AN AWFUL DISASTER.

Press, Volume LXVII, Issue 13986, 8 March 1911, Page 9

AN AWFUL DISASTER.

FIRE AT A CINEMATOGRAPH PERFORMANCE. GREAT LOSS Of LIFE. United Press Association—By Electrio Telegraph—Copyright. ST. PETERSBURG, March 6. A firo broke out during a cinematograph entertainment at Bologoe. Ninety persons were incinerated and forty were injured. (Received March Bth. 12.5 a.m.) ST. PETERSBURG, March 7. The inhabitants of Bologoe are chiefly railway men, but many peasants came to see cinematograph films dealing with the liberation of the serfs. It was also the last day of the carnival preceding Lent. The show was given in a wooden building, with three doors, whereof two were closed and the other barred in order that only one person might be admitted at a time. The windows wore closed with shutters. An explosion of benzine occurred, and in a few seconds the hall was a mass of flames. Twenty-five of tho audience, mostly men, retained their presence of mind and escaped through a narrow passage, but tho rest were burnt. A party of townsmen pluckily dashed into th© building, and made a desperate effort to save their wives and children, but nearly all the rescuers perished, the fall of the roof completing the holocaust. The firemen were a long timo arriving, and their effort* were fruitless. They could only help to remove the chnrred beams and boards from the corpses, many being in unrecognisable fragniento, which the peasants lifted on Sleighs, by candlelight, and took to the mortuary. Heartrending soonee wero witnessed, parent* with bleeding hands digging amid the smouldering ruins. Ninety corpses havo been extricated, and it is believed that 120 perished.