GAS EXPLOSIONS AT LOUISVILLE

Dominion, Volume 30, Issue 114, 8 February 1937, Page 9

GAS EXPLOSIONS AT LOUISVILLE

Result of Flood Damage

SEVERAL BUILDINGS WRECKED By Telegraph.—Press Assn.—Copyright (Received February 7, 6.30 p.m.) Louiswille, February 6. Two gas explosions and a fire due to the effects of the flood destroyed two three-story buildings in the heart of the business section of the city. Seven bodies have been found and three others are believed to be buried in the debris. The known injured numbered 12. Rescuers are unable to search the ruins until the gas which had accumulated in the building after the flood damaged a main has cleared away. The loss is estimated at 50,000 dollars. The upper floors comprised small apartments in which there were many flood refugees. Several were injured in jumping from second-floor windows before the walls crumbled. ' Two similar explosions later razed a business building and a factory. No one was killed, but the loss is estimated at 100,000 dollars.

A Memphis message states that the levees are holding along the swollen Mississippi, but a dysentery epidemic is reported among levee workers, resulting in an order to chlorinate all wells. The crest of the flood has reached Memphis. The Ohio River is falling steadily.

Mr. H. L. Hopkins, Federal Relief Administrator, visited Louisville and left for Cincinnati to continue his flood tour. The water is falling at Cairo, but points on the lower Mississippi River are still endangered and the dynamiting of several levees is being considered.

Meanwhile steady rains melted the snow on the mountains, threatening floods in Southern California. An earth slide blocked one railway and water covered the tracks of another in several places. A cinema company, consisting of 35 persons, including Judith Allen. Gene Autry, and Smiley Brunette, is marooned in the town of Kernville, where the flood covered a bridge upon which workers are piling sandbags. Tn an effort to save 800 persons marooned in the town of Woodlake evacuation of the town and lowlands nearby was ordered. Six are dead through sub-zero weather in North Dakota, and scores of motorists are marooned as a result of snowstorms throughout the north-west.

One hundred and sixty Minnesota high school students are marooned in a country schoolhouse.