SS Green Hill Park Explosion

On March 6, 1945, a little before noon, nearly 100 men were getting the SS Greenhill Park ready for its voyage to Australia when it exploded. The ship had been docked at CPR’s Pier B-C, which is now Canada Place, since February 27. It was loaded with a mixed cargo of mostly lumber, newsprint, and tin plate, but also pickles, sunglasses, light bulbs, cloth, lamps, radio equipment, books, and knitting needles. Critically, it also carried 94 tonnes of explosive sodium chlorate, signal flares, and several barrels of 60 percent proof whisky.

The whisky was hard for some longshoremen and crew members to resist, and they siphoned it off, hiding it in hot water bottles and lunch boxes. They were likely unaware that the fumes were highly volatile. It was dark in the hold, and one of the men lit a match to see, then carelessly dropped it into spilled whisky.

A sheet of solid flames shot up more than 30 meters in the air, and the ensuing explosions took out most of the large plate glass windows along automobile row on West Georgia Street. Thousands of windows in downtown office buildings smashed, and glass rained down on busy Vancouver streets. Buildings shook, and the blasts blew out 10 heavy corrugated iron doors inside Pier B. Some survivors claimed they saw men thrown up to 23 meters in the air. Pickles and sunglasses rained down from the sky, while shredded canvas and paper swirled around the signalmen on the Lions Gate Bridge, blown there by a westerly wind. Many on the ground thought the Japanese were attacking and ran for air-raid shelters.

Frank Wright, the 25-year-old captain of the Sutherland Brown, an army supply ship docked at the foot of Cardero, and his skeleton crew were the first to reach the 130-meter-long Greenhill Park. They managed to get a tow line onto the freighter. With the help of Douglas Dixon, the captain of a Charles Cates harbor tug, they tried to beach the ship on the North Shore’s mud flats where it could do the least damage, but the tide was too strong. They eventually managed to pass under the Lions Gate Bridge and into deep water, but the ship resisted and finally landed on the rocks near Siwash Rock in Stanley Park. The fire burned for three days.

Donald Bell, a 34-year-old husband and father of three from North Vancouver, was one of the eight men killed in the explosion. He died from fourth-degree burns that covered his entire body. The others killed were Joseph Brooks, Julius Kern, William Lewis, Merton McGrath, Donald Munn, Montague Munn, and Walter Peterson. Twenty-six others, including seven firefighters, were injured.

The SS Green Hill Park was named after a park in Nova Scotia and was one of nearly 400 merchant vessels built for the Canadian Government. It was launched on November 10, 1943, and delivered on January 25, 1944, taking just 159 days to build. After the fire burned itself out, the Greenhill was towed back to Burrard Dry Dock and rebuilt. A Greek captain bought her and changed her name to the SS Phaeax 11. She was renamed the Lagos Michigan in 1956 and was broken up and sold for scrap in Kaohsiung City, Taiwan, in 1967.