Post by IceCat on Dec 1, 2017 10:38:06 GMT
Boston's official Christmas tree was dedicated and lit for the first time this season on Thursday evening on the Common. It's an annual gift since 1971 from the people of Nova Scotia in perpetual gratitude for the city's swift and substantial response to a disaster that engulfed the city of Halifax 100 years ago almost to the day.
On the morning of 6 December 1917 Halifax was a bustling wartime port city as allied warships and the merchant vessels that supported the effort to win what we now call World War I regularly traversed the harbor. The Norwegian cargo ship named the SS Imo, exiting the harbor on her way to New York to pick up relief supplies for war-torn Belgium, collided with the French munitions ship SS Mont-Blanc. The resulting explosion was the most powerful manmade blast in recorded history up until the atomic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima nearly 28 years later, sending out a shock wave, then a fireball and tsunami that devastated much of the north end of Halifax harbor. Nearly 2000 people perished, around 9000 others were wounded and 25,000 left homeless - the day before a powerful blizzard engulfed the stricken city which only added to the misery.
With the city's meager resources at the time unable to cope with a disaster of this magnitude, the military personnel and vessels that survived the horror were the first responders, followed in the ensuing days by crews from the rest of Nova Scotia and beyond. The first organized relief from outside the region came by sea and rail from Boston, including doctors and nurses who tended to the wounded, many of whom were children. Two lasting legacies from that response were the establishment of pediatrics as a medical specialty and a better understanding of injuries to the eye.
www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/halifax-explosion/
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halifax_Explosion
This video has remained in my head since the time I saw it on TV during one of my many visits to Canada. It is a Heritage Minute produced by the federal government honoring train dispatcher Vince Coleman, who in the moments after the collision realized the impending danger and rather than abandon his post sent out an urgent telegraph message in an effort to stop train traffic from entering the city, moments before the explosion that would claim his life:
Kevin