The biggest man-made explosion before the atomic age was the
Halifax Explosion on December 6, 1917. A French ship, SS
Mont-Blanc,
collided with another ship on its way into the harbor in Nova Scotia
and a fire ignited its 2,925-ton cargo of explosives. The blast leveled
the surrounding community and the resulting tsunami destroyed another
village. Two thousand people died, and another 9,000 were injured.One
of the witnesses to the blast was Frank Baker, a sailor in the Royal
Navy, who wrote about the events of that day in his diary. He passed his
journal on to his son Rex before his death in 1977. Rex put the diary
away and only recently rediscovered it.
“The first
thud shook the ship from stem to stern and the second one seemed to spin
us all around, landing some [crew members] under the gun carriage and
others flying in all directions all over the deck,” Baker wrote. Sailors
150 miles out to sea heard the blast. On land, people felt the jolt 300
miles away. The shock wave demolished almost everything within a
half-mile. “Our first impression was that we were being attacked by
submarines, and we all rushed for the upper deck, where we saw a
veritable mountain of smoke of a yellowish hue and huge pieces of iron
were flying all around us.”
Frank Baker's diary entry is believed to be the only eyewitness account of the explosion recorded on that day.
Read the rest of it at Smithsonian.
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