Die gréisst vun Mënschen ausgeléisten Explosioun virun der eischter Atombomm: The Halifax Explosion.
In 1917, the waterfront areas of the City of Halifax in Nova Scotia, Canada and its neighbouring community of Richmond, along with the waterfront area of the cross-harbour town of Dartmouth were devastated when the French Merchant ship Mont-Blanc, chartered by the French government to carry munitions, collided in a narrow section of the harbour with the Norwegian ship Imo, chartered by the Commission for Relief in Belgium to carry relief supplies.
In the aftermath of the collision, Mont-Blanc caught fire and exploded, killing an estimated 2,000 people and injuring over 9,000. The explosion caused a tsunami wave in the harbour, and a pressure wave of air that snapped trees, bent iron rails, demolished buildings, grounded vessels, and carried fragments of the Mont-Blanc for kilometres.
This was the largest artificial explosion until the first atomic bomb test explosion in 1945 and still ranks highly among the largest artificial non-nuclear explosions.
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