Curse Of The Narrows [Hardcover]

Ms. MacDonald has researched the definitive account of the destruction of the City of Halifax, Nova Scotia during World War I. Everything that could go wrong did go wrong : from the right two ships colliding (one of them carrying nearly 3,000 tons of munitions) to the bomb ship drifting to Halifax before exploding and the blizzard that struck the City afterwards.

The disorganized search and rescue attempts through the snowstorm of the City in rubble (think of the destruction caused by hurricanes or by an atomic bomb) takes up the last half of the book. Nearly 2,000 people were killed by the blast with disabling injuries for the thousands of survivors. Ms. MacDonald writes of her native City with more detail than was perhaps necessary but the story is a page-turner and serves as a warning to the reader that life has not changed much in terms of disaster relief over the past century.

This is an exemplary and very interesting bit of historical writing. Oddly enough, I have a couple of other books on massive industrial explosions, including the Texas City disaster in 1947 and the explosion of the Ft. Stikine in Bombay harbor in 1944. MacDonald's book is by far the best. It's well organized, gracefully written, and mediates between the perspectives of the present and the lessons of the past in a particularly sensitive way. Most importantly, I think, it treats those caught up in the disaster with the utmost respect, avoiding the easiest trap for writers of historical non-fiction: the unconscious assumption that people in the past, because they wore funny clothes and had attitudes strange to us, were somehow quaint and not as bright as we are. MacDonald tells this story with great compassion and insight without milking it for melodrama (which would have been very easy).

Because she allows the past to speak for itself whenever possible, there are some really thought-provoking bits to those interested in modern disaster planning. I found it particularly interesting that the Red Cross of that day, for example, strongly preferred to work with citizen committees rather than political leaders, regarding the latter as being nearly useless because of the way they start to pursue their own agendas the instant in the initial shock wears off.

As a military history buff, I've known about the explosion of the Mont Blanc for a long time. I'm really glad to have such a wonderful book on it.

My great grandparents were young people around the time of the First World War, and with the boys called away to service overseas, my great grandmother and plenty of other "land girls" were called to man the plows of the little farms in upstate New York, where a struggling rutabaga truck farm kept all the neighboring women pon the job morning, noon and night, with time only off for Sunday school and church worship at the nearest community center, some twelve miles out. My great grandmother heard the noise of the Imo explosion and never forgot it, for the mule she was behind got skeered and ran into the next man's acreage, a feat he never did again, that lazy gray mule they called Buster. The harvest was long gone, for this was the beginning of winter right after American Thanksgiving, but my great-grandmother was once again tearing up the ruts, a weekly chore even in a nor'easter or snowstorm.

"The sky was full of black dust," she swore to me, as a very old woman in the early 1970s. "Looked like a billion locusts. And then we sniffed the air and we knew, them was part of people!" Laura Mac Donald, a topnotch TV producer, has interviewed many survivors of that long ago tragedy in Halifax, many of whom suffered permanent hearing loss as a result of the fiery explosion, the shock waves of which were heard not only in the Finger Lakes but, it is said, even in the Caribbean paradises of Cuba and Santo Domingo. In truth, it was a tsunami, and the producers of THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW should hold on to their footage for when the day comes and the studios want to bring this Canadian tragedy to life.

As usual, the poor people paid the most, the people of the North End who couldn't get out in time. There were so many people killed and dying that they ran out of gravediggers. Why, they even ran out of preachers, and when did that ever occur before or since? My great grandmother said the Catholics got it worst, and Mac Donald's figures show that in one parish alone, St. Joseph's, nearly five hundred members lost their lives in a single instant. "Some clergymen simply remained in or near the cemetery during the day," writes Mac Donald, "performing funerals until it got too dark to read."

And all of this in the days and weeks that should have been happy ones, the weeks before Christmas!

An inquest was held and Mac Donald somehow got hold of the complete transcript, which illuminates who was to blame and who was completely innocent. You have to know a lot about intercoastal shipping to understand this material, it's dense, like the very thickest parts of the Warren Report. Otherwise the book grips you like three magnets.

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