CBC City of Ruins The Halifax Explosion 2003

to create that fateful day this is part of the canadian experience a series of documentaries that chronicle the great events that shaped our country now here's city of ruins [Music] the forgotten story of canada's greatest catastrophe who murdered close to two thousand taligonians you look out the window and the that one is dead that one is dead december 6 1917 the story of the halifax harbor explosion [Music] good evening i'm mark starovic on the morning of december the 6th 1917 the city of halifax nova scotia was a bustling lively place but in less than a second halifax became the center of a tragedy like no other in the history of this country and for decades after a tragedy unparalleled in the history of this continent and yet outside of nova scotia the story of the halifax explosion is almost forgotten tonight on the canadian experience you'll relive that dramatic day it's an epic story of horror of heroes and of scapegoats the day the war came home [Music] the streets of the old garrison city of halifax are swollen with soldiers and sailors the harbor is cluttered with ships halifax is britain's crucial lifeline for war supplies and munitions the normally sleepy conservative city bristles with purpose and vigor halifax is a boom town with no dearth of activities [Music] i mean as far as we know i mean there were the bootleggers are doing a great job the prostitutes were making a fortune you know and they were even bootleggers operating at the ymca you know it's a so it was a pretty lively town [Music] the city's south end is home to a wealthy mostly protestant elite the city's north end called richmond is predominantly irish catholic here the houses of factory workers mix with homes of factory owners some of the big works were in richmond like um the richmond printing works um the acadia sugar refinery but the owners of the businesses lived as close to the business as possible so it was quite a mixed community of workers owners of shops owners of factories etc barbara orr's father is part owner of the richmond printing works she and her large family live in middle class comfort it was a wooden house but it was covered with asbestos shingles which was something quite new and of course they wouldn't burn or at least they were supposed not to burn it was a big house the oar's new house has a spectacular view of the busy harbor it's an irresistible sight to children barbara's younger brother ian has studied the boats until he can identify any of the hundreds that sail by [Music] in 1917 the port saw 2000 major ship movements we're not talking about little coastal traders but two thousand ocean-going ships came through halifax in that one year carrying every kind of cargo imaginable control of the harbor has been wrenched from civilian hands and given to canada's tiny fledgling navy the officer in charge is the english-born frederick wyatt and wyatt has a small staff which oversees the submarine nets and also oversees the movement of ships in the harbor a job not unlike that of being the attendant in a parking lot which is an important distinction inside the crowded harbor minor collisions are frequent wyatt warns his superiors of a dangerous chaotic situation it is not possible to regulate the traffic in the harbour and it is submitted that i cannot in this regard accept the responsibility of any accident occurring the concern of the admiralty was to load ships and get them to the war front and get supplies out there was very little concern about safety in fact there were no emergency plans in the city no emergency plans in the harbor no real thought to the implications on december 5th wyatt learns that a french ship the montblanc is on its way from new york on its top deck nearly 600 barrels of highly flammable aviation fuel and below massive amounts of tnt picric acid and gun cotton the montblanc is a floating bomb she had been fitted out in the shipyards in brooklyn with a wooden lining to the steel hull and everything closed with copper nails which don't produce sparks they'd banned all liquor on board a french ship and nobody was allowed smoking was banned no matches were allowed to be struck i mean that's how extraordinary the precautions had been taken for this ship loaded with munitions for france the montblanc is ordered to sail to halifax there a convoy will escort her volatile cargo across the atlantic the ship flies no red flag the usual warning of explosives aboard captain america is not compelled to fly one there was some discussion about whether they should fly a red flag which they would have done in peacetime and the captain said no because that would have told enemy agents that this was a munitions ship and if you were on a ship you didn't really want to advertise your care munitions because you were you were a pretty good target halifax harbor pilot francis mackey boards vessels and guides them safely through the unfamiliar waters of the harbor to francis mackie the mont blanc is just one more ship francis mackey has joint responsibility with the captain to bring the ship safely in but this is a defended port and it's close to night time every night at dusk a wartime system of steel submarine nets is raised across the mouth of the harbor to keep german submarines from slipping in on the evening of december 5th the montblanc has arrived after the nets are raised the ship must spend one more anxious night on open water but the submarine nets are preventing another ship from getting out the relief ship emo is delayed there one more night the night of 5 6 december is a cool calm december night one of those winter nights that people in halifax tend to tend to enjoy there's that tang in the air there's very there's very little wind uh well it was it was a nice day when nothing could go wrong and that was the start of it december 6th is a bright winter day [Music] at 7 30 in the morning the mont blanc begins its journey into halifax harbor so they were a little anxious to get through the gate and get into the anchorage and presumably get ashore the emo on the other hand had been waiting for an extra day in bedford basin waiting for coal and it was anxious to get underway and get on his trip over to europe now the emo begins to move out of bedford basin her destination they open water outside the harbour she's moving fast faster someone remarked than any ship he'd ever seen in the harbor see traffic keeps to the right as the emo came into the channel she saw an american [ __ ] steamer there and also a tug and she went over to the left of the channel going outwards so instead of getting across onto the halifax site which she should have done the emo proceeded out of the basin on the wrong side of the harbour but coming out of the bright sunshine was the other vessel the mont blanc the munitions ship and that captain simply had a view of a much larger vessel going to the wrong side of a narrow channel [Music] the montblanc is one blast of its whistle to say that she is where she should be close to the dartmouth shore email replied she whistled twice two whistles the emo is saying it will not change its course again mark blanc do another blast [Music] again imo replied with two blasts the moonball now turns toward the middle of the harbor to evade the emo the emo's captain orders his ship to stop but the reverse action of the propellers causes the emo to turn so both ships in attempting evasive action have essentially sealed their fate [Music] her bowels crashed into the marbles boughs the mumbler had um metal drums of benzel the aviation fuel on the deck they were burst the fuel on the deck spread all over the foredeck the ships pull away the emo has left an enormous cash in the mont blanc hull and as metal grass on metal somewhere there is heat somewhere there is fire and somewhere there is rapid combustion the barrels of benzoyl ignite almost instantaneously aboard the moon it would appear that there were nine or ten small explosions as these barrels went up and they just blew their top and released more fluids for more to feed the fire more and the fire meanwhile was seeping down through the heat in the deck and through the gash in the deck the the liquids were presumably dropping and starting to burn in amongst the cargo in the meantime mont blanc on fire has begun to drift towards the halifax shore here's this enormous column of black smoke puffs of flame bursting up through it the noise the light the huge column it was an amazing sight the halifax fire department in its brand new vehicle the patricia rushes to the water's edge they're joined by hundreds of onlookers entranced by the flames [Music] every works along the waterfront the men were at the windows children who had been heading for school ran down the hill ran down to get closer and nobody seemed to realize there was any danger at all there was a spectacle people were gathering stopped in the waterfront to look isn't this a dramatic very exciting scene you know and nobody had any sense of the potential and don't forget you know explosions of that kind while in the western front we're using mine explosions on the front people had not seen that sort of thing in north america there was no experience with that and no sense of danger so people were stopping the way we would for a fireworks display only those aboard the moon blonde know what's about to happen inside halifax harbor the montblanc is on fire at this point the captain of the uh emily limadec had either the option of waiting until his ship exploded he couldn't uh scuttle the ship because that would just take hours to get down and turn all the seacocks and everything he couldn't um he couldn't get forward to anchor the ship in midstream because the fort deck where the anchor mechanism was located was ablaze and so he did the only thing he thought he could do was to save his men so he ordered abandoned ship the montblanc's lifeboats are lowered and quickly filled the french-speaking crew of the montblanc begin rowing for their lives towards the darkness shore they ran and yelled at people but people didn't understand the message and nobody understood the implications of the message about 15 to 20 minutes had passed from the time of the collision to the time the montblanc nosed into the shore just underneath what is called richmond suburbs watching from the window of their new house are barbara orr her brother ian and her mother we saw the smoke come out of the big hull and ian he said that's an ammunition boat and i said what do you mean and he said those boats that's the kind of a boat that carries ammunition and i said will it explode he said no not that i know and my mother said oh i don't think so [Music] mrs orr gives barbara and ian permission to go down to the harbour ian heads directly to the water barbara hesitates it was so still so calm this awful column of smoke went up and then these balls of fire would roll up through it and then they'd burst but there was no sound it was the strangest thing and i i stood spellbound in the middle of this field i thought oh something awful is gonna happen the explosion occurred four minutes and 35 seconds after nine o'clock in one fiftieth of a second the largest man-made explosion the world has ever seen devastates the north end of halifax harbor and then we had the the the waves parting in the harbor which left the harbor bottom exposed we had the tidal wave which followed and then we had the most incredible thing was that we had this wave of debris sheets of flame shot down the harbor and towards the shore plates from the mont blanc hull fell among the ships death then advanced roaring over the ships leaped upward torn from their [Music] moorings the explosion kills hundreds instantly wounds thousands [Music] as i ran down barrington street i met another man carrying a child in his arms one part of the little one's head was visible and from the forehead a large splinter of wood protruded it was at least a half an inch thick and about six or seven inches long the end must have been embedded in her eye thousands of homes are destroyed buildings collapse trapping the living inside we crawled out through the window and everything was black can't begin to tell you of the awful sights dead bodies laid out in rows arms and legs sticking out of the burning debris burned to the bone and the whole north end nothing but charred embers well the whole thing just turns a heart sick walls of the schools collapse on the children inside [Music] the morning kitchen fires have turned richmond's wooden houses into tinder boxes anyone trapped in a collapsed house will likely burn to death richmond has all but vanished across the harbour the mcmac community of tufts cove is destroyed the town of dartmouth crushed the black community of africville is severely damaged but has been spared the worst of the blast protected by a hill and unbelievably barbara orr standing directly in the path of the blast survives its typhoon effect flings her more than a quarter of a mile one of her boots tightly laced knee-high boots was gone she was black dirty hurting skin hurt her legs hurt she tried to stand up and walk and she couldn't people were all crying around and saying the germans are here the germans are here and i said it isn't the germans a boat exploded but everybody thought it was the germans edith murphy is eight years old and i was kept home from school to mind my young sister she was only two and she was playing on the floor with the ball and i was there with her and my mother was in the bedroom she had a headache and she was having a rest and when it blew i hollered i said come out quick eight-year-old dorothea buchanan was on her way to buy kindling for the wood stove when the explosion knocked her unconscious i was dazed i was dazed i didn't know where i was i stood for the longest time when i come too and i looked all around i was like everything was as still as death frightened the heart out of me a great hunk of the mont blanc has fallen through the roof of the buchanan house fallen through three floors to the cellar dorothea's once familiar neighborhood is transformed the houses were all like somebody took them and shook them windows all out everything was blasted out the windows it was a big window it drew out you know it dragged everything right out edith murphy her baby sister and mother escaped to the backyard there was a woman lived upstairs she was only young she got blown right out through the top and she hung to the fence and she burned to death and she screamed to my cousin he lived in the bungalow at the back and it was my aunt she said go in and save the baby and he tried and tried to run in but they pulled him back because the house was burning but her husband got home and he got up there and he brought that baby out just minutes ago olin's brewery stood intact now it's a ruin a tomb for its workers and i saw this man and his face was just all cut to pieces and his hair was hanging down and he was loaded with blood and then he was falling and he was saying oh my god where am i and i stood and i got looking at him i couldn't go but my mother pulled me along she said you can't come on the cloud rises twenty thousand feet over the city below it the real nightmare is just beginning really um freak injuries like a woman having entire side of her face sliced off but and it just came open like that but she was holding it back on uh people cut in two but living for a few moments after their accountant two heads cut off um people having their um uh the force of the shock of the explosion blowing all their clothes off so they were left naked walking down the street naked [Music] window glass has lacerated the faces of those watching the spectacle of the burning ship they got trapped under things they got crushed but it was the glass that was the worst i mean people were mangled and bled to death the patricia pride of the fire department is a gnarled heap of metal only one of its crew has survived the tidal wave has lifted the emo out of the water and onto the dartmouth shore [Music] the living now begin to comb the ruins for survivors [Music] the first attempts to pull survivors from the ruins begins soon after the explosion so essentially the rescue is done by survivors which means it's done by women because this incident happened on a weekday morning during school hours in wartime the men are at work or at war the people at home are women with families the elderly and the preschool children so the women do the initial rescue work but soon soldiers and sailors join in the grim work the city's hospitals must deal with the cut and mangled bodies to dr willis bryant the injuries are the worst he has ever seen the ghastly appearance of so many wounds disfiguring faces and destroying eyes was really trying to the most experienced and strongest nerves some of the men who had been at the front in the war declared they had never witnessed anything so terrible there's records of a physician an eye surgeon who came and he did about 60 nucleations several days later that's removing eyeballs from people whose eyes had been skewered by glass one morning the whole ward of the hospital is full of people with serious eye injuries at camp hill hospital a badly injured barbara orr lies in a pile of bloodied bodies then i realized that there was something funny about the people most of them were dead and i saw this young orderly coming and i called to him and i asked him if i could get a bed or something and he looked at me i can see him yet as the shock of the explosion wears off survivors grasp the extent of their personal tragedies barbara orr's father mother five brothers and sisters are dead she alone of her family has survived the explosion has taken a terrible toll on edith murphy's family it was an awful day i'll never forget whenever i hear the fog horns blow in the night it gives me the cold chills we had seven killed in my mother's family my aunts she was making me a little blue velvet coat and she used to say if you don't stick if you don't stand still you'll never get this coat she just had to make the hair that's when she got killed it was terrible because you lose an awful lot of friends and all the neighbors we knew all the neighbors and you look out the window and the that one is dead that one is dead and they were wiped out all along by us because when you figure that a piece of the boat come in our house it wasn't going to come to our house any more than it would anybody else's so an awful lot of people lost after the explosion dorothea buchanan's family takes refuge inside her grandmother's damaged store an unused meat locker will be their home for the next week at night the noise of horse-drawn carts keeps her awake the flat wagons were going by and they were loaded with the dead well we weren't allowed to see that but we could i could hear it at midnight winter arrives in halifax it's the worst storm in a decade the trapped who may have survived the fires must now fight the freezing cold but amidst the tragedy an astonishing tale of survival some 26 hours after the explosion a man with his dog were going by the wreckage looking for family members and there were soldiers nearby when they heard a cry and the dog sniffed around the soldiers lifted up the ash pan of a stove and underneath it was a little baby girl annie liggins lived less than 200 yards from the center of the explosion she survived the blast that killed her mother and baby brother because i mean i must have been unconscious for a certain length of time to be there all night long and the next day and then i must but as man she said you were the mr he said something about the whimpering or something and the dog heard it so they went over to see and i was there but for hundreds of others there are no miracles it was a terrible experience hauling out bodies of some 200 young children from the ruins and piling them outside i can remember the nauseating odor of burnt human flesh the blind and the maimed and cries of torment from panic-stricken people bodies are taken to makeshift morgues many will never be identified or claimed soon after the explosion a workable telegraph is found and an urgent plea for help is transmitted organize a relief train to round up all doctors nurses and red cross supplies no time to explain details but list of casualties is enormous canadian doctors came in from all the surrounding areas and performed a large part of the medical response within two hours of the explosion wire reports reach boston a city with strong family ties to nova scotia relief trains quickly fill with doctors nurses medical supplies and race to the ruined city to the north that that explains the american response to new england states it was a neighbor to neighbor family to family response and a community response rather than americans helping canadians the first in a caravan of relief trains from across canada and new england arrives in halifax on december 8th for two days the nova scotia doctors and nurses have worked around the clock medical supplies have run dangerously low operations are performed without anesthetic now finally the medical teams can rest over 100 american doctors and over 300 american nurses were quickly in halifax to help the local doctors and nurses look after the 9 000 injured people but even before the americans arrive halifax has rallied organizing its own relief effort but what happened about the two and a half hour mark was at city hall a group of municipal leaders including some politicians including the deputy mayor the mayor was away including you know significant business people discuss what they should do and at that meeting they agreed that they would set up a transportation committee a relief and feeding committee a shelter committee and all of those committees went to work the halifax harbor explosion is now headline news around the world pushing the war off the front pages and before long the city's own newspapers are demanding answers how can one reasonably explain what that ship was doing there in a channel in the middle of a substantial sized city who was responsible who murdered close to two thousand taligonians who why that's what helgonians wanted to know headlines inflame public anger residents of german descent are arrested and the montblanc's captain ame lemadek asks for police protection on december 12th a hastily assembled inquiry begins hearings well the inquiry is interesting and it it was led by a judge who decided already that montblanc was responsible there was no attempt for a fair inquiry he allowed the lawyers to run wild [Music] the inquiry will focus on three men francis mackey who guided the mont blanc into halifax harbour the montblanc's captain and the naval officer in charge of the harbor commander frederick wyatt for months and months i saw an accident or collision was coming and i could see there was somebody going to be made the goat for this and i did not wish to be made the goat you can call it intuition if you like but that was my idea the emo's lawyers waste no time in attacking wyatt they accuse wyatt of blaming the emo's dead pilot for the events leading to the explosion to make a charge against a dead man which is unfair and unwarranted would be very much against british fair play neither unfair or unwarranted seeing it is an absolute fact they were questioning why it's veracity questioning his professionalism questioning his motives questioning his ability questioning his attitude and in doing so do they not remove some of the attention from their from their own clients by projecting the questions on to someone else i would try to do that if i was somebody's lawyer so there's a deliberate attempt never to tackle the issues of what caused the ship to be carrying that cargo was just looked at how was the collision caused and it was aimed at getting mobile so the inquiries of farce in my opinion it takes less than 15 minutes to read aloud the inquiry's conclusions blame is placed squarely on the french ship montblanc harbour pilot francis mackey captain amy lemadek and commander frederick wyatt are severely criticized and almost immediately within a day or two of the judgment amy lemedek francis mackey and frederick wyatt are all arrested and charged with manslaughter the cases against lumadec and mackey are dropped for lack of evidence frederick wyatt now stands charged as the one person responsible for the deaths of almost 2 000 people but there's no real evidence to convict him either and why it is set free the question of legal blame will finally be pronounced by the privy council in london they felt the original inquiry was so biased they looked at the evidence again and came up with the the verdict that both ships were to blame there was no one that you could ultimately point your finger at [Music] but the names of wyatt lamadek and mackie are forever linked to the disaster even so halifax is frances mackey's home and that's where he chooses to stay francis mackey must have been a very brave man to you know to be able to do that but i think it perhaps suggests that he also had some sense that he had personally done no wrong and but he carried on and he continued to live in halifax but the captain of the mont blanc i don't think the french government ever came down very hard on him and he eventually received a medal from the french government not for his part in halifax explosion of course but for his part in the war frederick wyatt leaves halifax and the navy for boston and works in civilian shipping in 1935 his name disappears from the public records survivors continue to be haunted by what they saw but i still see that man you know that i told you you know that bothered me for a long while because he was falling i knew he must have died there because he was screaming for help you know nobody could help him the nightmares i'd be in bed and the bed would shake be it the bed was shaking the plaster was falling in on me and i was getting this awful head that was going to burst [Music] then i was good and sick the wounded will carry eerie blue tin scars for the rest of their lives i remember my mother and it was a just a quick saying it was dope stare that's the explosion and it was people who had disfigured faces uh in halifax and there was something that you know you want to look and stare barbara orr begins a new life at the home of an aunt and uncle imagine barbara orr losing everybody in the morning of december 6th barbara had a happy well united reasonably well-off family living in a lovely house and by the end of that day she was totally alone she'd lost five brothers sisters mother father house every possession i think the um real heroism looking at it in perspective now was the ordinary people who were either badly injured or made homeless but the existences of the war and the kind of stoicism of these people at that time had to keep the heroic effort ongoing for the troops overseas the final tally of destruction is a grim list [Music] 1951 dead nine thousand injured 199 totally blinded hundreds of others partially blinded as a choir boy in 1940s halifax robert mcneil watches as the residents of a school for the blind make their uncertain way to their places in the front pews and i remember they were so shabbily dressed and their hair was so messily cut on the assumption that they wouldn't notice i suppose because they were blind but anyway they would hold on to each other to know when to rise or when to kneel and look up with strange angled faces towards the lights coming from the stained glass windows during world war ii a group of scientists in new mexico studied the effects of the halifax explosion they're building a bomb that will surpass anything known before i don't think anybody quite anticipated the results that they ultimately saw in hiroshima and nagasaki but they certainly had done their homework halifax was part of that homework the detonation of the first atomic bomb is the greatest man-made explosion since december 6 1917. people in halifax had this sense of before the explosion and after the explosion but the amazing thing about the halifax explosion is the amnesia the rest of the country in the world has about it why is the titanic so much better to every kid in canada than the 1917 explosion it killed the you know very few canadians yet we all know about it it's because there were wealthy people on board that had a lot of influence in the american and british society and that is why the story is going on had the halifax explosion killed a number of very wealthy canadians that had tremendous influence in canada it might be better known it tended to kill pretty ordinary normal blue-collar catholic people in the north end of halifax that didn't have a long lineage and weren't wealthy and therefore that it was just another sort of blip in in the war every year on december 6th the anniversary of the halifax harbor explosion is marked in a somber ceremony and every year fewer eyewitnesses gather to recall the horror of that day [Music] on december 6 1917 halifax became a casualty of war nothing as catastrophic had happened in canada before that it has not happened since there is no answer to the question whether or not the explosion could have been prevented or who was to blame ultimately or why [Music] the image that i i'm sure you've seen and thought upon is that the group of women that are lined up looking at the devastation on one of the cleared streets dressed all of them dressed in black but their whole city that they knew was just in shambles totally totally gone [Music] in a few weeks the canadian experience will bring you a frontier story of adventure rebellion and love in 1832 susanna moody and catherine partrail emigrate to upper canada the refined sisters are shocked by pioneer life [Music] their stories chronicle the turning points of the colony and leave an unequaled record of life in early canada sisters in the wilderness struggle and triumph on the canadian frontier [Music] you can find out more about the halifax explosion on our comprehensive and interactive cbc website and tomorrow night from the award-winning cbc documentary unit that created city of ruins a story of million-dollar crime and intrigue worthy of james bond and indiana jones who looted the baghdad museum and where did those priceless artifacts go find out tomorrow on robbing the cradle of civilization and then i hope you'll join lyndon mcintyre hannah gartner and me for the season premiere of the fifth estate we'll investigate the conspiracy theory still swirling around the events of september 11th watch us tomorrow to find out what is fiction and what is fact i'm bob mcewen stay with us the national is next you

Channel: Rewindium

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Length: 45min 21sec (2721 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 08 2017