HALIFAX
ASKS $25,000,000
FROM CANADIAN PEOPLE
Material Damage Exceeds This
Dominion Government Grants $1,000,000
All Germans in the City Being Arrested
1,050 Dead Recovered
Halifax, Nova Scotia, Dec. 9 --
Police began arresting all German citizens of Halifax today, whether man or woman.
By six o'clock, seven men and one woman
had been locked up, and police were after others, who will be jailed as
fast as they can be found.
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Halifax, Dec.
9 -- An appeal for $25,000,000 was made to the people of Canada by the
Mayors of Halifax and Dartmouth today. This figure represents only a
part of the material damage done by the explosion of the cargo of the
Mont Blanc last Thursday.
Sir Robert Borden announced
that pending a full consideration of the needs of those who have
suffered by the calamity, the Dominion Government had made a
preliminary appropriation of $1,000,000 for immediate relief. The
amount will be immediately at the disposal of the local relief
committee.
Today, after another terrible
night when the wind blew a hurricane and the rain fell in torrents,
relief work and the search for dead continued. Many more bodies have
been found. The number at the various morgues is 1,050. No definite
statement can be made about the total number of dead.
Non-residents not engaged in
relief work or here on business of extreme emergency today were asked
by Mayor Martin to leave the city at once because of the serious lack
of accommodation and the shortage of food supplies. He also urged
those not on relief missions to stay away from Halifax for the next
two weeks.
Those generously desiring to
donate food, clothing or building materials should first telegraph the
relief committee in Halifax stating the character and quantity of
goods offered, so control of the Halifax situation with respect to
immediate need and distribution can be maintained.
Halifax's cup of misery was
filled Saturday night, when after two days of horror caused by the
explosion and the blizzard that followed, making rescue work almost
impossible, the temperature dropped as a rain and wind storm broke
over the city.
Refugees unable unable to
secure accommodation in already overcrowded homes were housed in tents
on Citadel Hill and Common until wind blew the tents down and rain
drenched the occupants.
Many had to spend the night in
pitch dark open fields until relief parties found them and
escorted them to buildings where they could at least stand up out of
the rain, although wind blew through those windowless buildings at 50
miles an hour.
Today a warm rain was falling,
partially melting three feet of snow, causing each street to become a
torrent and hampering automobiles with supplies from getting to their
destinations.
Notwithstanding the awful
conditions, 500 sailors from the Navy Department tolled among the
ruins, searching for bodies.
With the passing of the
blizzard today it became possible for the first time to make a
comprehensive tour of the city, to gain a detailed conception of the
frightful devastation, which seems more complete that ever effected in
France or Flanders.
Beginning at the southern
sections of the city, which were least injured, one notices the broken
window panes. The main store section of the city, Barrington Street
more particularly, show by their broken plate glass windows where the
wave of concussion rushed by with decreasing velocity.
Around a number of large
buildings in this section of the ruined city, between 100 and 200
people stand, in the misery of their appearance looking like refugees
from a hastily evacuated war area. On the side of the historic Citadel
Hill are the tents housing these homeless folk.
At schools used as temporary
morgues, little processions of soldiers carry barely covered bodies,
while despairing women and children search among the blackened ruins
for missing relatives, Many of them weary from shock, lack of sleep,
and much walking from hospital to hospital in their fruitless search.
Closer to the spots most
affected, the destruction is more complete. Houses brushed off their
foundations, roofs distorted and crumpling, streets bulging as if an
earthquake had struck. Outstanding ruins were the large pants of the
Dominion Textile Company and the Halifax Exhibition buildings. The
great grandstand, completed only last year at a cost of $50,000, lays scattered around like matchwood.
The Richmond section of the
city, where the fullest force of the blow was felt, and where before 9
o'clock Thursday hundred of rows of houses stood, was still smoldering
and hissing under its mantle of snow, but no fragment of
wall above three feet is left.
Here plucky soldiers were
searching for bodies. Side by side with some of the bodies were
fragments of the Mount Blanc, blown two miles, which happily seem to
have caused instant death, saving the victims from lingering
suffering.
The waterfront, being lower
that the Richmond district, appeared to have escaped perfect ruin. The
direction of the holocaust was upward from the Mont Blanc, which is
lying in an amphitheatre composed of two sides of the Narrows.
It will
be possible to repair most of the wholesale business parts of the
city, as the buildings were built of substantial brick.
A military hospital on one of
the piers was tumbled down. It was hit by a 25-foot chain from the Mont
Blanc, which traveled a mile and a half over the harbor.
Steamers
alongside the wharves showed gashed sides and bent funnels, while the
paint seemed to have been rubbed off their sides.
An outstanding exception was
the cruiser Noble, which was lying tied up at its berth, much the same
as the writer had seen her many times since she completed her tips to
sea. Around her lay the tangled masts, steel ropes and plates welded
into a fantastic mass of scrap to two steamers that had been in the
graving dock a few feet away and which had not been made such stern
stuff as the ancient cruiser.
Roofless, the Government
railway station completes the ruin in this locality.
From the side of bleak
desolation that was Halifax, the eye travels to the opposite side of
the Narrows. Lying on the shore, only a short distance from one
another, the blasted Mont Blanc and the Imo, lifted by
the 40-foot tidal wave and blown 40 feet up the rocky beach.
The fan-like waves of the
explosion that spread from the Mont Blanc seem to have ripped
through Halifax like a cheese-cutter. Only a few feet way, the ruined
frame houses of the negro settlement known as Africiaville were all
standing.
With the arrival of relief
parties from the United States last night, the grim work of fighting
the aftermath of the explosion was begun.
The relief committee which was
appointed last night lost no time in organizing its work. The
committee which will have charge of repairs and reconstruction
appointed Colonel R. S. Low of Ottawa as manager, and Hamilton Lindsay
his assistant. Col. Low built the camps at Valcartier and Borden,
Ontario.
A request was issued to all
donors of building material to wire Col. Low, Halifax, giving a
reasonably accurate description of the materials offered and await an
answer before shipping. Building materials of all description,
particularly board and roofing paper, are urgently required. The
railways are asked to expedite shipment of material and to label cars
"Halifax Relief, Rush."
The administrative situation
in Halifax, as can well be imagined, is extremely strained, and the
outpouring of assistance, personal and material, from outside points
is temporarily adding to the difficulty of the situation.
Therefore, the relief
committee requests that doctors and nurses and other voluntary
helpers, kindly do not come to Halifax without first being advised by
telegraph or correspondence that their benevolent services can be
immediately and serviceably used.
At the suggestion of the
Mayor, no church services were held here today in order to give the
citizens an opportunity to render relief work. All the store were kept
open to facilitate the distribution of foodstuffs.
Representatives of both
political organizations today urged their followers to drop the
election fight for the two seats in Halifax. The suggestion is made
that Dr. Blackadder, representing the Liberals and Hon. A. K. MacLean,
minister without portfolio in the Borden administration, be elected by
acclamation.
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Dartmouth,
Nova Scotia, Ded. 9 -- This town on the opposite shore to Halifax,
caught the edge of the destructive blast from the munitions ship Mont
Blanc. A number of manufacturing plants were destroyed and several
rows of houses were blown down. The loss of life was 150.
