EARLIER REPORTS

Evening Post, Volume CXIX, Issue 95, 23 April 1935, Page 9

EARLIER REPORTS

MANY TRAGIC SCENES

TOKIO, April 22.

The* Formosa police report casualties and damage in the earthquake are as follows:—Killed, 3003; badly injured, 5267; slightly injured, 3955; missing; 3. Dwellings demolished, 6671; halt wrecked, 8802; damaged, 2933. Other buildings demolished, 22. The casual* ties include no foreigners.

. Details received are so far dependent on wireless messages from Taihoku. Numerous children and women, exhausted through tramping over broken qountry, have been left on the roadside to die. Oil gushers are blazing fiercely, belching black smoke over miles of countryside. To add to the horror, the fires are, spreading.

A correspondent on the scene graphically . describes his tour early this morning in the stricken region. He travelled with the utmost difficulty owing to wrecked communications and swollen rivers, which are impeding, rescue work. t , He saw few fires, but states that the casualties were mostly due to the crashing of the. walls of mud houses. The victims are practically all Formosans of Chinese origin. ,:

- The dead 'are laid out on the roadsides in all directions, many already * in rude wooden coffins. Thousands of injured are receiving aid at improvised centres, but the correspondent heard the screams of hundreds still entrapped in the ruins. Rain began at dawn, intensifying the agonies and further hindering the efforts of Red Cross workers, army men, and local officials. i It was an extraordinary scene, with innumerable flattened mud houses seemingly razed by a giant hand, interspersed with the bodies of the 'dead, dying, and injured lying" on mats.

The epicentre was in a shallow faultl 60 kilometres from Taihoku. The big cities escaped the serious damage which was suffered by interior towns and villages in north-west Forntosa.

A woman gave birth to an infant within her dwelling which crashed* Both were miraculously uninjured, but the imprisoned : grandmother waß shouting for help. Everywhere ther« is the odour of camphor, practically the only medicine immediately avail* able and one of Formosa's chief pro* ducts.'