Halifax Explosion Research Paper

“Hold up the train. Ammunition ship afire in harbor making for Pier 6 and will explode. Guess this will be my last message. Good-bye boys.” Said Vincent Coleman on December 6th, 1917. This message saved Passenger Train No. 10, the overnight train that was coming from Saint John, New Brunswick. The train was due to arrive in Halifax at 8:55 am, to its doom in front the blazing Mont Blanc, Coleman effectively saved 300 people from dying due to the Halifax explosion. The Halifax Explosion was a disastrous explosion that occurred on December 6th, 1917, that resulted in 1,963 deaths officially with another 9,000 injured and 6,000 people left homeless and destroyed a large part of the city. All but the Richmond district in the north end of the city

The Canadian government did not have a plan of action for what to do if there was a large influx of dead bodies or how to identify the victims. Luckily, five and a half years prior to the explosion, the coroner John Barnstead developed a system that used labels to describe bodies of victims to deal with and identify the approximately 209 dead bodies that originated from the sinking of the RMS Titanic. The labels included the physical description of the victim, their personal belonging that were on their bodies or in their body’s general area, the address of where they were found so on so forth. This system had even helped Frances Coleman find her husband 's body when the brother of Vincent Coleman, the deceased husband, identified by recognising Coleman’s wallet and watch that were found with his severely burned body. Despite the good efforts of John Barnstead, the system still had its flaws, for example due to the fact that bodies would bloat soldiers would have to cut rings off their fingers, which in turn caused people to mistrust the soldiers as they believed that the soldiers were stealing valuable property from the dead. A big problem that also occurred after the explosion was the lack of housing after the explosion. As mentioned before, the explosion had wiped out a