TERRIFYING DAYS

Evening Star, Issue 19274, 12 June 1926, Page 12

TERRIFYING DAYS

EARTHQUAKES IN SOLOMON ISLANDS A report on the rerent earthquakes in the Solomon Islands has reached Auckland from the general secretary of the Melanesian Mission, Major H. B. Eohinson, who is at present visiting these Pacific Islands. The writer of the report is the Eev. Dr Fox, of the mission station at Pawa on the island of Ugi. Dr Fox states;— “The earthquake started on Monday, April 12, and continued for ten days. During the first seven days there were thirty-five brief shocks and many tremors, but none were so terrible as the first one. “The awful violence of that fifteen seconds is beyond words. I was thrown clean out. It was a dark night and raining. There was a great roaring, and the houses danced like dervishes. A nut tree on the top of the hill was thrown to the bottom, and my house was instantly in flames. All the tanks, which were brimful of water, were thrown to the ground and completely smashed. The back verandah collapsed to matchwood and the side of the back room was wrenched out. In the hospital four boys were on beds, and they were all thrown to the middle of the room, and there met the medicine cupboard. Everything breakable broke. Then came quiet, and we put out the fire in my house with wet sacks. ’“All night the island quivered, and earthquakes came every throe or four minutes until 2 a.m. on Tuesday, after which thov came at longer intervals, and so till Thursday, at 7.30, when the next big one arrived. _ Big shakes came every half-hour with a roar., You could see the hills swinging as you swing your arm, and could hear the hillsides falling. Great fissures opened everywhere. Some of the boys vomited. One house turned over at an angle of 45 degrees. •• In some of the houses the main posts were wrenched out. A fissure opened across the floor of Air George’s house. Some of the fissures are fifty yards long. Fissures also opened on the reef of both sides of the Point. Many of the native houses and the stone church at Tawarodo fell.”