In a Crisis

On the morning of December 6, 1917, a French munitions ship collided with a Norwegian vessel in Halifax Harbour, Nova Scotia. The resulting explosion killed nearly two thousand people and flattened the north end of the city. It was the largest human-made explosion before the nuclear age. Within hours, survivors were pulling strangers from rubble, improvising hospitals in churches and railway stations, and sharing food with people they had never met. The next day a blizzard arrived. Residents of Truro, two hours away by train, loaded relief supplies and medical teams before anyone had formally organized them. People came from across eastern Canada and the northeastern United States, not because anyone had issued orders, but because other people needed help. This is not the story most people expect. The version of human nature embedded in popular culture and reproduced in disaster media coverage is that when things fall apart, so do people. Civilization is a thin crust over barbarity:…