Catastrophe and Social Change / Based Upon a Sociological Study of the Halifax Disaster

by Samuel Henry Prince

It was an earthquake[29] so violent that when the explosion occurred the old, rock-founded city shook as with palsy. The citadel trembled, the whole horizon seemed to move with the passing of the earth waves. These were caught and registered, their tracings[30] carefully preserved, but the mute record tells not of the falling roofs and flying plaster and collapsing walls which to many an unfortunate victim brought death and burial at one and the same time.

It was a flood, for the sea rushed forward in a gigantic tidal wave, fully a fathom in depth. It swept past pier and embankment into the lower streets, and receding, left boats and wreckage high and dry, but carried to a watery doom score upon score of human lives. Nearly two hundred men were drowned.

It was a fire or rather a riot of fires, for the air was for a second filled with tongues of igneous vapour hiding themselves secretly within the lightning discharge of gas, only to burst out in gusts of sudden flame. Numberless buildings were presently ablaze. Soon there was naught to the northward but a roaring furnace. Above, the sky was crimson; below, a living crematorium—church and school, factory and home burned together in one fierce conflagration; and the brave firemen knew that there were men and women pinned beneath the wreckage, wounded past self-help. Frantic mothers heard the cries of little children, but in vain. Fathers desperately tore through burning brands, but often failed to save alive the captives of the flame. And so the last dread process went on,—earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. And when the fires at last abated, the north end of the City of Halifax looked like some blackened hillside which a farmer had burned for fallow in the spring.

But perhaps the most terrible of all the terrible accompaniments was the tornado-like gas-blast from the bursting ship. It wrought instant havoc everywhere. Trees were torn from the ground. Poles were snapped like toothpicks. Trains were stopped dead. Cars were left in twisted masses. Pedestrians were thrown violently into the air, houses collapsed on all sides. Steamers were slammed against the docks. Then followed a veritable air-raid, when the sky rained iron fragments upon the helpless city. Like a meteoric shower of death, they fell piercing a thousand roofs, and with many a mighty splash bore down into the sea.

Nor yet did this complete the tale of woes of this Dies Irae. Scarce was the catastrophe an hour old when the news was flashed around that a second explosion was approaching. It was the powder magazine in the Navy-yard, and the flames were perilously near. Through the crowded streets raced the heralds like prophets of wrath to come. “Flee!.... Flee!.... Get into the open ground” was the cry. Shops were abandoned unguarded, goods laid open on every side. No key was turned, no till was closed, but all instanter joined the precipitant throng, driven like animals before a prairie fire—yet this was not all; for “the plight of the aged, the sick, the infants, the bed-ridden, the cripples, the nursing mothers, the pregnant can not be described.”

It was like the flight from Vesuvius of which Pliny the Younger tells:

You could hear the shrieks of women, the crying of children and the shouts of men. Some were seeking their children; others their parents, others their wives and husbands ... one lamenting his own fate, another that of his family. Some praying to die from the very fear of dying, many lifting their hands to the gods, but the greater part imagining that there were no gods left anywhere, and that the last and eternal night was come upon the world.[31]

It has been said that “Moscow was no more deserted before Napoleon than were the shattered streets of Halifax when this flight had been carried out.”[32] And when the hegira was over, and when there had ensued a partial recovery from the blow and gloom, a still lower depth of agony had yet to be undergone—a succession of winter storms. Blizzards, rain, floods and zero weather were even then upon the way. They came in close procession and as if to crown and complete the terrors of the great catastrophe thunder rumbled, lightning broke sharply and lit up weirdly the snow-clad streets. Such was the catastrophe of Halifax—“a calamity the appalling nature of which stirred the imagination of the world.”[33]

The description here concluded, brief and inadequate as it is, will sufficiently indicate the terrific nature of the catastrophic shock, and explain how utter and complete was the social disintegration which followed.

There was the disintegration of the home and the family,—the reproductive system of society—its members sundered and helpless to avert it. There was the disintegration of the regulative system—government was in perplexity, and streets were without patrol. There was the disintegration of the sustaining system—a dislocation of transportation, a disorganization of business while the wheels of industry ceased in their turning. There was a derangement of the distributive system[34]—of all the usual services, of illumination, water-connections, telephones, deliveries. It was impossible to communicate with the outside world. There were no cars, no mails, no wires. There was a time when the city ceased to be a city, its citizens a mass of unorganized units—struggling for safety, shelter, covering and bread. As Lytton wrote of Pompeii; “The whole elements of civilization were broken up .... nothing in all the varied and complicated machinery of social life was left save the primal law of self preservation.”[35]