Boston was way ahead of its peers, while Halifax was like most cities: unprepared to perform the city’s basic duties during an emergency. Because Halifax’s leaders had never made any emergency plans, they would have to make them up—just as soon as they figured out where everyone was. That Thursday morning, Deputy Mayor Henry Colwell, president of a local men’s clothing company, was walking to his day job when the shock wave knocked him off his feet. When he got up, unhurt, he remembered that Mayor Peter Martin was out of town, so Colwell was now the man in charge.
Where Boston had a governor preparing it for the worst in advance of the war with the full cooperation of the city’s leaders, Halifax had a glorified clothes salesman who didn’t realize he was in charge until the explosion bounced him onto his backside. At that moment, you might have predicted Halifax was less likely to rise from the ashes like San Francisco than fall hopelessly behind like Galveston.
Colwell walked straight to City Hall, where he saw the wind running through broken windows and sending legislative papers flying everywhere, and barely a soul inside because they had gone home to check on their families. When Colwell found Chief of Police Frank Hanrahan, the police chief told him Fire Chief Condon and his crew had been all died at the scene of the explosion, the Patricia had been destroyed, and Richmond had been reduced to ruins, with fires burning everywhere.
Colwell had to make some big decisions with little information or experience to draw on, and he had to make them fast.
Shortly after the explosion, word started spreading that a winter storm was coming up the coast from North Carolina to Halifax. Colwell and Hanrahan headed out to visit the military headquarters a few blocks away to meet with Colonel W. E. Thompson about two urgent concerns: heating and housing. Thompson offered to have his men set up a “tent village” on North Commons with mattresses, blankets, and soldiers to help the victims and protect the area. Satisfied, Colwell and Hanrahan headed back to City Hall.
As they approached the steps with a thousand thoughts racing through their minds, a stranger approached them to ask if he could be of assistance and handed Colwell his business card: W. A. DUFF, ASSISTANT CHIEF ENGINEER, CANADIAN GOVERNMENT RAILWAYS.
Yes, Colwell thought, he could. Colwell asked Duff to follow them upstairs, while Duff shared what he had already seen that morning. After the explosion, he had left his room at the Queen Hotel, borrowed a car, and drove to North Street Station to inspect the Canadian Government Railways (CGR) property. The station was the gem in Richmond’s crown, a gorgeous building with a glass dome. But the explosion had ripped the roof open like a can of sardines. The farther north Duff traveled, the worse the city looked.
Desperate to do something, Duff picked up as many wounded as he could, drove them to area hospitals, and then went back for more, until he realized he could never help more than a dozen or two victims at the most—facing the day’s common dilemma between the most urgent and the most important. Duff concluded he could help thousands if he could get word to the outside world about what had happened.
Because all lines were down in Halifax, Duff drove to Rockingham, where he cabled his general manager in Moncton, New Brunswick, to tell him the extent of the damage and of the urgent need for medical assistance and relief supplies.
Hearing Duff’s descriptions of the damage, Colwell exclaimed, “For God’s sake! Send out additional messages to the different towns of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick asking for further relief. And sign them, ‘The Mayor of Halifax.’ ”
The part-time politician had quickly assumed full power. Someone had to.
Unbeknownst to them, word of the disaster was already getting out, thanks to a few folks taking the initiative. George Graham, the general manager of Dominion Atlantic Railway (DAR), also happened to be in town the night before. While he and his daughter were eating breakfast in his private railcar at the North Street Station, their car suddenly rocked. They went outside to see 400 ruined railroad cars—crushed, tipped over, on fire. When Graham’s attempt to send a telegram from the Halifax office failed, he walked to Rockingham, counting twenty-five dead employees en route.
In Rockingham, Graham sent a telegram to Kentville, Nova Scotia, asking for a relief train of doctors, nurses, medical supplies, and forty-five DAR trackmen and bridge builders to repair the railway lines. Graham wrote, “Organize a relief train and send word to Wolfville and Windsor to round up all doctors, nurses, and Red Cross supplies possible to obtain. No time to explain details but list of casualties is enormous.”
These messages confirmed the buzz that had started when Vincent Coleman got his urgent telegram out from the railyard dispatch office at 8:49, just four minutes after the collision and fifteen minutes before the explosion. It turned out that his telegram to Rockingham arrived after the No. 10 express train from Saint John had already left the station, but the train had not yet reached Richmond’s North Street Station when the Mont-Blanc blew up. Nothing lost. But crucially, Coleman’s telegram got through, and was the only one to get out prior to Halifax’s lines going down at 9:04 a.m. His message sparked a series of telegrams that had spread throughout Nova Scotia and New Brunswick by 9:26 a.m., then reached Montreal (9:50), Boston (10:13), New York (10:27), and Ottawa (10:37).
It’s worth noting that the first round of missives did not include the American government in Washington, D.C. The Americans might have been allies on paper for the last few months of their 141-year history, but that didn’t make the American government something the Haligonians would think to call in their hour of need.
The information passed down to the cities was typically incomplete and inaccurate, stating that the explosion had occurred anywhere from 8:00 a.m. to 9:30 a.m. and might be the result of a bomb, with the damage grossly underestimated. “It is believed a number of people near the scene were either killed or injured,” one message said, “including several telegraph employees.”
But all these cities knew that something horrible had happened in Halifax and the town would need help. This early start was crucial, because Halifax could not get its lines restored to get another telegram off until 12:26 p.m., more than three and a half hours after Coleman’s missive, and they had to send it to Havana, Cuba, which forwarded the message to the American Red Cross in Washington, which sent it on to its office in Boston—which already knew about it.
While Colwell was urging Duff to send out more telegrams, a soldier burst in to tell them Wellington Barracks was about to explode. They had no reason not to believe him, and headed toward Point Pleasant Park on the southern tip of Halifax.
With each city block Colwell could see just how bad the situation was, with so many victims bleeding from their faces and hands, and others being hauled in wheelbarrows by parents and children. When Colwell had seen enough, he stopped short, grabbed Hanrahan, and convinced him they were duty-bound to return to City Hall and get to work, even if there might be a second explosion. Hanrahan readily agreed. Along the way they gathered other city officials and civic leaders and brought them all back to City Hall.
There, at 11:30 a.m., they called the first meeting of the Halifax Relief Committee to order. They didn’t waste any time standing on ceremony. The impromptu body included the chief of police, the city clerk, and about twenty city leaders of various sorts, some of whom had instinctively gone to City Hall to see what they could do without being asked. Colwell and his leadership team quickly formed subcommittees to address every critical need, from transportation, emergency shelter, food, and finance to mortuary. Then they appointed well-known, capable leaders and assistants to run each committee and outlined their immediate tasks.
The Food Committee, for example, opened grocery warehouses in Halifax and Dartmouth. Rotary Club members and volunteers packed boxes with bread, butter, tea, baked beans, sugar, condensed milk (which wouldn’t spoil), and precooked meat and fish, because they correctly assumed many victims would not have a working stove. They delivered these boxes to any places housing refugees and any ho
mes with people in them.
The leaders leveraged their strengths—a newfound civic spirit and a generally hardworking, selfless, and honorable citizenry—to cover their weaknesses, particularly a lack of organization and preparation, to create in minutes a skeletal version of what Boston had taken months to build. As one relief worker said, “Quick decision at the risk of occasional error was preferable, in the first hours, to extended deliberation and discussion.”
After agreeing to meet again at 3:00 p.m., they adjourned the meeting at 12:15—just forty-five minutes after convening it—fanned out across the city, and got to work. For a government that hadn’t bothered to develop any plans for disaster relief in the three and a half years since the war had started, it was catching up fast. It was a business case study in how to put egos, titles, and territoral battles aside to work for the greater good. Never had so much work been done in City Hall so quickly.
Most of these committees capitalized on the one advantage Halifax had over most North American cities: it had been mobilized for war, and was the temporary home to five thousand sailors and soldiers. Hundreds of them were supposed to ship out that day, but those orders were now delayed so they could stay and help.
Colwell’s team granted military and naval forces complete emergency powers, allowing them to act as police, rescue workers, guards, and transport controllers. That afternoon, the soldiers secured the Richmond neighborhood, which they officially renamed “the Devastated Area.” Residents who needed to check on their homes and retrieve what they could were issued official passes to the Devastated Area, which had to be shown or they would be arrested for trespassing. Those guarding the Devastated Area were given the authority to arrest looters, or even shoot them.
Assistance soon started coming in from other sources, too. In Dartmouth, Colonel Ralph B. Simmonds, a partner in Jas Simmonds Ltd., a large hardware firm, went to military headquarters at Spring Garden Road in the center of Halifax and offered his services. They asked him for supplies. By 11:00 a.m., Simmonds had equipped a hundred men with shovels, axes, saws, and ladders from his store, and sent them by boat with orders to clear a passage through the rubble on Barrington Street, a major artery.
Supervising this work, Colonel Simmonds recognized another need that wouldn’t have occurred to him if he hadn’t been on the scene. He sent a messenger back to his company to get all the three-by-five index cards they had to record where each article or corpse had been found and tie the label to the object or the body itself. They tagged the corpses and piled them on the side of the road three high until they could figure out where to move them.
But due to Halifax’s lack of preparation, civic institutions were immediately overwhelmed by the tasks in front of them. In 1917, the Halifax Police Department consisted of a chief, a detective, eight sergeants, and twenty-nine officers, plus eight temporary men who had been hired to help with the wartime surge in population, soldiers, and criminal activity. This staff hadn’t stamped out crime in the city—witness the profits bootleggers and brothels were enjoying—and it wasn’t expected to. Cracking down on the evils along “Knock ’em Down Alley” would require diverting resources the city and nation needed to spend on getting soldiers and supplies from North America to Europe. But while the police department hadn’t made Halifax heaven on earth, it was doing a decent job keeping the city safe for the many constituencies that called it home.
Likewise, the Halifax Fire Department had been hiring only part-timers since 1894, but the city had suffered few major fires during the intervening twenty-three years, even with the extra pressure of the Great War. The explosion, however, inflicted such heavy losses that the department’s presence was barely felt in the aftermath.
Colonel Thompson and his staff were trying to figure out how to come up with enough guards to secure the city when he received a knock on his door. Two American naval officers, Captain Stanford E. Moses of the USS Von Steuben, which had taken minor damage when the steamship Northwind drifted into it, and Captain Howard Symington of the USS Tacoma, which had felt the concussion 52 miles off Halifax and returned to port, asked, “Is there anything we can do?”
It was no time for prideful stoicism. On behalf of Halifax, Colonel Thompson had to speak up. “Can you give me any men to patrol the streets?”
“Any number?”
“Can you give me two hundred fifty?”
“Yes,” they said, without hesitation. Almost as fast, the “efficient Americans” produced the required number of bluejackets and Marines to monitor Halifax’s streets and shore, allowing the Canadian troops to get some sleep.
“This thoughtful consideration on the part of the American officers is characteristic of the people they represented,” Halifax historian Blair Beed writes, “and was manifested in a thousand ways by the measures of relief which they put in operation later.”
No matter how well-prepared a city was, having one-sixth of the population wounded in an instant would strain any health system.
Between Halifax and Dartmouth there were four public hospitals: the Victoria General, with 175 beds, was already at capacity before the explosion; the Nova Scotia Hospital for Infectious Diseases had 200 beds, but was set up for a very specific mission; the Children’s Hospital; and another small facility for infectious diseases on Gottingen Street. The city was also home to a few military hospitals—Camp Hill Hospital, with 240 beds; another on Cogswell Street with 150 beds; and Pine Hill Military Convalescent Home near Pier 2, where Barss had recovered in one of the 125 beds near the South End—plus seven small, privately run facilities, the largest of which was the Halifax Infirmary with a mere 30 beds.
In all, the two cities had about a tenth of what was needed to handle the 9,000 people who’d been seriously wounded by the explosion. The situation was actually worse than that, because most of those beds were already in use, mostly by wounded veterans. To make the best of this horrible situation, Haligonians would have to be resourceful, generous, brave—and a little lucky.
That week, Ernest Barss had been recuperating at his parents’ home in Wolfville, a slow and painful process consisting mainly of willpower and grit—and precious little progress, if any, with his left leg and his shell shock–induced nervousness, insomnia, and hand tremors. He was pushing himself to get better, but he had every reason to doubt that he ever would. He had continued to work for the war effort while wondering what he could do with his life. And then he received a call.
George Graham’s long walk to Rockingham, where he sent a telegram out to the rest of the province asking for urgent medical help, got quick results. Less than two hours after the explosion, a Wolfville physician named Dr. Elliott asked Barss, whom he knew had learned basic first aid overseas, to join him on the train to Halifax. All Elliott knew was what Graham’s cable had told him, “Simply that there had been an explosion and part of the city had been wrecked and was in flames,” Barss recalled. “Of course we thought it greatly exaggerated, but when about half an hour later an urgent call came for doctors and nurses we began to think there must be something in it.”
Barss was being recruited to return to a war zone—not to fight this time, but to help. Despite his infirmity and shell-shock symptoms, all of which could be aggravated by this demanding mission, once again Barss didn’t hesitate to answer the call to duty.
“A special train was made up and left about noon,” Barss said. “I just had ten minutes [to pack a bag], but I made it.”
If Barss’s outlook had changed dramatically during his first trip to the trenches, slowly turning his optimistic bravado into fatalistic defeatism, this second call would transform his life once again.
Chapter 24
Ready to Go the Limit
At 10:13 a.m., Boston received a telegram about the tragedy in Halifax.
Of all the cities that received telegrams about Halifax’s plight, Boston was probably the most unpredictable. Halifax is about equidistant from Montreal and Boston by train, but twice as close to Boston by
sea. So it wasn’t a question of whether the closest major city could help Halifax, but whether Boston would.
On the one hand, Halifax had fought for or supported the opposite side of every battle Bostonians had ever waged, starting with the American Revolutionary War—the very conflict that sent 30,000 United Empire Loyalists fleeing New York and New England to Halifax in the first place, forming a big part of the foundation of Halifax’s current population. One of Nova Scotia’s favorite sons, Joseph Barss Jr., gained his status by capturing, sinking, or burning dozens New England ships in the War of 1812, while Dr. William Johnston Almon and Jock Fleming risked life and limb sneaking a Confederate ship past Union forces under cover of darkness.
For the Bostonians’ part, when U.S. congressmen were openly advocating annexing Canada just six years earlier, Massachusetts’s representatives didn’t make a peep of protest. They had even supported the idea themselves more than once over the years. And there was the simple matter of identity: this was Halifax, Nova Scotia, not Providence, Rhode Island; Canadians, still British subjects, not fellow Americans.
But the bonds between these two shipping towns went even deeper. They had more in common with each other than either had with the cities to the west. Boston was home to thousands of Halifax cousins, who still visited, and transplants like James Earnest McLaughlin, the architect of Fenway Park. It certainly didn’t hurt that, as of April 1917, the United States and Canada were officially allies in war for the first time in their long histories. That by itself probably didn’t compel Boston to action—Russia was also an ally in the Great War, after all—but it removed one more obstacle. Plus, Boston had something no one else had: a Committee on Public Safety. Boston had prepared for something like this, and now had an opportunity to show it.
The Great Halifax Explosion Page 22
