A Paradise Built in Hell (12 page)

 

 

 

When I was a child we used to play a game in any big open space on summer evenings. One of us would stand at the far end of an expanse and shout out “green light,” and everyone else would surge forward from the starting line, then freeze when “red light” was heard. A disaster is a little like a game of red light/green light in which everyone is suddenly freed to rush in their own direction, faster and harder than in ordinary times. The people in San Francisco in 1906 did not become something other than what they always were. General Funston loosed his fears and his belief in the legitimacy of violence and dispatched an army to act on them. The city fathers rushed forward with their schemes for improving their own situations as regards money and power, and sometimes also carried out their duties to serve the public interest as they saw it. The wealthy were sometimes cowed by the idea of an unregulated public and sometimes a part of that public. Ordinary citizens had less impact individually but collectively did much to shape the disaster’s aftermath. Pauline Jacobson dashed forward with her gregariousness and her reinforced positiv ity about human nature, as did Jack London, Mary Austin, and William James. Anna Amelia Holshouser, like Thomas Burns, Officer Schmitt and his wife and daughters, and countless others, showed up with generosity and resourcefulness. Some people sprinted toward opportunities to help themselvs to unsecured goods, but what theft took place was dwarfed by the gifts and gestures of altruism in the aftermath of the ruin of the city. Many fear that in disaster we become something other than we normally are—helpless or bestial and savage in the most common myths—or that is who we really are when the superstructure of society crumbles. We remain ourselves for the most part, but freed to act on, most often, not the worst but the best within. The ruts and routines of ordinary life hide more beauty than brutality.

A
little after 9:00 a.m. on December 6, 1917, Gertrude Pettipas was leaning out an open window watching the cargo ship on fire in the Halifax, Nova Scotia, harbor below. Then it exploded. “A great black ball of smoke rose up to about four or five hundred feet and out of this came lurid cardinal colored flames. It was a magnificent though terrifying sight. . . . I saw a blinding sheet of fire shoot a mile high in the air. It seemed to me to cover the whole sky. It blinded me, and immediately the concussion struck me in the face throwing me with terrific force across the room. I struck the wall and fell. The house swayed and rocked, and the doors and windows were blown to pieces.” The First World War had come home to this quiet Canadian port town already bustling with soldiers and supplies for the front in Europe. Many thought the Germans had invaded, but it was a harbor accident involving a tremendous quantity of explosives bound for the European front. It created the largest man-made explosion in history before nuclear weapons.

That morning, a Norwegian ship, the
Imo,
draped with a “Belgian Relief ” banner, had taken an unorthodox course, as if to pass the munitions ship the
Mont Blanc
on the wrong side in the long narrow channel of the sheltered Halifax harbor. The
Mont Blanc
signaled frantically, but the two ships were unable to agree upon a safe passage past each other. The
Imo
steamed on fast and plowed into the side of the
Mont Blanc
, tearing into the side of the ship. The latter ship was loaded with nearly three thousand tons of explosive powder, along with highly flammable oil, gun cotton, benzol, and picric acid. It was intended to join a convoy headed for France. The impact ignited some of the cargo, and the fire spread to the most volatile material. Some precautions had been taken when the ship was loaded in New York; the iron hull was lined with wood nailed in with copper nails to prevent sparks, and the crew was forbidden to smoke almost anywhere on the ship, including the deck laden with barrels of fuel. But the load was still a reckless one. The collision started a fire that began to spread, but only the crew on board knew how deadly it would be. Unable to warn anyone, they evacuated. The ship drifted toward the shore, hundred-foot flames clawing the sky, and then the nearly three thousand tons of explosives detonated.

The explosion lifted the entire six million pounds of the
Mont Blanc
a thousand feet into the air, vaporized much of it, and dropped a shower of white-hot shrapnel over Halifax and Dartmouth, the city across the strait. The ship’s anchor shank, weighing half a ton, was thrown two miles, and the barrel of a large ship-mounted gun nearly three and a half. Water was sucked up into a column and then dropped again into the torrential wave that overswept the surroundings, rising nearly sixty feet beyond the high-water level. A cloud of white smoke rose twenty thousand feet into the sky. What remained of the benzol mixed with a cloud of water to form a sticky black rain that fell on both sides of the harbor for several minutes. A sound wave shot out, and the sound was audible more than two hundred miles away. An air blast rolled over the city, knocking down buildings, tearing through doors, windows, and walls, crushing the bodies of those who were hit head-on nearby, exploding eardrums and lungs, lifting people and hurling them into whatever was nearby or carrying them away, snapping trees and telegraph poles like twigs, reducing whole neighborhoods to splinters and rubble. A fireball followed, igniting much of what was within a mile or so surrounding what had been the
Mont Blanc.
Every building within a mile was destroyed, and many farther away were shattered or ignited. Then the fire began to spread: 325 acres were totally destroyed, 1,630 buildings annihilated, and 12,000 damaged. More than 1,500 people were killed, leaving behind widows, widowers, orphans, and bereaved parents. Nearly 9,000 people were injured, families torn apart, and ultimately 41 adults and children were blinded and 249 lost one eye or the sight in it.

After they despaired of doing anything about the conflagration, the crew of the
Mont Blanc
rushed to the lifeboats, rowed frantically ashore, and then ran. They landed near the Mi’kmaq village of Turtle Grove on the Dartmouth coast opposite Halifax. A native woman, Aggie March, stood with a baby in her arms, watching the spectacular, oddly colored flames. A sailor ran past her, grabbed the infant, and continued running into a thicket. When she caught up with him he knocked her down and jumped atop her and the infant. They survived, though nine in Turtle Grove were killed, and the explosion brought an end to the indigenous settlement that had existed since the eighteenth century. The blast shattered tens of thousands of windows into clusters of glass daggers that flew into walls, into wood, into flesh, and into eyes—into the many eyes of those who had been watching the drama in the harbor through windows that winter day. Windows shattered fifty miles away. One girl sitting at her desk in Halifax’s Catholic school saw the windows bend toward her like sails just in time to duck the shower of shards that followed. Houses were smashed into piles of splinters, and people were trapped or crushed underneath. The rain of black grease covered many of the people out of doors, making them almost unrecognizable to family members who met them on the streets, or in the hospitals, or went looking for them in the impromptu morgues.

Six-year-old Dorothy Lloyd was walking to St. Joseph’s Catholic School with her three sisters when a woman ran toward them, hair flying back, shouting, “Go back! Go back!” They saw a mountain of smoke in the sky, stopped in their tracks, and were thrown to the ground by the force of the explosion. Smoke filled the air.

“Dolly, look at the stovepipes flying in the air,” Dorothy said.

Her sister corrected her. “Those aren’t stovepipes. They’re sailors.” The men were streaming by, and the blast then picked up the two school-girls and separated them from their other sisters. They came to earth in a vacant lot surrounded by fallen birds. The blast tore the clothes off some of the people that December morning, even tight-laced boots and buttoned coats, depositing them naked or partially clothed as far as a mile from where they had been walking or standing and watching the ship on fire in the harbor. The steep slope of the city rising up from the water prevented many from falling any great distance when the blast was done carrying them, and several people survived extraordinary airborne journeys. Fireman Billy Wells had been racing toward the harbor on the fire engine
Patricia.
The next thing he knew was that he was standing naked far above where he had been, and his arm was hacked to the bone. A wave full of debris from the harbor followed him uphill and washed him into a field. Wells recovered, but not everyone was so lucky. The other seven members of the fire crew were killed, and when Wells walked away from where he had landed he saw corpses hanging out windows and draped over telegraph wires.

Many of the injuries were grotesque. Twelve-year-old Irene Duggan had been thrown into the air and impaled through the flesh of her arm on a metal stake that left her dangling above the ground. A soldier got her down, and the Duggan brothers and sisters who had not been buried under the partially collapsed house dug out their severely injured mother and sister. A soldier just back from the battlefields of the First World War said the event “affected me far worse than anything I saw in France. Over there you don’t see women and children all broken to pieces.” Though he’d been sent back to recuperate from a punctured lung, he made twenty-three trips to a hospital carrying the wounded.

One of Dorothy Lloyd’s sisters had been trapped under a school gate until a soldier freed her; the other was entirely unharmed. The four girls went back to a home whose windows had been blown out, but the family stayed there waiting for an older child until a soldier drove them out at gunpoint. They walked to the Halifax Commons with their neighbors, and on the way the missing boy pulled up alongside them driving a wagon. The stunning scenes were not over for Lloyd, though. She went to see a ring of nuns holding their habits out from their sides and found they were screening a woman giving birth on the grass on that cold day.

The night express from New Brunswick was approaching Halifax as the explosion hit, and the engineer slowed the train to a crawl until debris stopped it, and then crew and passengers took on wounded and homeless people and delivered them to nearby Truro. An earlier train approaching the area with three hundred passengers was spared because a railroad dispatcher, Vincent Coleman, rushed back into the telegraph office near the harbor despite the mortal danger to send a warning and a farewell up the tracks: “Hold up the train. Ammunition ship on fire making for Pier 6 and will explode. Guess this will be my last message. Goodbye boys.” His telegram stopped the train and sent out an early call for aid. He died in the explosion and is still remembered in Canada. Harold Floyd, a nineteen-year-old boy who stayed behind to telephone safety information, died as well. Jean Groves, the telephone operator at the exchange building near the dock, stayed behind in the shattered site to call for nurses, doctors, firemen. She had to be carried from the building. Doctors, nurses, and volunteers worked around the clock to save the lives of the injured. Trainloads of supplies and of volunteers, including medical teams and skilled laborers, poured in, and from the day of the explosion onward, the injured, orphaned, and homeless were dispatched by train to where their needs were met.

Uninjured locals stepped up to the emergency as well. A young busi nessman named Joe Glube slept through the explosion, awoke to find his mother and sister bleeding from superficial wounds, set off with them for the Commons when told to do so, and then detoured to board up the windows of his stationery store. There he realized how horrific the disaster had been and how great the need and again abandoned his task to take his secondhand Ford to the grocery warehouses. They had been opened, and volunteers were busy distributing their contents to the public. He began setting out with supplies and hauling the injured in to where they could be aided and later became the driver for a veterinarian who paid house calls to the injured. Such improvisation—new roles, new alliances, new rules—are typical of disaster.

Dorothy Lloyd’s family was not alone in being bullied by the military—the supervisor of the Children’s Hospital stood before her staff with a cut on her face and announced that she would not allow the hospital to be evacuated to the Commons, where the children might die in the cold. The nurses all supported her. An armed guard was set over the damaged area, and only people with passes were allowed to enter. But overall, recovery went smoothly, perhaps because of the relatively small size of the city or the wartime sense of common purpose already in place. Because of the war, the Germans in town were harassed, but no one seems to have been shot or seriously persecuted.

The San Francisco earthquake had happened in soft spring weather, though rain afterward made camping out-of-doors uncomfortable. The blizzard that brought snow and frigid temperatures to Halifax after the disaster did far more, and the differences between the two disasters were many. The wartime city had become a garrison town full of soldiers, but these armies immediately set to work aiding the populace and did not interfere with the civil authorities or citizens (though they did guard the devastated zones, making it difficult for some people to return to search for property and bodies). But the soldiers were as often useful and generous. They were ordered to shoot looters, but comparatively little seems to have come of this overreaction: the chief of police reported on December 9, three days after the explosion, that he had heard of only one case of attempted burglary. Clashes between competing authorities or between authorities and the public were few. The culture and civic temperament were different, so that though there was much generosity and courage, there does not, from the records, appear to be much of anything resembling the black humor and boisterous good cheer of San Francisco. The death toll was much higher as a percentage of the local population, and the winter wartime explosion as a result of human error was grimmer in many ways than a spring earthquake natural at least in origins.