QUETTA EARTHQUAKE

Otago Daily Times, Issue 22630, 23 July 1935, Page 18

QUETTA EARTHQUAKE

NURSE’S GRAPHIC STORY FLOWERS BLOOM AMID CHAOS. A graphic description of the desolation and despair which followed the recent earthquake at Quetta is contained in a letter from Sister Jean Stacy, an Australian nursing sister, to her mother, Mrs Florence Stacy, of Tumut, Sister Stacy said that the first day she was in a woman’s nursing section, and almost 100 patients were brought in, suffering mostly from fractured legs, arms, or pelvis. Indian students were doing the dressings with the staff. The Indians and British were wonderful. The officers’ wives work very hard as V.A.D.’s without a grumble or complaint. “ A few hundred yards away,” added Sister Stacy, “ lay a great mound of stone, dust and boards, under which were 20,000 dead. It is almost inconceivable; a great invisible pall of death. There are no cracks or fissures; no sulphur springs; the water system is untouched and the railway hardly damaged, while trees are standing and flowers blooming. But all houses below a certain area are levelled and death lurks everywhere.”