Canada at War: Tragedy at No. 5

In Port Arthur it was just an ordinary busy morning. The big, bulging grain elevators (capacity: more than 50,000,000 bu.) were hiring anyone who could and would wield a shovel. More grain ships than ever before were being loaded at the great Lake Superior port.

Suddenly, at the No. 5 elevator of the Saskatchewan Pool Terminal, Ltd., where the Sonora was loading, a pillar of flame shot 300 ft. skyward. There was an earth-shaking roar, heard several miles away. No. 5's cement walls, towering 180 ft. above dock level, fell apart like cardboard. The top four floors of the big bin were sheared away, and fell in a death-dealing avalanche of concrete and twisted steel, smashing nearby freight cars pancake flat. Concrete pillars, 2 ft. square, were tossed through the air like matchsticks.

Inside what was left of the $1,750,000 elevator, rescuers found the human remains. George Crittal, Port Arthur bricklayer, one of the first rescuers to pick his way into the shambles, saw injured men with "white faces, their hands blistered so badly that water was dripping from their fingers and their scorched and hairless heads. . . . Men, both living and dead, were terribly mangled. .... We found one worker pinned under a twisted column. There was a piece of steel reinforcement through his neck. . . . There was another chap [whose legs were] buried under a pile of bricks and debris. ... He told us to get him out and never mind his legs, 'leave them there.' "

At week's end the death toll had mounted to 16 (out of 70 who had been at work in No. 5), with four men still missing and bodies still being found in the wreckage. Another 34, all badly burned, crippled and blinded, were in Port Arthur hospitals.

The probable, unavoidable cause of the disaster: spontaneous combustion of grain dust.