Ground Zero: A Reassessment of the 1917 Explosion in Halifax Harbour

Dean F. Oliver teaches history at York University.

The 29 essays in this collection cover most conceivable aspects of the
Halifax explosion. Included are pieces on the historical setting, relief
efforts, medical response, disaster literature, and scientific nature of
the blast. There is also a section on legal issues and another on urban
reconstruction, a play, an oral account, and a discussion of
contemporary postcards. The contributors include amateur historians,
academics, disaster researchers, scientists, mariners, and a playwright.

The selections are of uneven quality. Many (those on explosion mortuary
artifacts and “Seabed Impacts of the Explosion,” for example) might
have been omitted; others fail for want of evidence. Allen B.
Robertson’s piece on church and synagogue responses to the explosion
says almost nothing of the latter, while Malcolm MacLeod’s evidence of
“signs of region” in the disaster is circumstantial and
unconvincing.

Several, however, repay careful reading. Those by William J. Buxton on
the Massachusetts- Halifax Relief Committee/Health Commission and by
Suzanne Morton on the Victorian Order of Nurses explore brilliantly the
practical and philosophical dilemmas in delivering relief services. The
praise showered on American efforts, though entirely deserved, disguised
the friction between local and outside organizations and personalities.
Likewise, Donald A. Kerr’s piece on litigation provides a crisp,
detailed account of the actual collision between the Imo and the Mont
Blanc, and Jay White’s use of quantitative variables places the
explosion in historical perspective.

Ground Zero is thus a useful, eclectic assemblage but not a
comprehensive one. There is no solid narrative account of the explosion
and its aftermath, and the federal and provincial governments are
scarcely mentioned. Finally, and almost inconceivably given that Halifax
was a massive naval and military centre in wartime, no one tackles the
naval and military implications of the disaster and its effects on the
Canadian war effort. These omissions severely limit the work’s overall
value, despite the excellence of several of its individual essays.