Fire and Flame is the fourth track on the 2020 album Cures What Ails Ya. It was written by Dave Robinson, and as such is a Longest Johns original. Show This song memorializes the 1917 Halifax Explosion, one of the most tragic disasters in Canadian history. FactoidsOn the morning of December 6th 1917, the French cargo ship Mont-Blanc was bound from New York to Bordeaux. The cargo manifest and ship's logs for the Mont-Blanc indicate it was carrying 2,925 tons of explosives in its hold, and as they couldn't fit any more below deck, barrels of benzol and picric acid that also had to make the trip were stored on deck instead of below as usual. Due to frequent assaults by German U-boats, restrictions on allowing ships with dangerous cargo into safe harbour were lifted during World War I, as the straits leading into many Canadian harbours had been selected during the Napoleonic Wars specifically for the ease with which they could be defended. Halifax Harbour was no exception, as it requires the careful navigation of the narrows between the land to reach the port at Bedford Strait. The collision between the Imo and the Mont-Blanc was the culmination of several careless actions, oversights, and mistakes, not least of which were the excessive speed of the Imo and the lack of special protections that the Mont-Blanc had requested. At 8:45 AM, the two ships collided and the barrels on Mont-Blanc's deck breached, and when the Imo disengaged, the resulting sparks ignited the benzol vapors. The captain gave an immediate order to abandon ship, expecting it would explode immediately, but the ship sat burning in the harbour for nearly 20 minutes while valiant efforts were made to douse the flames by three nearby ships. However, their efforts were unsuccessful. During this time, Patrick Vincent Coleman, a train dispatcher for the Canadian Government Railways was informed of the situation. Rather than trying to evacuate, Coleman remained at the telegraph office and managed to dispatch a warning message to all train stops bound into Halifax. His message is credited as having saved more than three hundred lives. It read simply:
At 9:04 AM, the Mont-Blanc's cargo detonated with such force that the ship disintegrated entirely. Its half-ton anchor was found 3.2 kilometers away from the point where the explosion had occurred, and to this day is a memorial cenotaph. The explosion was reportedly heard over 200 kilometres away. The blast killed nearly 2000 people, injuring 9,000 more, and the resulting tsunami obliterated the native community of Mi'kmaq at Tufts Cove. It was one of the single worst disasters in Canadian history. Lyrics
RecordingsStreaming/Purchase
YouTube Videos
Gaming Streams
|