EUROPE UNDER WATER

Taranaki Daily News, 2 January 1926, Page 11

EUROPE UNDER WATER

FLOODS CAUSE GREAT DAMAGE., TERRIFIC HURRICANE FOLLOWS. STORM BRINGS DEATH IN TRAIL. uy Telegraph—Press Assn.—Copyright Received Jan. 1, 9.10 p.m. London, Jan. 1. The year 1925 was literally blown out in the year’s worst gale. Vast areas of Britain and the Continent are flooded, and the position is so serious in Belgium, Germany and Holland that the Governments are obliged to undertake rescue and relief.

STREETS BECOME RIVERS.

MANY DROWNING VICTIMS. WIDESPREAD DESTRUCTION. VESSELS CALLING FOR AID. Received Jan. 1, 5.5 p.m. London, Dec. 31. Serious floods have ocscurred throughout Europe. A hundred persons were drowned in Translyvania, and special trains are succouring the refugees. Thousands of horses and cattle were drowned. The Seine overflowed its banks at many points and several low-lying parts of Paris are inundated. Warsaw and Belgrade are threatened with widespread damage. In Britain hundreds of miles of the roads are impassable and vast areas of agricultural land are submerged through the Severn and the Wye overflowing. The floods assumed most serious proportions in North Yorkshire.

A message from Berlin states that the floods are extending. The Rhine is twentysix feet above normal. The British troops in Cologne were compelled to use rafts to reach the canteens.

A motor-car at Heideiburg suddenly en- ■ red a flooded street, and the occupants, a doctor and his wife, were drowned. Hundreds are homeless in Eastern Hungary. The river Meiss is swollen. Solders using field guns unsuccessfully at‘empted to break up the masses of ice the floods brought from the mountain. The roops diminished the loss of life by bursting a dam. Meadows, fields and valleys in Britain during the past few days have been transformed. into sheets of water. Ten million tons of rain fell in London during an hour, accompanied by a mild gale, loosening chimneys and causing havoc to wireless aerials. The weather foreasts predict a continuance of blizzards, which are producing mountainous seas in the Atlantic and numerous S.O.S. calls and thrilling tales of plucky life boat and coastguard rescues. A message states that a gale in Zeeland blew a crowded motor-bus off a ferry, and six passengers were drowned. A hurricane with a wind velocity of eighty-five miles an hour and intense thunderstorms in London and elsewhere did much minor damage. Telegraphs and telephones were interrupted. At .an East End poor law institution one was killed and seven were injured by the fall of a chimney upon a ward occupied by- forty inmates, some of whom were partly buried in the debris. The Thames and Seine rivers continue to rise. Parts of the quays in Paris were submerged and cellars in the suburbs flooded. A smaller wireless aerial at the Eiffel Tower was carried away.