Waves of Destruction
"What World War I accident notoriously led to perhaps the world's first and only true "man-made" tsunami?
On Dec. 6, 1917, two supply ships collided in the harbor at Halifax, Nova Scotia, resulting in a massive explosion that created a localized tsunami that, along with the fire and shrapnel from the explosion itself, devastated the city in one of the worst maritime disasters in modern history.
Halifax boasts one of the most ideal and ideally defensible natural harbors in the world. However, during World War I, the port suffered from a glut of Allied ship traffic ferrying supplies from North America to Europe.
Eventually, the worst-case scenario occurred when the fully loaded French munitions supply ship Mont Blanc collided with the Belgian relief vessel Imo (formerly of the White Star Line, which also owned the Titanic), setting fire to more than 2,500 tons combined of TNT, picric acid, gun cotton, and benzol.
But the explosion was not immediate. The Mont Blanc merely caught fire following the collision, in effect becoming a time bomb as the flames crept toward the munitions holds.
While the explosion flattened or incinerated most of the buildings near the harbor, the harbor itself confined the seismic force of the explosion, creating a localized tsunami that flooded the entire coastline surrounding the harbor. By the time workers had extinguished the fires and the water had receded, the disaster had effectively wiped the harbor town of Richmond off the map.
All told, more than 2,000 people died in the Halifax explosion and ensuing tsunami, and thousands more suffered injuries. While man-made tsunamis are difficult to induce, these pale imitations of natural tidal waves nonetheless illustrate how deadly tsunamis can be."
Ripped off, without any pangs of guilt, from Geek Trivia
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