SUNNYSIDE FIRE DAMAGE DONE.

Evening Post, Volume LXXXVII, Issue 74, 28 March 1914, Page 6

SUNNYSIDE FIRE DAMAGE DONE.

NOT SO EXTENSIVE AS MANY THOUGHT. (BI TELEGRAPH— SPECIAL TO THE POST.) CHRISTCHURCH, This Day. Interviewed yesterday morning, Mr. J. E. Russell, secretary of the Sunnyside Mental Hospital, stated that the damage done by Thursday's fire was not as extensive as most people imagined. When the female ward was burnt in 1888, it had been almost totally destroyed, and had been lebuilt at a cost of about J815.0G0. During the piocess of recon.truciion. two brick partitions about 120 ft apart had been placed in the middle part of the building, where, cuiiously enough, the file had originated before. These partitions were the means of pieventing the fire from spreading to the outer wings, -and the consequence was that, beyond the loss of the big dormitory and a few iconia, little damage was done. The rooms on the bottom floor weie not touched by the fire, and would be habitable as soon as the water was cleared away. The work of rebuilding \\as already under way, and the major portion would be done by their own men under tho supervision of the institution's foreman carpenter. He expected it to be finished in the course of a few weeks. Questioned as to the origin of the fire, i Mr. Russell advanced the theory that a a park from the engine room had blown over to the birds' nests, of which there were a large quantity beneath the eaves. The running of the "institution had not ' suffered any appreciable difference as a j result of the fire, the patients wliose sleeping room had been destroyed being billeted on '" shake-downs " in the day i rooms.