CAPSIZED BY RIVER

Press, Volume XCVI, Issue 28471, 28 December 1957, Page 8

CAPSIZED BY RIVER

Chaneys Corner House A two-storey house was capsized by the flooded Waimakariri river when it ripped through a secondary stopbank near Chaneys corner yesterday afternoon. The breach was only 10 feet wide but it occurred immediately behind the house. The building toppled back at a 45 degree angle. Windows and chimneys were shattered. The house was not occupied, although for some time this was not known. The force of the breakthrough was indicated by the scouring round the eight-foot high piles supporting the building.

Two reporters saw the marooned house from Belfast. It was in, the middle of hundreds of acres of swirling, muddy water. They clambered along the top of the breached stopbank, stripped, and swam 20 yards to the wrecked house. Beds and other furniture were floating round inside the house like debris inside a half-sub-merged ship. While the reporters crawled across the sloping roof the water cut deeper under the foundations and the house slithered back into the river for another five or 10 feet.

A storekeeper who had watched them clamber over the building looking for signs of habitation tramped a quarter-mile after they failed to reappear on top of the broken stop-bank and helped them back to the road. One cut an arm when he fell as the housfc lurched. It was later learned that the house was used only as a holiday residence. Homes Evacuated

With flood water threatening to break over the railway line at Chaneys corner itself, local residents went to work moving furniture and household goods from their homes.

The nearest five houses—which would have been flooded in a few minutes had the bank broken—were quickly evacuated with the help of local farmers. Refrigerators, foodstuffs, clothes, and even children’s Christmas presents were loaded on to waiting trucks. At the house nearest the railway line, Mr and Mrs L. Johnson had little time to worry about the advancing water as they loaded their goods into cases. What they could not move they stacked up on tables and window ledges inside their modern brick house.

At the Ouruhia Store, Mrs J. H. McWhiter, with the help of a number of children, packed their grocery supplies on the highest shelves in the shop. Once the packing was completed many of the residents made their way up to the railway line that was the only thing holding flood water from their homes.