Dead in the Water: Toronto's Forgotten Disaster
by Julian A.S. — In the fall of 1949, a horrific dockside fire aboard the SS Noronic kills well over one hundred people, and marks the end of an era on the Great Lakes.
by Julian A.S.
In the early morning hours of September 17, 1949, the SS Noronic was docked in Toronto Harbour, moored for the night during a week-long pleasure cruise of Lakes Erie and Ontario at the end of the summer season. Around 500 passengers were aboard the popular Great Lakes passenger steamer, many of them elderly, and most asleep in their cabins. Shortly before 02:30, smoke was discovered emanating from a locked linen closet, and within mere minutes, the entire steamer would be ablaze and hundreds of people would be desperately fighting to survive.
At sunrise, well over one hundred were dead and one of the largest passenger ships to ever sail the Great Lakes had been reduced to little more than a smouldering hulk. Somehow, a ship already in the refuge of safe harbour had become the site of the deadliest disaster in the history of Toronto—one which has since been widely forgotten.
The incident was not only a great human tragedy, but the loss of Noronic also marks the end of the era to which she belonged. The golden age of passenger steamship travel in Canada—and perhaps its twilight, too—ended with the horrific events of September 17, 1949 at the foot of Yonge Street.
This is the story of the Noronic.
From the mid-19th to the mid-20th century, large passenger steamships were ubiquitous with the lakeside communities and vast expanses of the Great Lakes. Often owned by railroad companies and integrated into their networks, steamships formed an integral part of the region’s transportation system, carrying passengers and cargo between otherwise distant communities and negating the need for expensive and laborious overland infrastructure. Today, large lake freighters are still a crucial part of the North American economy, though the era of widespread passenger travel has long since ended.
In her day, Norornic was an icon. She was ordered by the Northern Navigation Company, a corporation which merged with the Richlieu and Ontario Navigation Company to form the extant Canada Steamship Lines while she was under construction. Noronic served with Canada Steamship Lines for the duration of her career. It is also from this corporate amalgamation that Noronic received her rather unusual name, it being an abbreviated portmanteau of Northern, Richelieu, and Ontario (NO-R-ON) and ending with the conventional -ic of the Northern Navigation Company. Noronic was laid down in the spring of 1913 at the Western Drydock and Shipbuilding Company in Port Arthur, Ontario—which today forms part of Thunder Bay—and was completed later that same year. At 110 metres long, she had capacity for 600 passengers and 200 crew, and was one of the largest Great Lakes passenger ships yet built. Her interior spaces featured ornately decorated passenger cabins and amenities, and Noronic quickly became renowned for her comfort, luxury, and exceptional quality of service.
During the summer season, Noronic primarily sailed Lakes Huron and Superior between Detroit, Michigan, and Duluth, Minnesota, with intermediate stops in Sarnia, Sault Ste. Marie, and Port Arthur. In this capacity she was a venerable icon, often referred to as “Queen of the Lakes” and was well loved by passengers, crew, and local residents alike.
Noronic was also the youngest and largest of three sisters. The vessels Huronic and Hamonic served alongside her with Canada Steamship Lines in the first half of the 20th century, and these siblings proved to be a storied and troubled group. Hamonic, the middle sister, was launched in 1909 and sailed for over 35 years before being lost in a fashion that would eerily foreshadow the dramatic end of her sister. On July 17, 1945, Hamonic was destroyed by fire while docked near Sarnia. The crew, passengers, and rescuers acted heroically to avert what might otherwise have been a serious disaster. Four years later, many passengers aboard Noronic would not be so fortunate.
Noronic’s fateful final voyage was a week-long tour of Lakes Erie and Ontario, her last of the season before being laid up for the winter in Sarnia. She departed Detroit around 23:00 on September 14, 1949, with stops scheduled in Cleveland, Toronto, and Prescott, before completing the round-trip sailing to Detroit the following week. This voyage was primarily a pleasure cruise, and nearly all of the passengers aboard were American nationals. On the first leg of this journey to Toronto, there were 524 passengers and 171 crew listed on Noronic’s manifest.
On the evening of September 16, Noronic steamed into port for the last time, arriving in Toronto Harbour around 19:00. Despite some rain showers that morning, the sun was now setting over what had been a warm and cloudless afternoon, and a steady breeze was blowing from the southwest. Noronic docked at Pier 9 of the Canada Steamship Lines terminal at the foot of Yonge Street, which is today the site of the Jack Layton Ferry Terminal. Hundreds of passengers disembarked, venturing off to enjoy the Friday evening nightlife across the city, though most would return later in the evening to sleep in their accommodations aboard Noronic before she departed the following morning.
Likewise, of the 171 crew scheduled for this voyage, nearly all disembarked to enjoy their shoreleave in Toronto. Unlike the passengers, however, most would not return to the ship that evening, nor were they required to do so. In fact, on the night of the disaster, only a skeleton crew of 15 was on duty, responsible for over 500 passengers. Captain William Taylor was among those who disembarked, and he made his way to a dinner party in the city.
The mood that day had been jovial and celebratory, the passengers enjoying the pleasant first days of the voyage, and excited at the prospect of more holiday still to come. As the evening wore on, the dining hall and lounges aboard Noronic gradually emptied as revellers turned in for the night. Passengers returned to Pier 9 from restaurants, bars, and nightclubs across downtown Toronto. Slowly, the grand old ship began to slumber.
Captain Taylor returned to Noronic around 02:25 in the company of Josephine Kerr, a female passenger. He escorted her to her stateroom on C deck, the pair walking very near a certain port-side linen closet. The captain wished her goodnight, and retired to his cabin on the ship's A deck. At this point all appeared well, though the two had just unknowingly passed the epicentre of an unfolding disaster. Subsequent accounts conflict, but some suggest that the captain had been drinking heavily during his night on the town.
Only minutes later, passenger Donald Church bid his lingering companions farewell and left the aft passenger lounge where he had spent the evening socializing. As he entered the corridor on C deck and began walking forward to his cabin, he noticed an unusual haze. With alarm, he realized that he had encountered smoke and urgently began attempting to find its origin. He soon found it. Smoke was pouring out from around the locked door of the very linen closet which the Captain and his companion had just passed.
Ironically, Donald Church had spent his career as a fire insurance specialist. He knew firsthand the risk posed by even a small fire. Especially aboard a ship. Unable to open the door, he ran for help.
Amidships, Church encountered bellboy Garth O’Neil, whom he informed of the situation. The two hurriedly returned to the linen closet, where O’Neil used his keys to open the door, revealing what appeared to be a growing but manageable fire. The pair began firefighting efforts immediately with a small handheld extinguisher, but to no avail. Already, the small fire was hungrily consuming the interior of the closet and its flammable contents. As flames began to spit out into the corridor, the two men retreated and retrieved a firehose from a nearby firefighting station, but were unable to successfully operate it, either because they were not properly trained or because the equipment was poorly maintained. Perhaps both.
Several crucial minutes had now passed since Donald Church first discovered the fire, firefighting efforts had been a complete failure, and still no alarm had been raised aboard Noronic. Beyond the few passengers in the immediate vicinity of the growing commotion, nobody on the ship had been made aware of the escalating emergency. The fire was now beginning to spread uncontrollably down the C deck corridor. O’Neil abandoned the hose and ran to activate the fire alarm, which would sound a bell in the officer’s quarters and in the wheelhouse. He then rushed to personally notify other crew members.
Coincidentally around the same time, Dan Harper, a dock watchman, was standing on Pier 9 when he noticed flames begin to lick out from Noronic’s hull. Despite the dramatic scene, he heard no alarm from the sleeping ship. Harper hurried to a nearby telephone and called the fire department from shore.
Aboard Noronic in the officers’ quarters, First Officer Gerry Wood was roused by the crew fire alarm which Garth O’Neil had just activated. He was quickly jolted from his groggy state by the smell of heavy smoke. Already, he could see flames pouring from the starboard side of the ship. Wood immediately ran up to the wheelhouse and sounded the general klaxon alarm. Only now, nearly ten minutes after the fire had first been discovered, was the alarm finally raised on the Noronic.
Wood also sounded the ship's whistle to further signal the emergency, but the horn immediately became jammed. From that moment on, the deafening blast of the whistle howled continuously for the duration of the disaster. It was this roaring noise, if not the flames themselves, that most survivors and witnesses later recalled as the first sign of trouble. For many, it was already too late.
By this point, nearly half of Noronic’s upper passenger decks were fully engulfed in flame. For those who hadn’t made it off the ship in the calmer opening minutes of the emergency, it was now utter chaos. The fire roared through the ship’s interiors, spreading faster than many could comprehend. People awoke to a nightmare, stumbling half-asleep from their cabins and into the inferno. Others trying to avoid the blaze ran frantically, disoriented and panicked in the chaos. Many were burned alive, others trampled to death in the maelstrom. All the while, people screamed, the fire roared, alarms sounded, and the ship’s whistle blared. It was a truly hellish scene.
On Pier 9 and on the water, the fire department and other first responders began to arrive. Passengers made frantic escapes across ladders extended to the ship and down ropes thrown overboard. Others, unable to find another means of egress, lept from the ship, falling dozens of feet into the frigid water or onto the pier below. By now, the Noronic was almost completely ablaze. Large embers and other burning material rained down on rescuers, victims, and the surrounding buildings.
The crew of a water taxi—Ross Leitch, George English and Cecil Mackie—had diverted from their round trip to the Toronto Islands at the sight of the disaster, and arrived on the scene. Over the course of an hour, they pulled dozens of people from the water. Thanks to their efforts that night, and those of other first responders, only one victim died by drowning.
Around 20 minutes had passed since Donald Church had discovered the fire, but the battle to escape Noronic had already been won or lost. Those still aboard Noronic would never leave.
On the shore, dozens of ambulances and taxis were frantically ferrying victims to local hospitals or makeshift gathering points in the lobbies of downtown hotels, notably the King Edward and Royal York. The massive inferno was visible from across the city, and a crowd of spectators began to gather. Firefighters poured feeble streams of water on the fire as it consumed the entire vessel.
As more and more hoses were brought to bear on the conflagration, water ran down into the hull and flooded the lower decks of the ship. Noronic slowly began to list and sink, eventually settling on the lakebed below at an angle. Above the waterline, everything even remotely flammable was consumed. At some point, as the furnace that had been Noronic disintegrated, the roar of the ship’s whistle ceased, casting a relative silence over the surreal and horrific scene.
The fire was finally extinguished—or burnt itself out—around 05:00, two and a half hours after it had first been discovered.
As the sun rose, the extent of the destruction became clear. Noronic was a semi-submerged wreck of charred and deformed metal. Practically everything that could possibly burn was decimated. The ship’s superstructure and passengers areas were completely destroyed, and even the steel decks and metal structural elements had withered and slumped in on themselves. It is hard to overstate the extent of the devastation. That Saturday morning, Torontonians awoke to news of a horrible tragedy at their doorstep, and the city was profoundly shaken.
By mid-morning, the gruesome task of clean-up was underway. Firefighters and other recovery workers began to board and survey the wreck. Though it was clear that there had been a great loss of life, there were surprisingly few perceptible human remains. Many had been burned far beyond any hope of recognition, coalesced into the countless piles of ash and debris. It was immediately evident that the scope of the disaster would overwhelm the city's mortuaries. The Canadian National Exhibition Horticulture Building, located on the CNE grounds about four kilometres away, became the provisional facility for the processing and identification of victims’ remains. For weeks after, workers sifted through heaps of debris and ash which was trucked from Pier 9 on a massive scale, a gruesome and granular search for teeth, wedding rings, or any other discernible remains. These efforts marked one of the first-ever large-scale uses of forensic dentistry to identify the victims of a disaster
All told, 118 people lost their lives. All but one were American passengers. Dozens more were seriously injured, and hundreds of survivors, first responders, and recovery workers were deeply traumatised. Outrage began to grow over the fact that scores of passengers had died, yet all but one of the crew had somehow been spared.
The federal Minister of Transport immediately ordered a public inquiry into the tragedy. Its results would paint a damning picture of the captain, the senior crew, and Canada Steamship Lines management. It also revealed the dramatic shortcomings of the contemporaneous laws and regulations concerning passenger ships in Canada and the United States.
Because the fire had so completely incinerated the ship, its cause was never definitively determined, though there were two primary theories. Some speculated that a crew member’s carelessly discarded cigarette had been the culprit, smouldering secretly in the linen closet before eventually erupting into flame. Others pointed to electrical equipment in the bulkheads, and suspected that a faulty wire had caused sparks in the enclosed space. Arson was not seriously considered due to a lack of evidence, though this would soon change. Another Canada Steamship Lines vessel, the SS Quebec, suffered a major fire less than a year later, on August 14, 1950. This blaze likewise started in a closet, and despite a similar lack of concrete evidence, foul play was suspected due to the fact that the recently-inspected fire alarm system had inexplicably been disabled. The proximity and similarity of these two events led some to postulate that the blaze aboard Noronic had not been an accident, and that a disgruntled employee with access to locked closets may have been the culprit. This was never proven, and we will likely never know who or what sparked the disaster aboard Noronic.
Regardless of its cause, the fire spread with such ferocity that it was out of control almost as soon as it had been discovered, and it only continued to accelerate from that point on. For all the chaotic and sometimes conflicting recollections of the event, the common thread in eyewitness and survivor testimony was the unbelievable speed with which the fire consumed the ship. The design of Noronic itself was largely to blame. In 1913 when the Noronic was constructed and fitted, there was little thought given to fireproofing. The ship was a floating tinderbox, filled with thick carpeting, ornate furniture, and extensive wood paneling, all of which was decades old and completely desiccated by the night of the fire. She also lacked fireproof bulkheads or other such basic design features now considered imperative in maritime architecture. Since the Noronic had been constructed so early in the 20th century, it had been grandfathered into subsequent regulations. By law, it required almost nothing in terms of fire retardant materials, design, or lifesaving equipment.
As a result, the Noronic lacked any sort of automatic fire detection system, instead relying on “Special Officers” to make once-hourly rounds of the ship and raise the alarm in the event of a fire—though by law these patrols should have been continuous. Likewise, in lieu of a sprinkler system, there were only manually-operated fire extinguishers and hose stations. This equipment was rarely, if ever, tested, and ultimately proved useless during the crucial moments when Donald Church and Garth O’Neil might still have had a chance to contain the fire.
Lifeboat and fire drills aboard Noronic were conducted at the same time every week and were so consistently scheduled as to negate any simulation of surprise or urgency. Furthermore, such drills involved only the crew, and passengers were never explicitly instructed on what to do in the event of an emergency. In the subsequent inquiry, it became clear that even senior officers had conflicting, incomplete, or nonexistent understandings of what their responsibilities were in the event of a fire. No plan whatsoever existed to quickly alert and evacuate passengers, especially at night when most would be asleep.
In short, emergency procedures aboard Noronic had been perfunctory and lackluster at best. To the extent that they even existed, they amounted to an assumption that the crew would be able to extemporaneously, quickly, and correctly respond to any incipient crisis—and that they would be afforded the time to do so. This assumption was also predicated on the idea that the ship would be underway on the water, with her full crew complement aboard. Of course, on the night of the disaster only a tiny fraction of the crew were even aboard the ship to begin with. In the words of the inquiry’s final report, “complete complacency had descended upon both the ship’s officers and the [Canada Steamship Lines] management”. Despite the captain being present on the ship during the fire, he failed to take any meaningful action to coordinate evacuation efforts. Though he and other crew did make some disjointed attempts to rouse and evacuate passengers, the systemic failings prior to the night of the disaster meant that almost nothing could be done by the skeleton crew once the fire was underway, especially given its breakneck spread.
The Noronic was staggeringly vulnerable to the risks posed by a shipboard fire. In the middle of the night, a devastating confluence of circumstances left passengers to fend for themselves in the worst-case scenario.
Yet for all the shortcomings of the crew, the company, and the ship itself, the Noronic and her operators had been largely in compliance with the law at the time of the disaster. In the aftermath of the tragedy, rules and regulations were updated in a bid to prevent a similar tragedy from ever occurring again. The findings and recommendations of the investigation spelled disaster for the industry. The age of the automobile was underway, commercial air travel was nascent, and demand for passenger shipping had been slumping for some time. By that point, the majority of the Great Lakes passenger fleet was decades old and profoundly vulnerable for the same reasons that Noronic had been. It was clear that bringing most vessels into compliance with new regulations would be prohibitively complex and expensive. As a result, many were retired and scrapped in the early 1950s. Passenger travel on the Great Lakes—an iconic and formative Canadian institution for more than a century—never recovered from the fallout surrounding the Noronic disaster.
In the fall of 1949, 118 people horrifically lost their lives at the foot of Yonge Street, and a significant chapter of Canadian history came to a dramatic close. The incident marked a sea change in fire safety standards, and likely saved an untold number of lives in the subsequent decades—though at a significant and grisly human cost. To this day, the fire remains the deadliest single disaster in Toronto’s history. Although the event no longer holds the same significance in the city and country’s collective memories it once did, the lessons learned from the Noronic disaster are just as relevant today as they were nearly 75 years ago, reminding us that when those responsible for human life become complacent, there will always be a cost.
In memory of those lost aboard Noronic, September 17, 1949.
This piece is largely based on the Report of Court of Investigation into the circumstances attending the loss of the S.S. Noronic, in Toronto Harbour, Ontario, on September 17, 1949, and The Noronic is Burning! by John Craig.