At 9:05 a.m., in the harbor of Halifax in the Canadian province of Nova Scotia, the most devastating manmade explosion in the pre-atomic age occurs when the Mont Blanc, a French munitions ship, explodes 20 minutes after colliding with another vessel.
As World War I raged in Europe, the port city of Halifax bustled with ships carrying troops, relief supplies, and munitions across the Atlantic Ocean. On the morning of December 6, the Norwegian vessel Imo left its mooring in Halifax harbor for New York City. At the same time, the French freighter Mont Blanc, its cargo hold packed with highly explosive munitions–2,300 tons of picric acid, 200 tons of TNT, 35 tons of high-octane gasoline, and 10 tons of gun cotton–was forging through the harbor’s narrows to join a military convoy that would escort it across the Atlantic.
At approximately 8:45 a.m., the two ships collided, setting the picric acid ablaze. The Mont Blanc was propelled toward the shore by its collision with the Imo, and the crew rapidly abandoned the ship, attempting without success to alert the harbor of the peril of the burning ship. Spectators gathered along the waterfront to witness the spectacle of the blazing ship, and minutes later it brushed by a harbor pier, setting it ablaze. The Halifax Fire Department responded quickly and was positioning its engine next to the nearest hydrant when the Mont Blanc exploded at 9:05 a.m. in a blinding white flash.
The massive explosion killed more than 1,800 people, injured another 9,000–including blinding 200–and destroyed almost the entire north end of the city of Halifax, including more than 1,600 homes. The resulting shock wave shattered windows 50 miles away, and the sound of the explosion could be heard hundreds of miles away.
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Just a bit more ‘death by government’.
My Grandfather saw a similar thing happen when he was in the Admiralty Islands during the war, when the ammunition ship USS Mount Hood exploded
Before Beirut there was this famous and fantastic* fuck-up.
*Fantastic in an unimaginably bad way.
A ship that had carried oil to Texas (and still had some in the bottom) was then loaded with fertilizer which exploded. I believe a ship being loaded with bombs in California blew up. There was a huge port explosion a couple years ago in China (they say we caused it with a rocket which is undoubtedly crap). There was a huge explosion at a US port blamed on Nazis spies. The Spanish-America war was blamed on a US battleship explosion in Cuba; and WW1 on the Louisitania being sunk by a U-boat; etc etc.