KOREAN ROAD REPAIRS

Press, Volume LXXXVII, Issue 26396, 14 April 1951, Page 7

KOREAN ROAD REPAIRS

N.Z. PERSONNEL WORK BIG QUARRY (N.Z. Army Public Relations Service.) , IN KOREA, April 10. One of the biggest quarries in South Korea is being operated at this port on the Korean coast by New Zealand and Royal Engineers under the command of 2nd Lieutenant Malcolm Velvin, of Marton. The men are working 12 hours a day, six days a week, blasting out an average of 100 cubic yards of metal a day for use on roads leading to the battlefront. The metal is also being used on roads leading to supply dumps in the area where the New Zealand Base Headquarters is established. The work is being carried out at high pressure so that as much metal as possible can be laid before the start of the rainy season, now less than two months away. Unless the roads are metalled, they will become quagmires, as they did last rainy season. Because the nearest Korean house is only 25 yards from the quarry, special precautions have to be taken in blasting. Three waggon-mounter* drills are being used to penetrate the rdek surface to a depth of about eight feet. The charges are then laid, and the area is built up with sand-bags to prevent debris and metal being carried too far by the explosion. Two New Zealand bulldozers and 100 Chinese and North Korean prisoners of war from prison enclosures in the area are working eight hours a day to move the metal from the site of the blasting to the metal crushers. Sixteen of the men under Lieutenant Velvin’s command are New Zealanders, and the remaining 10 are members of the Royal Engineers.

Death Sentence for Murder.—Ronald Newman Cribbin, aged 21, a shearer, was found guilty in the Central Criminal Court at Sydney of the murder of Mrs Edith Hill, aged 72, at the Astor Flats on December 14. It was stated that Cribbin had admitted shooting a taxi-driver dtiring his chase by the police on December 17. The death sentence was imposed.—Sydney, April 13.