FIREBALL HITS FACTORY

Press, Volume XCIV, Issue 28150, 13 December 1956, Page 9

FIREBALL HITS FACTORY

Damage Estimated At £5OOO PHENOMENON AT AUCKLAND (New Zealand Press Association) AUCKLAND, December 12. In a spectacular split second of destruction a fireball ripped two gaping holes in a factory roof and tumbled the chimney in a nearby house at Morningside at 5.20 this morning. It also hurtled debris for 100 yards along Collins street, smashing windows and doing other minor damage. No-one was injured.

Damage at the factory, Lynn Laces, is estimated at about £5OOO. This includes loss of production. Debris strewn along the road and in gardens consisted of splintered 12in by 4in timbers, up to 10ft long from the factory roof, broken sheets of roofing asbestos, heavy pieces of jagged glass and complete metal fanlights.

The greeny-white ball hit the factory roof at 5.20 a.m. as the foreman of the early shift —the only person on the premises—was having a cup of tea in the firm’s cafeteria. Hte saw it bounce off on to the road in Collins street, then shoot along the street. It caught the chimney of Mrs A. W. Pearse’s house, two doors away, cut power and telephone lines, and vanished.

Mrs Pearse, lying in bed. heard the bang of the fireball, then “a crash like the last trump” as her chimney came cascading down through the corrugated iron roof. It left a hole through which rain poured. The fireball left a hole 50ft by 40ft in one ridge of the factory roof and a smaller hole in the next ridge. Looms, operating automatically, did not stop, and the fireball did no interior damage, but rain pouring through the holes saturated stock and seriously damaged several electrically operated machines. Work in the main room of the factory was temporarily halted. Iron on Roof Torn Loose Mrs L. E. Diamond, living three houses from the factory, heard a rumbling like thunder then a crash as though the roof of her bouse was lifting. The iron had been torn loose. Roofs at Westmere, on the Waitemata Harbour, were blown off, and windows at Waikowai on the Manakau, blown out as a tornado, associated with the fireball swept across the Auckland Pennsula early today. Power supplies in these areas were interrupted for about two hours when a 6000-volt feeder cable was broken. Numerous street-to-house service lines were twisted and broken. Telephone lines suffered little damage. A sheet of corrugated iron blew into trolley bus overhead wires, caused short-circuiting, and put trolley bus services out of action for four hours and a half.

The Meteorological Office said weather conditions at the time were jus right for a tornado.

A newly developed depression in the western Tasman Sea moved rapidly east last night until its centre was just south of Auckland. The accompanying cold front arrived about 6 a.m. Contact between this and the existing humidity produced tornado conditions.