On September 1, 1923, the Great Kanto Earthquake leveled Tokyo and Yokohama. As firestorms swept through Yokohama, tens of thousands of frantic survivors fled toward the city's waterfront, which offered the only shield against the inferno. Dozens of foreign ocean liners, merchant vessels, and warships anchored in Yokohama Port immediately transformed into floating sanctuaries, pulling thousands of survivors from the burning docks.
However, an unforeseen logistical nightmare quickly unfolded: the rescue fleet was running on empty, and there was no fuel left to turn the propellers. In 1923, maritime transport still heavily relied on coal and heavy fuel oil. The earthquake had destroyed Yokohama's port infrastructure in minutes.
Massive fuel oil tanks along the pier ruptured, spilling burning oil across the harbor water and incinerating the city's coal storage yards. To make matters worse, the small tugboats and wooden barges used to transport coal from land to ships were smashed by the tsunami or burned at their moorings. Grand ocean liners like the Canadian Pacific's Empress of Canada took on over 2,000 refugees, but found themselves trapped.
Their steam boilers were consuming precious fuel just to run electrical generators, distil seawater for drinking, and power pumps to battle floating debris fires around their hulls. Captains faced a harrowing paradox: if they used their remaining coal to sail refugees to safety in Kobe or Osaka, they risked stalling out at sea. If they stayed, they were sitting ducks in a harbor filled with floating fire.
The maritime relief effort stalled until emergency coal shipments were dispatched from naval depots further south, leaving thousands of traumatized refugees stuck on immobilized ships in a sea of smoke for days.