The 1943 Dawson Creek Explosion

An explosion that levelled an entire city block

The day of Feb. 13, 1943 started normal enough for the community of Dawson Creek. The village was a hub of activity thanks to the US Army and the continued work and maintenance on the Alaska Highway. What many did not realize was that that was also the day when an event would change Dawson Creek forever.

It was on that day when a small fire started, and soon spread over to the livery stable. In that stable, everything from telephone wire, tools, kegs of nails, wooden crossbar arms and tires were being stored by the US Army. Also within that stable was an army vehicle loaded with dynamite.

Word soon began to spread that there was dynamite in the building, but it did not stop many people from watching the fire burn.

Most people who were watching the fire had no idea that there was the immense danger of an explosion brewing in the building. The construction workers in the crowd said that the dynamite would only burn, not explode because the percussion caps were not with the dynamite.

What they didn’t know was that there were percussion caps stored with the dynamite.

Then, the explosion hit. Dorothea Calverley saw the explosion and she relates this in an article she wrote for the North Peace Historical Society, quote:

“The burning building and its contents, completely red hot, went hundreds of feet in the air. Where the brightness of flames had been a second before, there was a momentary blackness as the fire was snuffed out like a candle, but a few minutes later there were hundreds of small fires as debris came down over a block away in all directions. Worse was the thousands of miles of copper wire which unrolled from its reels and tied everything in its tangled coils. Over a block away, a school nurse, driving her car, was startled by a flaming auto tire descending on her car’s radiator to hang and flame on.”

One woman who lived nearby was making supper when the front and the back door of her house were blown inside, shooting through the house but missing the glass china cabinet.

In a restaurant, a man and a woman who did not know each other were sitting 15 feet apart. The woman had her baby on her lap. After the explosion hit, the baby was found in the man’s lap, perfectly fine.

An entire block of buildings was destroyed, and the US Army took over control of the firefighting as fires raged in the community. The Red Cross also set up an emergency hospital ward in its club house. By Sunday, five people were dead and 120 were injured.

A few months later, Maclean’s was out at the booming community and the reporter described the disaster as such.

“I walked the blackened, blistered sidewalks and along streets that had burned away entirely, looking into huge craters and cellars now filled with scum-covered water. At the corner where a fine hotel had stood, there was only rubble. Where the barber shop had been, only a steel chair was left, slanted a bit and twisted out of shape. A typewriter lay keys down in the gutter. Twisted water pipes, bed springs, a pair of scales and most pitiful of all, the harp-like structure of a grand piano was sitting bravely in the ruins.”

A package of seed corn had been blown through the air in the explosion, without being burned, and a few months after the explosion, stalks of corn were now growing in a vacant lot.

The cause of the fire was never found, but a charge of negligence was laid against the contractor who leased the building, but not the sub-contractor whose employees placed the dynamite in the portion of the building they had leased.