TRAPPED BY FLOOD

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume LXI, Issue 18397, 15 May 1934, Page 9

TRAPPED BY FLOOD

FAMILY’S DIRE PERIL NIGHT OF ANXIETY One ot' the most sensational incidents connected with the recent floods in the Little River district in Canterbury was the escape of Mr. Shad bolt, a groom on Mrs .T. F. Buchanan’s Kin loch station.- . • - A few hundred yards front the homestead and separated- bv-a creek was the cottage occupied by Mr and Mrs Shadbolt. About one o’clock on Saturday morning Mr. Shadbolt roused Mr. G. Dixon, manager of the station, and asked for assistance in getting Mrs Shadbolt and their ll months’ old baby away from the cottage, which was threatened by the torrents and heavy debris coming down from the hills. The two men made t.heir wav baek to the cottage, and 1 with Mrs Shadbolt and the baby attempted to make the return journey to safety. Mrs Shadbolt slipped and Mr. Dixon, in attempting to support her, also fell, with the result that they were washed some distance down the hillside, where they Were brought up by a fence. With some difficulty they rejoined Mr. Shadbolt, who was carrying the baby. : - . -. The party tlujn made their way to the creek, only to find that in their absence the bridge had gone. . There was nothing to do but wait for daybreak, while across the creek Mrs Dixon, alone in the homestead, spent a night of terrible anxiety, as she dici not know where her husband and the members of the Shadbolt family were. Mr, Shadbolt’s home was miraculously saved by the flood. Great boulders banked up behind the- -cottage, and on it, and acted both as a buffer which shot the water off on either side and as a stay to hold the house on its foundations. A creek formed by the bursting of the dam forced its way through the billiard-room of the Kinloch homestead, and the holding paddocks behind the homestead were piled high with hundreds of boulders. The scene of desolation on every hand beggared description. Rich farm land was transferred into wastes which resein-. bled battlefields —here great gashes where the earth was scoured and swbpt to the levels below, and there mountains of boulders, shingle, and tree trunks. In one area a wall of shingle 20ft. high was thrown up.