The French ship Mont Blanc was bound for Europe out of New York, carrying 2200 tons of TNT, plus Benzoil stored on deck – both in excess of and in violation of usual shipping cargo regulations. Regs had been suspended due to the war effort. Consequently, the ship was overloaded and slow, not to mention had the turning capability of a floating anvil. She was advised to join a slow convoy to Europe, for protection, departing from Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada.
Halifax Harbour was overcrowded with ships going to and from Europe as quickly as possible, and harbour pilots had a rough time of it. Safety was ditched in favour of speed, and bigger cargoes. The Mont Blanc carried a higher ratio of munitions to benign cargo (violation #1), and carried giant drums of Benzoil on deck (violation #2).
Wanting to get going across the Atlantic as quickly as possible, the Imo and the Mont Blanc were in the same corridor of Halifax Harbour. Squish.
The Imo‘s captain made the grave mistake of reversing his ship, trying to pull his ship’s nose out from where it had smashed a hole into the Mont Blanc.
Metal scraping on metal equals sparks, equals fire…equals boom-boom.
Giant drums of oil went up like fireworks – ooh, pretty!
The Mont Blanc was not flying a regulation red flag to warn other ships that it was carrying munitions, because the crew thought that it would make their floating bomb an easy target for U-boats during the Atlantic crossing.
Nobody on shore watching it collide with the Norwegian ship Imo had any clue what was onboard – they thought it was just a regular fire.
The most common non-lethal injury to survivors was blindness, which in part helped create the CNIB – the Canadian National Institute for the Blind.
