Halifax Explosion at 100: A devastating disaster that left a lasting mark

CBC News is live streaming the commemoration ceremony marking the 100thanniversary ofthe Halifax Explosion

A century ago, Halifax's great harbour slosheditselfagainst the shores as the city awoke for anotherday.

By 7:30 a.m.onDec. 6, 1917, the late fall sun was high enough to erase the night. A brisk day dawned under blue skies.

Officials with the Royal Navy, the Royal Canadian Navyand civilian authorities checked their schedules to ensure harbour traffic flowed smoothly to feed the Great War taking place across the ocean. Healthy soldiers arrived from across Canada to join the European theatre. Broken men returnedthrough the same port.

• INTERACTIVE | Experience the Halifax Explosion in 360 video

In the harbour, warships hulked over the three small ferries shuttling people between Dartmouth and Halifax. Fishing boats and pleasure crafts sailed amid the giants. The rules of the harbour were familiar: keep right (starboard),signal your intentionsand pay attention to other ships.

That system had worked for three long war years. Andwhile the city of 50,000 dove into another busy morning,some 2,000 would not live to seesunset that night.

Maude Houghton was a girl of six that day."I remember going to school. I had just got to the corner and boom! The explosion. I was scared," she told CBC News.

Houghton,now 106, is one of only 17 known living survivors of the Halifax Explosion;each of them has been invited to the main commemoration ceremony taking place this morning at the city's Fort Needam Memorial Park.

She remembers going with her family to the city's Common, where they met up with her father. "I just remember that I wanted to go home so bad," she said. "My mother was strong, like me."

Much of the day was "too horrible" to recall. "I wanted to get away from it all," Houghton said. "Lots of people crying. Mothers were grabbing their kids and hugging them."

A horribleday that had started as any other in the port city.

Men heading to work, children to school

Prior to the blast, trains chugged into the North Street terminals near the harbourfront, bringing supplies for the ships and soldiers. Horses clopped over the cobblestones, sharing the road with the odd automobile. Old trams delivered workers to their offices and factories.

Men on their way to work removed their winter coats as the sun warmed the day beyond usual December temperatures. Tardy children rushed to school, jackets opened.

In Halifax'snorth end, Viola Desmond sat alone in a kitchen highchair as her father popped into the washroom. He was caring for his three-year-old daughter while her mother and sibling rode a train en route to a family funeral.

Thomas Raddall, 14, had just sung the morning hymn at Chebucto School. "We were just sitting down and of course that always produced a clatter, but this particular morning, the results were terrific,"the writertold the CBC50 years later.

Vince Coleman's daughter started her day at school as he worked the telegraph dispatch. His actions later that morning staying at his post after realizing the looming disasterwould make him a heroand end his life.

Outside the harbour, the munitions ship Mont-Blanc fired up and prepared to enter. In the Bedford Basin, the relief ship Imo started its engines to exit.

The ships should have passed each other a day earlier, if at all. The Mont-Blanchad arrivedjust after the gates closed, and the crew slept another night on the sea.

The Imo crew had prepared to leave that same day, but its coal arrived too late, soit dozed safely in the basin for one last night.

Failure to yield

As it entered the harbour narrows, the Mont-Blanc blew its whistle once, saying it would maintain its course. The Imo whistled twice, indicating it was staying in the same lane. Whistles clashed in the air, and then the ships collided.

The clock on Halifax City Hall ticked over to 8:45 a.m. A tendril of smoke escaped the gash in the French ship.

People watched the crew of the Mont-Blanc abandon the burning ship. Unguided, it drifted toward Halifax as the flames closed in on the raw ingredients of a bomb concealed in its belly.

Across the harbour inMaskwiekati Malpek, or Tufts Cove, Rachel Cope and her brotherspotted the burning ship as they left their Mi'kmaqcommunity to go to school. She would survive. He would not.

A tower of black smoke, lit by flame bursts, smeared the sky. Hundreds of people stopped to watch the spectacle. Many mothers and young children looked through plate glass windows.

The blast to come would spewglass and other debris through the air, levelling two square kilometres of Halifax. An estimated one in 50 survivorshad significant eye damage thelargest mass blinding in Canadian history.

Meanwhile, firefighters rushed to Pier 6 as the Mont-Blanc bumped into the wooden pier. Billy Wells drove the shiny red Patricia, the city's first motorized fire truck, to the burning ship. He would be the only survivor of his six-man crew.

A dozen horse-pulled wagons clattered to the rescue. The firefighters rolled out their hoses.

The clock at City Hall ticked through the fourth minute of the ninth hour of the sixth day of the twelfth month of 1917. Just before it would have turned to 9:05 a.m., the Mont-Blanc exploded in abrilliant flash, stopping the clock forever.

It was the biggest blast the world would see until the advent of the atomic bomb.

Pieces of the Mont-Blanc the shaft of its 500-kilogram anchor and a twisted, massive cannon from the ship's stern hurtled throughthe air in different directions, each landingmore than three kilometres away.

In addition to the 2,000-person death toll, more than 9,000 were injured, about 20 per cent of the city's population.