Disasters from the past hit home in this pair of powerful accounts
Curse of the Narrows: The Halifax Disaster of 1917, By Laura M. MacDonald, Walker, 356 pp., illustrated, $26
The Great Hurricane: 1938, By Cherie Burns, Atlantic Monthly, 230 pp., illustrated, $24
A port city destroyed, its waterfront swept away. Human error at fault. Thousands killed. Appalling injuries. Relief efforts hampered by a bitter storm.
That was Halifax, Nova Scotia, on Dec. 6, 1917, but Laura M. Mac Donald's powerful account of that disaster, ''Curse of the Narrows: The Halifax Disaster of 1917," cannot be read this fall without thinking of the Gulf Coast hurricanes.
And the immediacy of those current disasters does not diminish that of nearly a century past. If anything, Mac Donald's account of the Halifax disaster more closely focuses the mind on the present -- perhaps by allowing the reader to consider how one might respond to an account of Katrina and Rita a half-century or more from now.
As the merchant ship Mont Blanc entered the Narrows of Halifax's harbor to await a convoy, it collided with the outbound ship Imo. Fire broke out and quickly spread, triggering explosions in Mont Blanc's cargo of munitions destined for the Allied armies. Out of control, the ship veered toward the waterfront, exploding at 9:04 a.m. with the force of a massive bomb.
As the blast waves swept outward, buildings collapsed, some 1,600 of them, many burying their inhabitants in the rubble. A fireball mushroomed out, setting ablaze everything within a half-mile.
Amid the destruction, some 2,000 people were dead or dying, and thousands more injured; many who had been watching from their homes were hurt by windows shattering in the blast.
Vague reports of the catastrophe reached Boston, where a state emergency response unit had recently been created, a FEMA-like agency, the nation's first. Within hours, relief teams were assembled and headed for Halifax by train. To this day, Halifax expresses its gratitude with the gift of a towering Christmas tree for Boston Common.
Mac Donald, a Halifax native, has crafted a fine account of the disaster, solidly balanced between the onrushing sweep of events and their growing impact on survivors and witnesses -- how ''bewilderment [was] followed by shock" until ''as the day wore on . . . the mood grew somber."
The reader senses the unfolding disaster during Mac Donald's gradual introduction of the blizzard, which, within 24 hours of the disaster, would smother the city, disrupting the work of emergency medical and relief teams.
New England's brush with a Katrina-type disaster came just 67 years ago, when a powerful hurricane caught the region unawares on Sept. 21, 1938.
We understand now, after the events of the past weeks, just how unprepared it is possible to be for even a well-forecast storm -- which the '38 hurricane was not.
In ''The Great Hurricane: 1938," Cherie Burns, who has ridden out storms on Nantucket, conveys the impact of unexpected disaster in her dramatic accounts of people caught by the storm's fury, drowning in downtown Providence, lost while out fishing in Long Island Sound.
