DAUGHTEKS DBOWNED

Evening Post, Volume CV, Issue 6, 9 January 1928, Page 9

DAUGHTEKS DBOWNED

FATHER'S EFFORTS VAIN LONDON, 7th January. There was no recurrence of the London floods to-day, but the Port of London Authority issued a warning that they may be repeated, as the tides arc likely to increase till Tuesday. Breaches in the embankment wall have been temporarily repaired with sandbags. The corrected death-roll is now fourteen. Most of the fatalities were, at Westminster, where poor people in tenements near tho Houses of Parliament were the worst sufferers. Heroic efforts to rescue those imprisoned were made last night by police and neighbours, who went to the doors arousing sleepers. Harding, an artisan, whose four daughters were drowned in their beds, had a terrible experience. The girls were sleeping in one room in a basement. Harding rushed down and heard the girls' pitiful cries to open the door, but the water was so deep that all his powerful, prolonged, and desperato exertions were unavailing, and he had to give up tho attempt and go upstairs to rescue his wife and other children. Priceless pictures housed in. a basement at the Tate Gallery, mostly Tiiruer sketches, were soaked, and it is feared that many are ruined. This is the most sudden and serious flood in London in living memory. The "Observer" describes it as the worstshock to London's complacency since the war, revealing a parlously weak spot in the defences of tho metropolis, which cannot be repaired by the mere extension and strengthening of the embankment. The Thames has developed a menace unknown for upwards of a century, because the national system of land drainage has fallen hopelessly in arrears.