TROPICAL STORM

Evening Post, Volume CXXI, Issue 138, 12 June 1936, Page 5

TROPICAL STORM

£ NIGHT OF TERROR a In NORFOLK ISLAND DELUGE 10 id £ A GRAPHIC STORY >n ie Further details of the unprecedented it storm which swept Norfolk Island on May 21, briefly reported by the Direc- " tor-General of the Post and Telegraph 1) Department in "The Post" of May 22, e are given in a vivid description by an island resident in a letter written to a ' friend in Wellington. 0 "You will have heard over your n wireless, I suppose, of the frightful r storm we had here on the night of 7 May 21. I believe a previous wireless ' during the afternoon from Sydney had t announced that a severe electric disturbance was hanging over the island, '! but none of us heard that, and all re- £ tired to bed with no anticipation of 1 what we were in for. It started about 1 11 o'clock with a steady rain and a j distant growl of thunder, with an occasional flash of lightning on the far hori- > zon, which mildly entertained me as I s reposed in my bed beside a long slid- , ing window and glanced now and again \ out to sea. By 12 o'clock the rain was , hammering down upon the roof, the " thunder was right overhead, and the < lightning was flashing continuously . and lighting up the scene outside as clearly as though it were day. I j >' thought it was so violent that it could t not possibly last, and that an hour . must see the end of it; but it got [ steadily worse and worse until I sat j up and put my book down and began : to take serious notice. 1 "WORLD WAS ABSOLUTELY | ROARING." "The world was absolutely roaring j around me; a wild welter of noise and ■ falling waters, punctuated by dull [ booming thuds from time to time that I could not classify at the time, but found next day were landslides. I was not frightened at all, though I was • so isolated from help if anything should . happen that I might as well have been upon a desert island. Crash —flash— boom—and roaring water hour after hour and all night long. It was impossible to think of sleep, so I lighted Imy lamp again and wandered about the house, mopping up the floors as they became flooded from the rain pouring down both the living-room and kitchen chimneys, and moving books and furniture from place to place. Between the flashes of lightning the world outside was pitch dark—as dark as though I had gone blind and should never see again; and then there would come another earth-shaking crash of thunder and a livid glare that showed me every 4 leaf on every tree and the beaten sea right t(j the horizon —then • pitch dark blackness again. And the roar of the rain on the roof! Never letting up or slackening for a minute i for a solid seven hours! It sounded as though a hundred plumbers had gone mad and climbed up and were beating the .iron roof with hammers. Fifteen inches fell in those seven hours —about a third of what falls'in a year in England, where it is supposed to be \ alv'ays raining. (A man told me today, 1 incidentally, that fifteen inches meant J fifteen hundred tons of water on every t acre of land on the island; I don't know if he was correct, but I believe co.) CALM AFTER STORM. "Well, after about what seemed a fortnight, the night came to an end and the day, dawned round about seven o'clock. The lightning ceased, the thunder retreated, and the rain slackened sufficiently for me to sink into an exhausted slumber. When I woke at nine, the sun was shining, the birds were singing, the bees were actually out among the flowers, and the sea was blue and beautiful; but my ears were still filled with the sound of falling waters, for the road outside was a rushing river and waterfalls were leaping down from the mountainside in every direction.

"I dressed and went cautiously through the torrent in gumboots down to the library. I expected to find that the rain had seeped in beneath the door and window ledges and that probably all my books were ruined; but the carpenter who built it had done a wonderful job and, to my relief and amazement, there was only one rivulet meandering across the floor and not a book had even a spot of water on it. But other poor souls were not so lucky and a frightful lot of personal damage was done as well as general damage to the island which is a quaking bog—a sort of huge, dripping sponge—though it is drying up in the most marvellous fashion, the soil being so porous. But hillslides slipped into the valleys, carrying away acres and acres of cultivated soil. At the Cable Station at Anson Bay tlite cliff fell into the sea and smashed and buried the cable where it comes ashore, and, ten minutes after a gang of men had hurriedly rushed out on a lorry to dig it out and drag it ashore, and had knocked oil work, down came another slide and buried it again.

"At Kingston a house built at the mouth of a little green gully was swept right away about 2 a.m., the inhabitants leaping out into the wild night as the water burst through the wall behind them and carried everything away. The golf course is lost beneath a heavy dressing of earth and Watermill Valley—fifty acres—is a lake, while half a dozen old stone convict bridges have been wrecked and are lying piled stone on in jumbled heaps in the rushing watercourses. But the sun is shining again—indeed the weather is as hot as midsummer, and the island green and steaming— and gangs of men under Government supervision are working in all directions and within a week or so we shall have forgotten all about it. And it probably will not happen again for a hundred years; for the oldest inhabitant doesn't remember anything like it in all his days and the fact that the bridges have stood for a hundred years and only gone down now, shows that it was something quite out of the ordinary."