Disaster
The Norwegian ship SS Imo had sailed from Holland en route to New York to take on relief supplies for Belgium. She arrived in Halifax on December 3 for neutral inspection and spent two days in Bedford Basin awaiting refuelling supplies. Though ready to depart late on the 5th, the Imo was held up one additional night as her refuelling was not completed until after the anti-submarine nets had been raised for the night. The French cargo ship SS Mont-Blanc arrived from New York that same evening. Fully loaded with munitions including TNT, picric acid, benzol and guncotton, she intended to join a convoy gathering in Bedford Basin readying to depart for Europe, but was likewise too late to cross into the harbour before the nets were raised. Ships carrying dangerous cargo were not allowed into the harbour before the war, but the risks posed by German submarines had resulted in a relaxing of regulations.
Read more about this topic: Halifax Explosion
Famous quotes containing the word disaster:
“The opposition is indispensable. A good statesman, like any other sensible human being, always learns more from his opponents than from his fervent supporters. For his supporters will push him to disaster unless his opponents show him where the dangers are. So if he is wise he will often pray to be delivered from his friends, because they will ruin him. But though it hurts, he ought also to pray never to be left without opponents; for they keep him on the path of reason and good sense.”
—Walter Lippmann (1889–1974)
“The appropriation of radical thinking by lazy, self-obsessed hippies is a public relations disaster that could cost the earth.”
—Ben Elton (b. 1959)
“It was so long since I’d seen masses of young men that I’d forgotten how much pleasanter men of between twenty and thirty were to be around with than older men. It isnt so true of women. When I was in my twenties I thought the grown adults I ran into were a disaster and now I know I was right.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)