Nanaimo’s Explosives Industry Was One BIG BANG After Another
BLOWN TO ATOMS NEAR NANAIMO
Explosion in Hamilton Powder Co.’s Works Brings Instant Death to Twelve
Bodies of Eleven Victims, All Chinese, Will Never Be Recovered
Windows Broken Three Miles From the Scene
Such were the dramatic headlines for Jan. 15, 1903. Proving that it was a great news story is the fact that these headlines are from the Winnipeg Free Press which had picked up the story by wire.
I was reminded of Vancouver Island’s, particularly the Nanaimo area’s, history of explosives manufacture (they called them powderworks in those days) by recent news stories of a new residential development on James Island even as the Tsawout First Nation sues for its return.
The privately owned 330-hectare island off Sidney is one of the most expensive properties in the province; usually when it’s in the news, besides mention of the fact that much of it’s owned by an American billionaire, it’s often noted that it was once the home of Canadian Industries Ltd. which, for decades, manufactured nitroglycerine and other explosives there because of its isolation.
Previously, this hadn’t been the case at all, several earlier powderworks having been built much closer to habitation. In fact, it once was the practice to haul large jugs of nitroglycerine along Nanaimo public roads with horse and wagon!
Until the day that one bump too many proved fatal for a teamster and his luckless horse.
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A partial view of the Cilaire subdivision, looking seaward. The name Cilaire, a road, Black Powder Trail, and some overgrown waterside concrete ruins are all there is today to recall when this was the site of the Hamilton Co.’s powderworks, the site of two deadly explosions over a century ago. Photo: 460 Realty, Gerry Thomasen
A break in the “erst-while stillness” that “rudely shocked the inhabitants for miles around” is an odd way, at least by today’s standards, to describe the effects of horrific tragedy. But such was the journalistic style of the Edwardian period. And such is the way the Nanaimo Free Press chose to begin its account of the blast that shook the Hamilton Powderworks on the Departure Bay Road, on the morning of May 19, 1910.
Mind you, the bold black headlines were more sensational and more like we’re used to today: “FIVE MEN ARE KILLED IN POWDER EXPLOSION. Separator building blown up at Departure Bay. Shock was felt as far as Duncan and debris fell for half a mile round–only one body recovered.”
Dead or missing were George Preston, William Baldwin, H. Meredith, Herbert Hygh and George L.L. Wager. More fortunate were a crew of men who’d been gravelling the roadway at the entrance to the powderworks. They later described the explosion as not being all that loud, but the concussion almost bowled them over. To escape a “hail of missiles,” they had to duck under trees or dive under the wagons–this latter choice of refuge almost proving disastrous when their spooked horses tried to bolt.
So violent was the explosion that the noise “reverberated and re-echoed like a thunderclap”.
It, and the rain of debris which immediately followed, were accompanied by a pall of black smoke that drifted out over the harbour and could be seen for miles. For some time those who rushed to the scene held back, fearful of a second blast. But as more time passed, would-be rescuers began to search the wreckage that resembled a war zone. The presence of the doomed men’s wives, who watched from a distance, was described as “indeed pitiful to the bystander”.
‘Nitratar’ foreman George Preston, about 40, married but without children, had been with the company for 15 years. Master mechanic Herbert W. Hygh, of Northfield, was 33 or 34 years old and the father of three. Plant repairman H. Meredith, 28, left a wife and one small child. George Llewellyn Lacy Wager, 31, was also a repairman and the father of a single child. Forty-year-old William Baldwin, married with two children, was one of three brothers employed by the Hamilton Works. It was believed that his “annihilated” body was that which had been recovered, curled around the trunk of a tree. Of the others there were only “grisly relics of what this morning were strong, healthy men”.
The biggest problem facing the coroner’s jury was the lack of–literally–hard evidence.
Of the 660-square-foot wood framed separator building, used in the manufacture of dynamite, there was just a massive hole “many feet in diameter and many feet deep,” scattered debris and a thick layer of dust. One of the two chemical tanks was in this hole, the other some 10 feet distant. Hours later, a strong acrid odour continued to linger in the air.
The lost separator plant in which five men died was valued at just $2000.
Instead of small coastal freighters bringing in deadly ingredients to make explosives then taking away even deadlier finished products, this is what you see from Cilaire today. —Wikipedia photo by Kam Abbott
A subsequent report was quaintly headlined, “Five souls hurled into eternity.” With only the mangled remains of a single victim found in “a yawning chasm [of] seething, foaming, steamlike vapour, hissing and ominously roaring,” perhaps this was true enough. A coroner’s jury had little in the way of hard evidence to work with, the blast having wiped the separator plant from the face of the earth but for two chemical tanks.
The inquest was indeed fortunate to have a key witness, John Hall, company chemist. When he passed through the separator plant at 7:30 that morning he noticed that the ‘drowning’ tank used to dilute the explosive soup was filled with water to within a foot of the top. He pointed it out to Baldwin. At the adjacent nitrator plant, Preston told him that the next batch would be finished about 8 o’clock and Hall returned to his office.
When the whistle blew at 8 to announce that the charge was finished, and the separator plant answered with its own toot, Hall proceeded to the latter building. There, he noticed that an asbestos seal on a pipe “was slightly baking” and that the acid mix had been allowed to flow so strongly that it had spilled over into a trough.
Hall started at the run to tell Preston to slack off.
But as he did so, Baldwin called to him that the leak in the seal was getting worse, acid was running over the floor. After signalling Preston in the nitrator building to shut down, he and Baldwin diverted the chemical flow into the ‘drowning’ tank of water. The water in the tank was warm to his hand but not unsafe, he thought, as he headed to the office to telephone the plant superintendent and to ask chief mechanic Hygh to issue rubber boots to his crew so they could lower the level in the tank with buckets.
But the work area was so confined that the buckets would have to be cut down to fit, so he and Preston agreed to bore a hole into the tank and to drain it with a hose. Hall watched as Preston, Wager, Meredith and Baldwin prepared to go to work with an auger and extension bit. Just then, Hygh appeared with another drill and three faucets, with the suggestion that they install one of them in the base of the tank. After testing the temperature of the water in the tank again, to find that it had cooled down somewhat, Hall went to see how things were going in the dynamite wash house. It was then 10:25.
It was as he was explaining all this to the plant manager that the separator plant, George Preston, Herbert Hygh, H. Meredith, George Wager and William Baldwin were, as stated, “hurled into eternity”.
Hall’s dramatic testimony was followed by that of professional powder maker James Preston. The brother of George Preston, one of those killed, and a former employee who was at the plant that morning, stated his belief that the “drowning tank heated, owing to the quantity of acid and the insufficiency of the water it held”. He’d noticed this before and had mentioned it to one of the crew whom he didn’t identify.
Mining and construction were the two biggest users of explosives. This tin, for sale on ebay, held 100 blasting caps which are used to detonate dynamite. Many a time when I was a lad, Saanich work crews let me watch over their shoulder as they set charges while blasting to lay water lines! (Try that today.)
“Anyone who knew anything about powder making knew the tank was not as it should be,” he declared, and listed his concerns: There should have been no need to install a second faucet, as was being done at the time of the explosion, because there should have been two faucets to begin with as was the case in installations elsewhere.
He’d never seen a ‘drowning’ tank set on gravel, which had allowed, over time, a buildup of gravel beneath the tank that restricted access–even with a bucket–to the drain. The style of the tank prevented its acid mix from being agitated uniformly, causing great heat at the bottom and very little at the top. A second, emergency tank was not in “first class” condition. There should have been no metal tools in the plant. The charge (chemistry) had been four times longer in the tank than the normal half-hour. He’d never seen an asbestos seal, such as that which had allowed acid to spill onto the floor, used elsewhere.
Most damning, his brother had complained to him that he “could not get the repairs he wanted,” and had implied that the nitrator/separator crew were working with a man short.
In Preston’s opinion, if the drowning tank had been properly constructed the tragedy would not have occurred.
In answer to a question by company superintendent Burnham, he said that he considered his brother to have been a “first class nitroglycerine man” who hadn’t fully appreciated the dangerous state of affairs at the plant. Then why, asked Burnham, if Preston thought conditions were unsafe when he worked there six years before, had he not complained to him? “It was not my place to tell you,” was the curious response. Pressed by Burnham, he said, “If I had gone out of my way to complain about this building, I might have been told to get my money.”
“That is not fair,” protested Burnham. “There has never been a man discharged during my management for any such cause.”
He declared that the powder works had been examined over a three-day period by “a leading expert in the manufacture of explosives on the continent of Europe” whose report was “very complimentary [without] a recommendation for a single change”. Other visiting experts in the field had “never criticized anything, particularly they never mentioned the drowning tank or the necessity of two faucets”.
The most dramatic testimony was yet to come.
Asked by the jury foreman what he thought to be the cause of the explosion, Hall said he wasn’t sure. They were all experienced workers. He thought it slightly possible that a spark caused by, say, the dropping of a tool in the oily chemical mix on the concrete floor could have precipitated the blast. He acknowledged a “difficulty” in the separator plant a few days previously. Someone had left a broom in the drowning tank and when the new “charge (up to 2400 pounds of the chemical components of nitroglycerine) came down it fumed off”.
Meaning that the broom dissolved with such a fizzle that it prompted the blowing of the warning whistle and the evacuation of the plant until the emergency passed.
Asked if any of the victims had expressed any concerns to him, Hall said no. He acknowledged that the Departure Bay plant had experienced a previous explosion but without fatalities. He’d noticed the leaking joint at 8:10, 20 minutes before the fatal detonation and had reported it to his superior, but thought that foreman George Preston had the draining of the fluid, which Hall estimated to be 1800 pounds, into an overflow tank under control. Hall was in the nitrator building, 30 feet from the separator plant, when the blast occurred.
As for its cause, he could only say, “Something had occurred to the tank to cause the explosion. There might have been a blow.” No, in answer to another question, he didn’t think it was dangerous to bore a hole into the wooden tank to install another faucet with which to drain it faster.
William Stewart, foreman of the chemical mixing and packing departments who was 100 yards away when the separator building blew and was uninjured, said he thought all the victims were “good, reliable men”.
Superintendent Burnham then introduced the startling possibility of there having been not one but two explosions.
“I have been told that at the time of the explosion that there were two distinct detonations. The first one was very sharp and sounded like the report of a rifle, and the next the detonation of the big explosion itself.” Such would not have been the case, he said, if the chemistry had exploded from overheating, or from a spark caused by a dropped tool as workers dealt with an acid spill, two theories advanced by Preston.
“My own theory...admitting the fact that there was one sharp explosion, followed by a heavy detonation, is that a rifle bullet struck the tank. Only last week, while in the mill yard, I heard the report of a rifle immediately across the ravine, perhaps a hundred yards from the separator building. I immediately ran up the hill and tried to see who it was who was doing the shooting, and called to him to stop. Even since then I understand that [Herbert] Hygh [one of the victims] had had the same experience. I have seen both grouse and pheasants myself in the last few days on the side of the ravine towards the works and [they] are probably to be found on the other side. In fact those that I saw were directly in line from the side of the ravine with the separator building. Personally I consider this a far more likely solution of the cause of the explosion.
“All of the men here unfortunate enough to have been killed were absolutely steady, reliable, upright men. In fact I have often wondered how we could get such men to take these positions...”
Burnham also declared, “This system with us has always worked satisfactorily and economically.”
Employee Ernest Catling described a previous incident and resulting fire that had necessitated repairs to the separator building. But the pipe joints–including one which had leaked acid onto the floor prior to the fatal blast–hadn’t been replaced.
Further to manager Burnham’s theory of a rifle bullet fired by a hunter causing the fatal blast, two final witnesses testified to hearing two detonations, the first being described as “a crack” that seemed to come from the direction of the ravine.
Faced with all this, the jury ruled that Herbert Hygh, George Preston, Henry Meredith, George Wager and William Baldwin “met their deaths by homicide by misadventure” and recommended that the plant be “kept in proper condition for any emergency in the future”.
This “antique old” wooden finger-joint Atlas Powder box is for sale on ebay for C$100.78.
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Let’s go back to the devastating blast of Jan. 14, 1903, this one, also at the Departure Bay powderworks, at 8:40 a.m.
You wouldn’t think, looking at this view of Nanoose Bay, that it was the home of a major powderworks or a naval torpedo testing base. —Wikipedia photo by Kevin J.F. Martin
George Simonetti left a widow. James Fulford left a widow and three children. Ten ‘Chinamen’ who also died in the horrendous explosion that morning may well have left wives and children, too, but we’ll never know.
More than a century later, we don’t even have their names,
In this explosion, the second disaster to befall the Hamilton Powder Co., manufacturers of gun-cotton and gelignite explosives, in a month, 12 men were “launched into eternity simultaneously, their bodies being rent into fragments almost too small for identification”.
For all of its remoteness, the blast was heard as far north as Parksville and as far south as Ladysmith. In town, many windows facing north were shattered and buildings shook as if from an earthquake. The contents of some store shelves were toppled. Nanaimo citizens, terrified of yet another colliery disaster, rushed into the streets.
As far as could be immediately determined, the detonation of the equivalent of a railway carload of gun-cotton in the drying and weighing room triggered a second blast in the gelignite room, also packed with highly explosive materials, some 400 feet distant. This structure was totally destroyed, the 12 men within virtually atomised but for a single Chinese employee whose body was intact but beyond identifying.
“The scene in the neighborhood of the [powder]works bears terrible evidence of the force of the explosion,” reported the Free Press.
“An excavation six feet deep marks the spot where the buildings stood. The railway track near at hand is torn up and two rails are twisted like corkscrews around the trunks of trees. One large tree is cut off 15 feet above the ground. The new works in course of erection at a point 400 feet distant, which are to replace those destroyed in the explosion of a month ago, have suffered severely.”
“Two rails twisted like corkscrews” show the incredible force of the blast. —Photo: Vancouver Island Free Daily
But they were strong enough to save the lives of Charles Stevens and Mat Whelan, who were inside, saw the flash, then heard and felt the concussion that tore off a side of the building in which they were working. Stevens was struck on the shoulder by a falling timber but was uninjured. Both men, in fact, survived, their escape being termed as miraculous by those who rushed to the scene of destruction.
George Preston—who, as we’ve seen, would be killed in a third blast less than seven years later—was, this time, blessed by fate. At work in the nitroglycerine building whose explosive ingredients were even more powerful than the others, he was flung against a piece of machinery as doors and windows were blown in and all around him. Struggling to his feet, the cool-headed Preston thought not of fleeing but of the critical chemical process that was underway. If he allowed “the work to stop...at the stage which it had then reached” it would have meant a third, even greater detonation.
So he courageously stayed at his post and kept the machinery (not seriously damaged although an entire wall of the building had crumbled) going until the delicate process was completed.
Recently married to his foreman’s daughter, George Simonetti had worked for the Hamilton Co. for five years. A month and a day earlier, he’d narrowly survived the blast that killed employee James Sloan.
The Hamilton powderworks was situated on the Departure Bay shoreline at Cilaire, today the name of a residential street. Some of the concrete foundations of the old works are still there, overgrown.
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State of public roads blamed for blast
How does that classic Tennessee Ernier Ford song go? "If Saint Peter calls me, I can't go; I owe my soul to the company store."
He was referring to the fact that a coal miner drew credit from his employer, and to the sadder fact that, sometimes, he slipped backwards to the point of becoming an indentured servant.
So an announcement in the Oct. 10, 1890 Nanaimo Free Press that local miners, who were charged as much as $4 per keg for blasting powder, would soon be able to purchase directly from the Hamilton Powder Co. for $2.50 a keg must have been received as good news.
Until completion of the CPR in 1885, Nanaimo collieries imported much of their powder all the way from Britain via Cape Horn. This prompted the Hamilton Co., a Montreal subsidiary of the Nobel Explosives Co. of Ardeer, Scotland, near Glasgow, to send their west coast sales manager, HG. Scott, to Nanaimo on a scouting expedition. He liked what he saw and purchased 165 acres at Northfield, near the Northfield Mine.
W.R. Young, superindent, and W. Hugh, foreman, followed with several railway cars loaded with equipment and materials. “J.B. Clair had the contract to clear 10 acres on which to build storehouses and other buildings of brick for the mill boiler and powder plant," the late Nanaimo historian John Cass noted some years ago. "Each of the mixing buildings in the process of manufacturing had an iron roof laid down in such a way that the roof would go skywards in case of an explosion. A small wharf was built at Departure Bay to receive imported raw materials. The first steamer to berth was the S.S. Robert Dunsmuir."
Most of the machinery was shipped in from the head office in Scotland and the major construction of solid brick buildings employed 25 men. One housed the 75 h.p. single-cylinder horizontal engine and boiler room. As no electricity was used in the plant for fear of igniting the dust-laden air, the manufacturing and mixing process was conducted by an ingenious sytem of ropes and pulleys that were further challenged in their efficiency by the fact that all buildings were surrounded by high earthen bunkers.
Well distant from all of them was the beehive kiln in which alder and maple were burned to produce charcoal; once the company's property was exhausted of its supply, logging operations moved to the Tom Cassidy farm until that supply, too, was exhausted, and on-site making of charcoal was discontinued.
In the pulverizing house, the mixing of sulphur, charcoal and saltpetre was done in a large drum, iron balls rendering the ingredients into fine powder. Thence they passed on to the amalgamator house for final blending and compression by hydraulic press into cakes 18 inches square, half an inch thick and as hard and black as slate. The next step was the corning mill where brass-toothed rollers cracked the slabs into the size of kernels of corn, hence its being known as the corning mill. Any particles which escaped this stage of the process were returned to the pressroom for a second go-round.
In the glaze mill, the powder grains were placed in revolving wooden barrels with graphite which gave them a waterproof coating. Final step of the process was to pack the powder in 25-pound kegs, also manufactured on-site. Total production cost of a keg of powder was $1 which wholesaled at $1.75 nand was retailed to miners at $2-$2.25. As stated in the Free Press, this was a substantial saving over the $4.50 previously charged by the companies.
It's fascinating to note that, at the beginning of each production run, all unnecessary personnel evacuated the plant as the machinery was fired upby a skeleton crew. If nothing untoward happened, they returned to their work!
It's even more intriguing to realize that, until it was prohited by law in 1898, the Hamilton Co. shipped its products, often 100s of kegs at a time, by horse and wagon on public roads to Departure Bay. They brought their Chilean nitrates in by the same means.
Previously, the Giant Powder Co., the first in North America to acquire manufacturing rights to Alfred Nobel's dynamite, had established at Emory Creek, near Yale, later at Telegraph Bay, near Victoria. The California firm had originally been drawn to the province by construction of the CPR through the Fraser Canyon where, legend has it, blasting accidents killed a Chinese navvie for every mile of track.
When we consider that both companies hauled their volatile ingredients for black powder and nitroglycerine to and from Departure Bay and downtown Nanaimo's Cameron Island by horse and wagon, the wonder is that there weren't numerous explosives-caused tragedies. A sad exception was 30-year-old teamster Austin Stevenson who was hauling the deadly white liquid, nitroglycerine, for his employers, Canadian Explosives Ltd., the corporate child of a merger between the Hamilton Co. and the American petro-chemical giant, Dupont Co. His route took him from the dynamite plant at Departure Bay to the powderworks at Northfielld.
On the fateful morning of April 16, 1896, Stevenson loaded his wagon with four large jars of nitroglycerine (400 pounds worth $175). Each jar was cradled in a three-inch bed of sawdust and packed in gunny-sack material. To ensure that they couldn't come into contact with each other in the course of their jostling journey, the jars were secured in place by a wooden framework. The entire weight of the load came well within the wagon's legal limit of 1500 pounds.
After rechecking his brakes and the harness of the single horse, Stevenson headed out. He slowly passed an E&N Railway section gang, fields of cattle and (it would come out at the inquest) a salesman resting under a tree. He'd later testify that, as he drowsily watched the wagon (from a safe distance, happily for him), it crossed the railway grade with a slight bumping motion.
Suddenly, there was a terrific explosion, the force of the blast throwing up a curtain of dust and bowling the salesman over backwards.
When he picked himself up, all he could see was a 150-foot diameter hole, six feet deep, in the roadway and a spiral of blue smoke. Neary trees were uprooted or denuded of their foliage, grazing cows were stunned, neighbouring houses had their windows blown out and, it was later claimed, some had their foundations cracked. The wagon had been reduced to kindling. One account states that the horse, found nearby, was mortally wounded and had to be put down; another says it was decapitated and disembowelled. Austin Stevenson was “blown into nothingness”.
As if all this weren't dramatic enough, while touring the powderworks, the coroner's jury had to be assured there was no danger after they threatened to flee the building during company manager W.A. Young's demonstration of a clear liquid which he identified as nitroglycerine. They returned a verdict of accidental death and a recommendation that, before the Hamilton Company shipped any more of its nitroglycerine, the state of the roads be improved!
This was the second fatality involving nitroglycerine in five months. Less than a year after the Austin Stevenson tragedy, a blast at the nitro works blew the roof off the building but somehow failed to detonate a further 20 jars (2000 pounds!).
Another near-miss on record involved human error while working with the finished product. In the spring of 1891 workmen were removing rock on Victoria Road. Because of unseasonally cold temperatures, they warmed themselves beside a fire. They also warmed up their dynamite—by body heat—placing several sticks under their clothing as they huddled around the flames.
Their supervisor, deeming this to be unsafe practice, advised them to place the dynamite in a double-lined pot and warm it beside the fire. The resulting blast—surprise!—blew out almost 100 windows in nearby houses.
Incredibly, no one was hurt.
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We’re not quite done. Any history of the explosives industry in Nanaimo would be incomplete without the story of Nanaimo’s biggest bang of all from the floating time bomb, S.S. Oscar.
Protection Island looks idyllic in the summer sunshine. When the explosives-laden steamship Oscar crashed ashore near the south end in 1913, the resulting explosion levelled most of the island’s trees, showered Nanaimo with fine shrapnel, and shook most of the city.
—Photo Gina Pearce, ‘Your Protection Island Realtor (R), Pemberton Holmes
Snow was falling by mid-day, Jan. 14, 1913–10 years to the day since the Departure Bay powderworks explosion—as the small coastal freighter Oscar slipped her moorings from the Western Fuel Co. wharf where she’d just bunkered 15 tons of coal.
Vancouver-bound from Victoria, she was laden with general cargo and 1,900 cases of dynamite and black powder—enough explosive power to blow her out of the water and level several city blocks if the Oscar were so unfortunate as to explode while in Nanaimo Harbour.
It so happened that S.S. Oscar was indeed about to blow her top, and with incredible fury.
Off Entrance Island, Capt. Alex McDonald hailed an incoming ship; upon being told that it was blowing heavily in the Strait of Georgia, he decided to wait it out by returning to Nanaimo. But, as the Oscar put about, he was informed that a fire had erupted in the ship’s aft bunkers.
Likely the result of spontaneous combustion, the fire couldn’t be fought because the fire hoses had been drained so they wouldn’t freeze.
For a man with more than 50 tons of dynamite and powder below deck, McDonald met the emergency coolly. But in their haste to lower the lifeboat, the five crewmen forgot to secure the line to the ship and it drifted away, so they had to huddle in the bow.
Before joining them, McDonald jammed his telescope in the wheel so as to keep his floating bomb, which was still underway, aimed at nearby Protection Island. It, fortunately, was sparsely settled.
As the Oscar scrunched her bow on the sandstone shore, McDonald ordered his five-man crew to abandon ship. They didn’t even get their feet wet when they scrambled down a rope ladder and ran, waving their arms and shouting, for the shelter of the Western Fuel Co.’s mine shaft, three-quarters of a mile distant.
There was no warning Nanaimo residents of the impending blast–hardly even enough time to explain themselves to the power-house engineer on duty, who was hard of hearing, to boot, and his crew of Chinese stokers.
Before they could take refuge below, a blinding flash was followed by a thundering roar, and all were thrown to the ground, where they lay in a shower of debris.
The blast levelled most of the island’s trees, showered the city with fine shrapnel, and shook most of the city. Nanaimo, no stranger to mine explosions—even a detonating cannon ball, and the series of powderworks mishaps already cited–lost most of its downtown windows, and numerous brick chimneys were cracked.
Pedestrians had to jump for their lives out of the way of panicked and stampeding horses.
Mayor John Shaw, dining at the Windsor Hotel on Church Street, was one of the miraculously few casualties, suffering severe cuts to his face when all the seaside windows, valued at $4000, were blown in. On Protection Island, blacksmith Dan Gray would lose the sight in one eye.
“I can tell you, I was quite sure it was the end of the world,” Cuthbert M. Brown recounted more than half a century after. Then a day-schooler at St. Ann’s Convent, he vividly remembered the flash, the BANG!, the raining down of shattered glass, “all mixed with the shrieks of teachers and students alike. I was too speechless to utter a sound.”
It was hours before stunned Nanaimo citizens knew for sure what had happened, that it wasn’t another mining disaster.
Mr. Brown, looking back, thought it likely that the “weather and heavy blanket of snow had a lot to do with minimizing the effect”.
The shock wave caused damage as much as five miles distant, the post office clock stopped at precisely 1:55 p.m., and police guards had to be stationed about windowless businesses.
Thirteen hundred feet down, the No. 1 Mine which was connected beneath the harbour to the Protection Island shaft, was fractured in numerous places, but quick action in sealing the resulting leaks prevented what could have been a catastrophe for the hundreds of miners on shift. As it was, damages totalled $125,000, then a major sum.
In that golden age, explosives carrying vessels were permitted to enter congested harbours to deliver their cargoes; but they weren’t to tie up at dockside although they could, as had the Oscar, put in to load coal. Capt. McDonald just happened to have such a deadly cargo when he recharged his bunkers.
For his handling of the Oscar from the time he was informed of fire in the bunkers, to the moment he and his crew abandoned ship, he received no official censure.
Nanaimo was no stranger to mine explosions caused by gas or coal dust—the almost inevitable, and lethal, by-products of the collieries which were the Hub City’s economic backbone. And, because the mines required explosives, particularly black powder, local companies provided further economic employment and benefits by manufacturing powder and dynamite using nitroglycerine—another occupational hazard over the years.
Over a period of 15 years, 1911-1918, the Nanaimo Free Press reported nine accidents involving the manufacture and shipping of high explosives, besides the Oscar incident:
January 1903 - 12 men killed in an explosion at the Hamilton Powderworks, Departure Bay.
December 1907 – Another blast demolished buildings and caused $20,000 damage.
May 1910 – Five workers killed when the Departure Bay powderworks exploded.
April 1911 – A blast at the Protection Island powder magazine killed one worker.
October 1911 – An explosion, fortunately of lesser consequence and no fatalities, at the Northfield works.
December 1911 – three workers killed in an explosion at the Departure Bay works.
April 1912 – Supt. W.A. Wilson died in an explosion.
January 1913 – The grounding and exploding of the S.S. Oscar, as described above.
July 1913 – Yet another explosion, this one at the Canadian Explosives plant, Northfield.
January 1918 – Two more killed in a blast at the Giant Powder Works.
In short, Nanaimo suffered a succession of non-coal mine related fireworks that killed 25 people and caused a fortune in damaged properties. But that was long ago and, more than a century later, Protection Islanders are said to be “notoriously fond of their Oscar history”.
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At least it could be said that the Giant Powder Co.’s works at Nanoose, 16 miles north of Nanaimo, were out of public harm’s way. Established in 1912 it was spread over 100s of acres, the volatile ingredients for making gunpowder, dynamite, TNT and nitroglycerine being separated by the ‘black’ and the ‘white’ works respectively.
Allowing for inflation, you can multiply the cost of the operation, one-third of a million dollars, by 20—serious money over a century ago.
The powder plant required wharves, a narrow-gauge railway to link the widespread building, an electrical plant, waterworks and even its own company town for employees. The manager had his mansion, married workers their cottages ($8 per month including water, electricity and firewood), and single—white—employees resided in a handsome, three-storey, turreted boarding house. Twenty-five Chinese labourers had their own ghetto farther inland.
On a wet March day in 1983, the late George Butler, a founding member of the Nanoose Bay Historical Society, escorted me about the Giant Co.’s ruins. For years part of the Department of National Defence torpedo testing range, entrance through a commissionaired gate required advance notice and permission in writing.
We were too late to see the black powder manager’s house; just bulldozed, its ruins were still smouldering. The imposing boardinghouse which had stood nearby was long gone as were the large water tanks, the townsite and the Chinese camp.
Cattle wandered along the former railway grades. The white powder (nitroglycerine) storage shed survived but it was within the naval testing grounds and off-limits to the public. But we could read the date of construction inscribed in its solid concrete casting, 1913.
Of the black powderworks, two massive foundations of concrete remained. Only three sides of each were standing because the fourth wall had been of frame construction—to allow an explosion to vent harmlessly.
Just how well the white powderworks were built was dramatically shown on New year’s Day, 1918. Because of the holiday, all of the staff but for J.O. (Jack) Cross and an unidentified Chinese assistant were away. Just as well, as 50 tons of dynamite, gunpowder and nitroglycerine somehow detonated. The blast of the “dope house” was heard and felt on the Lower Mainland, New Westminster residents thinking it an earthquake. Only a blackened hand was found of the two men on duty—but the long, low-gabled white powderhouse survived.
Three-quarters of a century after, traces of that fatal blast could be seen in the form of steel girders yet embedded in concrete footings—twisted and snapped off by incalculable force.
The Giant Powder Co. repaired the damage and resumed operations for another decade when it and other explosives and munitions manufacturers, including the historic Hamilton Powder Co., merged as the Canadian Explosives Co. then as Canadian Industries Ltd. (better known to paint buyers as CIL). All explosives manufacturing was moved to James Island in 1925.
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