He Had 20 Seconds to Warn the Train | Halifax, 1917

At 9:04 on a cold Thursday morning in 1917, a railway dispatcher in Halifax, Nova Scotia knew something almost nobody else in the city knew: the ship burning in the harbour was carrying nearly 3,000 tonnes of explosives, and a passenger train with three hundred people aboard was minutes from arriving. He had a wife. He had four children. He could have run. He sat back down at the telegraph key and started tapping. This is the story of the largest man-made explosion before the atomic bomb — told from the seat of one man who watched it coming. CHAPTERS 0:00 A man who did not leave 1:43 Chapter One — A City Made Rich by a War Somewhere Else 8:25 Chapter Two — Two Ships and a Gap Too Small 14:44 Chapter Three — Twenty Minutes, and a Man Who Went Back 20:22 Chapter Four — Nine Hundredths of a Second 25:09 Chapter Five — What a Message Is For 29:26 Next episode SOURCES & IMAGES Photographs courtesy of the Nova Scotia Archives and Wikimedia Commons (public domain). Where accounts of the collision and of Coleman's final message differ between sources, the disagreement is stated in the narration rather than smoothed over. THE WITNESS SEAT History from the inside. One person, one day, one moment the world remembers. New episode every week. #history #documentary #halifaxexplosion