LASHED BY BITTER SNOW

Taranaki Daily News, 21 December 1929, Page 11

LASHED BY BITTER SNOW

AMERICAN MIDDLE WEST COLD CAUSES MANY DEATHS. CHICAGO’S BUSINESS DISRUPTED. By Telegraph—Press Assn.—Copyright. Rec. 7-50 p.m. Chicago, Dee. 19. Thirty-six persons are known to be dead as the result of lashing snowstorms and bitter frost in the Middle Western States. Transportation and communication are disrupted over a wide area.

Seven persons died in the city of Chicago, where business is disrupted and hotels are packed with people who are unable to reach their homes, which are under cover of an impenetrable curtain of snow.

Six prisoners manhandled the guard and escaped from the Cook County gaol in the heart of the city. Three of the escapees are recorded as “desperate.” Traffic on the' great lakes is seriously retarded.

A Vancouver message says a blizzard dislocated traffic in Ontario yesterday and then moved south through the Mississippi valley. The death list runs from 30 to 40. A feature of the snowfall of 15 inches is that thousands of motor-cars are left stranded or abandoned on the roadsides, the drivers being utterly unable to- proceed. Huge snowdrifts were piled up in the howling gale. Springfield, Illinois, reports that 600 automobiles are lost in the snowdrifts, some of which are ten 'feet high. In some small towns the newspapers depended only on radio for their news, all the wires being down.