I have never posted on a Sunday before but I would like to ask Toronto area readers to give thanks for the escape of the passengers from the potentially catastrophic plane accident on the runway at Toronto's Pearson Airport. No one was seriously injured.
Let's briefly review the escapes from potential catastrophe that Toronto has seen.
In the late Nineteenth Century, Toronto was a very religious place. It was full of revivals and was a destination for many Christians who were dismayed by the encroaching secularism in Europe.
In the spring of 1904, a horrific fire virtually erased downtown Toronto. You can see today that there are more older buildings, which would have been there at the time of the fire, to the east of Yonge Street downtown than there is to the west of the street. These remaining buildings include the St. Lawrence Market, Massey Hall, St. James Cathedral and, St. Michael's Cathedral. Although this area was the scene of another great fire more than fifty years before. The Old City Hall, behind Eaton Centre, would have been there at the time also.
Amazingly or, more likely, miraculously, no one was killed. According to information online, one man was killed during the cleanup after the fire when a wall collapsed. The similar Chicago Fire, several decades before, killed several hundred people.
Could it be that God was showing how pleased he was with Toronto's religiosity by allowing everyone to escape the disaster?
In the early 1970s, the city of Toronto undertook a campaign to close down some of the disreputable businesses in the downtown area.
In November of 1979, Toronto really saw a potential catastrophe. A brake on a train that was passing through Mississauga malfunctioned, and generated a lot of heat by friction. Finally, it burned through metal and caused an axle to come loose from the train. This caused the train to derail.
Unfortunately, the train was not carrying routine cargo. The cars of this train were full of not only propane, but many other chemicals that were very highly explosive. What happened next was possibly the largest man-made non-nuclear explosion that the world has ever seen. A fireball, like the mushroom cloud from a nuclear blast, went nearly a mile into the sky.
It could have been like Lac Magantic, the explosions of fertilizer ships in Texas City in 1947, and the destruction of much of Halifax by the explosion of an ammunition ship in 1917, all put together, and then some.
Instead, it became known as the "Mississauga Miracle". Although Mississauga was evacuated, not a single person was killed. Was God, once again, showing how pleased he was with Toronto's zeal?
Earlier, in 1970, Toronto had been involved in another miraculous escape. NASA's Apollo Space Program had great success in landing astronauts on the moon, and then getting them safely back home. These landings were Apollo 11 and 12. But Apollo 13 did not go quite as smoothly.
When the Apollo 13 spacecraft was nearing the moon, a small electrical fire is believed to have started in a liquid oxygen tank. This caused the oxygen to vaporize and the pressure caused the tank to explode. This crippled the ship's power and made a landing on the moon impossible. It was decided that the spacecraft would undergo a partial orbit of the moon so that it would use the moon's gravity to point it back toward earth.
The Lunar Module, which would not be used for a moon landing, would instead be used as a "lifeboat" to get the astronauts back to earth because it, unlike the main Service Module, had not been damaged by the explosion. This would get the astronauts back close to the earth, where the Lunar Module would be discarded before re-entry into the atmosphere.
The trouble was that none of this had ever been done before, or really planned for. When the Lunar Module was separated from the Command Module, which held the astronauts and was the only component of the spacecraft to return to earth from the mission, it had to somehow be blasted to a safe distance away or it could potentially collide with the Command Module, which would not be a good thing.
In Apollo 8, in December 1968, the astronauts had jettisoned the third stage of their rocket as it neared the moon, as planned, but the stage had the same momentum as the spacecraft and remained alongside the spacecraft, now powered by the Service Module, for quite some time, causing great concern that it might collide with it, which would be disastrous.
This is a photo taken of the potentially dangerous separated stage, taken from the spacecraft during the earlier Apollo 8 mission.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_8#/media/File:As8-16-2583.jpg
But how could that be done? NASA called on the University of Toronto for help, who came up with an answer that worked after several hours of calculations. There was no time to program this into the crude computers of the time and these were the days before calculators.
The U of T decided that the lunar module could be blasted to a safe distance away by pressurizing it and the attached command module and came up with just the right internal pressure for the modules to have which would blast the now-unnecessary Lunar Module to a safe distance, but without doing any damage to the hatch between the two, which would have been fatal upon the dangerous reentry into earth's atmosphere.
In other examples of miracles involving Toronto, in 2005, there was the crash of an Air France jet while landing at Toronto Airport in poor weather. The aircraft was destroyed, but there were no fatalities. It was referred to in the media as yet another "Toronto Miracle".
In July 2017, an Air Canada flight from Toronto was coming in to land on a runway at San Francisco, in very poor visibility. What the pilot didn't know, and only found out at the last safe moment, was that there were several other planes on that runway waiting to take off.
Remembering the worst air accident ever, at Tenerife in the Canary Islands, in 1977, a plane taking off and colliding with another that was taxiing, neither plane seeing the other until it was too late, this was similar to, and could have exceeded that in disastrous magnitude.
Instead, Toronto got yet another miraculous escape to add to it's collection. While we need to be careful, I think it is time to give thanks to God.
