficult, decision to tend to others. Under normal circumstances the severely hurt victim would be saved, but “normal” had left Halifax at 9:04 that morning.
The caregivers naturally emphasized urgency over organization. With thousands in desperate need of immediate help just to make it through the day, doctors, nurses, and others frequently failed to record where th
eir patients were when they had been injured, what wounds they had suffered, where they lived, or even their names. When a soldier found a woman bleeding to death in her blown-out home, it made no sense to wait for her husband to return from the factory to tell him where his wife had gone. Even if her husband was still alive, where, exactly, would the soldier leave the note? Just about everyone wanting to help had to figure out what to do for themselves.
Likewise, when a solider rushed a grandfather to a local hospital, or a police officer picked up a mother with glass in her head, or a fireman rescued a baby from a burning house, tracking the patients’ journeys seemed like a truly trivial pursuit. But this essential expedience would help explain why hundreds of victims went unidentified, making it much more difficult for family members to find their loved ones in the days that followed.
None of this kept common citizens from performing heroic deeds all over Halifax and Dartmouth, deeds that seemed to multiply as the hours grew. The habit of extraordinary effort from ordinary people took root and proved contagious. Watching a neighbor rip through a wall to rescue another neighbor or a stranger find the strength to pull a timber off a factory worker he heard screaming as he walked by seemed to inspire others to test their own limits. What the resilient Haligonians did best was simple but hard: they kept going.
Before the Americans had declared war the previous spring, Boston had started preparing for it. On February 10, 1917, two months before the country officially joined the conflict, Massachusetts formed the nation’s first Committee on Public Safety, designed to react to disasters and even anticipate them. Led by Governor Samuel W. McCall, the committee included leaders from a cross-section of Boston society: government officials, bankers, and the nation’s biggest shoe manufacturer, Henry B. Endicott, whom McCall had tapped to chair the committee, which sought to ensure that the people of Massachusetts would retain their way of life despite the inevitable drain of the Great War, even if they were struck with a catastrophe at home. This meant setting aside resources and preparing skilled professionals in transportation, medicine, agriculture, housing, and accounting to respond to whatever came their way. Remarkably, Governor McCall managed to do all this without raising taxes through private donations of money, goods, and services, particularly free labor.
The Great Halifax Explosion Page 21
