FLOODED AREAS IN IRAK.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXVI, Issue 20263, 24 May 1929, Page 11

FLOODED AREAS IN IRAK.

SPECTACLE FROM THE AIR.,

FLIERS' NARROW ESCAPE,

CRASH. JUST AVERTED.

Times Cable. LONDON,' May 22. Tho Basra (Irak) correspondent of the Times reports that ari Indian mail air liner dropped like a stone from a height of 4000 fecit, with her engines stopped, to within 400 feet of Lake Hammer. The cause of the mishap was that the machine was caught in an air pocket due to atmospheric conditions resulting from tho floods.

A passenger from Bagdad on board the air liner says the engines cut out and! the petrol temporarily failed to reach them owing to tho velocity of the fall. Luckily tho engines functioned again in the nick of time, when the pilot anticipated that a forced descent on the water was inevitable. The passenger says the entiro country l side forms a most remarkable spectacle.' For fully one-third of the distance from Bagdad to Basra (350 miles) +he land is inundated. The railway line is broken in two places where a mile of track has disappeared. Cultivators of the soil are faced with enormous losses. As seen from the air the floods stretch to the horizon. • They are interspersed with tiny islets of grain stacks.

The Itiver Euphrates is falling, but no benefit is possible down stream until tho volumes of flood waters are drained off tho numerous depressions in the land.