December 6th, 1917 – A Day of Infamy in Halifax History
In Halifax almost every school kid knows what happened on December 6th, 1917. It’s ingrained into the psyche of the city and it was literally the day the earth stood still.
On that cool December morning so long ago a densely-packed French munition ship, the Mont Blanc, collided with a Belgian ship, Imo, that was carrying relief supplies for the Belgian population suffering in World War I. The resulting explosion was the first man-made explosion of such force before the bomb on Hiroshima. IN fact the blast broke windows in Truro almost an hour away from Halifax.
Needless to say half of Halifax and Dartmouth were completely destroyed and almost 2,000 people died form the blast and being trapped in smashed homes. Thousands more suffered horrific wounds including blindness. It was so powerful that the fathers of the Atomic bomb studied the disaster in preparation for the bombs that destroyed the two Japanese cities.
Every December 6th, at 9am, there is a ceremony at the Memorial Bell Tower on Fort Needham, a site overlooking the narrows where the explosion took place. On the monument is a carillon of bells, donated in 1920 in memory of the two churches destroyed in the explosion. The presentation was made to the United Memorial Church, which was built to replace th lost churches, by a young girl who had lost her entire family in the blast: mother, father and four brothers and sisters. The ringing of the bells can be heard across the Narrows to north Dartmouth.
At the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic there is a special area dedicated to the explosion that draws tens of thousands of persons each year.
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