THE OHIO DISASTER.

Auckland Star, Volume XLIV, Issue 107, 6 May 1913, Page 9

THE OHIO DISASTER.

(Prom- Our Special Correspondent.) i NEW YORK, May 28. Reports of tornadoes, fires and floods through the Middle Western States are now occupying the scarehead columns of the d-iil _v newspapers to such an extent that the fall of Adrranople is considered of eomparativeiy slight interest in contrast, and relief subscriptions for the sufferers are the order of the day. Starting with a tornado at Omaha last Sunday, the path of destruction swept eastward, wrecking reserroirs, deluging the watercourses and making fires of buildings incidentally wrecked by the wind. Latest reports to-day assert that ten thousand live 3 -may be lost. The city, of Dayton, Ohio, was under forty feet of wateT, and the loss is enormous. Stories of the suffering are heartrending, fathers shooting their wives and families rather than see them drowned, people on roofs and in upper stories of high buildings starving to death, a rushing river a hundred miles wide, where dry laud existed last week, all sorts of thrilling episodes and spectacular events described in the newspaper men's best style, are making the dailies the principal current literature .of even those accustomed to more eerious matter. President Wilaon has sent his Secretary of War to the scene of disaster, and will probably follow 'himself to afford national relief. The cries from the unfortnnate are that they do not want money, but food arid clothing and the means to start again. Such floods generally result in greatly increased crops in tie ravaged district the following season, but nothing in any degree approaching this disaster h*s been experienced ia twenty years or more.