BOOMING ROAR.

Auckland Star, Volume LX, Issue 142, 18 June 1929, Page 9

BOOMING ROAR.

DETONATIONS AT SEA. EARTHQUAKE MYSTERY. ELEVEN MINUTES AFTER SHAKE. EXPLANATION STILL LACKLYG. (By Telegraph.—Special to "Star.") WELLINGTON, this day. Wellingtonians got a thrill from the earthquake, and there are only a few cases of minor personal injuries, but there is mystification over a phenomenon which occurred eleven minutes after the first rolling shake had directed attention to unusual happenings, and sent hundreds of people into the open air. Suburban residents who were clear of the city noises heard a series of dull but heavy detonations to the southward. There is general agreement about the location of the noises. It was in Cook Strait, somewhere to the south-west. A preliminary roar is a familiar earthquake experience, but this came much 'later. Some dark masses of cloud over the westward hills paused some people to think that a thunderstorm was in progress, but the explosive reverberations followed one another so rapidly that they could not accurately be ascribed to electrical discharges. They were heard at Mr. Erie Riddiford's station at Orongorongo, on the East Coast, at Lower Hutt, Petone, Pencarrow lighthouse, Northland, Karori, Newtown and in the city area. Like Concussion of Guns. The actual earthquake was not noticed at Orongorongo, but the explosive noises caused an effect there similar to that of the concussion from the tiring of heavy guns. Heard from Northland and Karori the reports seemed to come from the direction of Makara, toward Cook Strait. As they increased in intensity and rapidity some slight trembling of the ground, like concussion, was noticeable. Shops at Karori shook while the noises were in progress, a period of about five minutes, and a second earthquake shock was also felt. The impression that the booming roar was due to a thunderstorm was in a sense justifiable, in that the sound seemed to come out of the western sky. Observers in the Hutt Valley declared that the mysterious booming seemed to come out of the sea from the south-west. A resident on the hill near Island Bay, facing Cook Strait, likened the sounds to ihocW"heard in Auckland and Wellington at the time of the Tarawera eruption, when the Pink and White Terraces fcere destroyed. The Government seismologist, Dr. C. E. Adams, was unwilling to dogmatise regarding the cause of this phenomenon, but he ventured a guess, from the quantity of well-authenticated evidence, that the whole disturbance was deepcentred and intense, and the sounds might be caused by the crunching of rocks underneath. "But a great variety of earthquake sounds has- been recorded," he said, "and it is hard to say what was the cause of the present phenomena."