LIGHTNING AGAIN

Evening Post, Volume CXXVII, Issue 137, 13 June 1939, Page 8

LIGHTNING AGAIN

MORE HAVOC CAUSED

TWO AUCKLAND HOMES VIOLENT HAIL Ap RAIN (By Telegraph—Press Association.) AUCKLAND, June 12. A hailstorm of unusual intensity, accompanied by a cold wind and followed by phenomenally heavy rain, was experienced in several of the outlying suburbs shortly before 3 o'clock this afternoon. Residents of New Lynn and Mount Roskill, where the fall was heaviest, expressed the opinion that the conditions were almost without precedent. The scene in Titirangi Road beyond New Lynn suggested a recent snowfall. Covered with hailstones to a depth in some places of an inch, lawns carried a white mantle, and the gutters on the roofs of many houses were blocked by thickly piled hail. In the water tables children were able to make ice balls almost as big as pumpkins.

Lightning damaged two houses in Western Springs Road, Morningside. They were occupied by Mr. and Mrs. Metcalf and Mr. and Mrs. J. D. Foster. In one of the affected houses and in a number of neighbouring homes telephones were disconnected by the shock. A tram standing at the Westmere terminus was struck, but as the charge was immediately earthed through the rails no damage was done, and the tram was able to proceed under its own power.

A violent explosion accompanied the flash which struck the houses in Morningside. The lightning apparently struck a wireless mast at the back of the Metcalfs' house and ran along the lead-in to the .set in the living-room. A clock on the wall of this room stopped at 2.15 when the pendulum was detached by the explosion, which hurled pieces of the wireless cabinet across the room. Pictures on the walls were knocked awry, curtains scorched, and all the window pares and one of the frames blown out. The main switchboard in the hallway was broken and burnt and one of the sides was found in a bedroom 15ft away. The house was not occupied, Mr. and Mrs. Metcalf having left on holiday on Sunday.

The occupier of the neighbouring house, Mr. Foster, was working in his workshop at the. back when the flash occurred. "I heard a violent report, and when I went outside sulphurous smoke was coming from the windows of the Metcalfs' house," he said. Six feet from the door of the workshop a hole 12 inches across and more than a foot wide had been blown in the thick concrete path. Heavy pieceb of concrete were hurled some feet away and a fragment had pierced a neat hole through both sides of a drainpipe. The windows of an attached washhouse immediately above the point where the lightning struck were broken and the whole of the electric power and lighting system was disrupted. A corner of the shed near the wireless mast also was struck, leaving a ragged hole about six inches in diameter.