Gee Ricky, I'm sorry your town blew up.
If you don’t know anything about the Halifax Explosion then you will be screwed the next time it comes up on a date or a party or a game show. So study up so that you will be prepared the next time it comes up. Or, even better, the next time a bunch of jerks are talking about something stupid, you can just wait for an opening and say: yeah, like the Halifax Explosion! And they will all be like – what? And then YOU can say…
The Halifax Explosion took place in Halifax (derh), Nova Scotia, Canada on December 6, 1917. It was an accident, and it went down like this: See, everyone back then was all busy being in World War I. And Halifax, being pretty close to Europe (in a relative sense) was a handy spot to load up boats with bombs and guns and mustard gas and beans and all the other shit they needed to fight the war.
So there was this one ship, the Mont-Blanc which was loaded up with munitions to bring to Europe and this other ship, the Imo which was carrying relife supplies also bound for Europe. Unfortunately, the two things did not cancel each other out and when they ran into each other, they created the largest accidental man-made explosion in the history of the world. And I don’t mean (up to that time). I mean – ever. Even now.
The explosion pretty much flattened the town, and the statistics associated to it are staggering (sorry about all the metric system crap – damn Canada!):
- They found a piece of the Mont-Blanc anchor 4 km away from the ship and a gun barrel more than 5 km away.
- The smoke cloud rose 20,000 feet above the city.
- The blast caused a tsunami that rose 18 meters above the high water mark on the Halifax side of the Harbor.
- The water from the tsunami, did not put out the raging fires that were caused by people’s stoves and furnaces being knocked over.
- Pretty much everything in a 2 square kilometer radius around the explosion was flattened outright.
- 1500 people were killed outright. 9000 total were injured by falling debris, fire and buildings falling on them.
If you want more boring details, you can always go to Wikipedia. But wouldn’t you rather watch the videos after the jump? Learn all about the Halifax Explosion and be more popular at any gathering!
Don’t mind the fact that the kid does not seem to get that black text does not show up on a black background.
The disaster has it’s own song!
I was feeling pretty smart, I was now in the “know” after reading this. Until my genius son told me he knew about this two years ago…Great..Give me something else…quick!!