NAPIER’S HOPELESS DAWN

Taranaki Daily News, 6 February 1931, Page 5

NAPIER’S HOPELESS DAWN

CROWDS HUDDLE ON BEACH

BjtORNING TOUR OF THE TOWN. SHOCKING SCENES-OF TRAGEDY. What a hopeless dawn it was to which most people awoke on Wednesday morning! The huddled hundreds who had kept their weary vigil throughout the night on the beach in front of the Napier Marine Parade saw the stifl riiSe in rcey splendour on what ;n other circumstances would have been a delightful scene. The two big ships, the Northumberland and the Taranaki, lying off the coast awaiting developments, had been augmented by another big ship and a coastal freighter, and very picturesque they looked silhouetted against the first flush of the morning. But no sooner had the sun risen than a fierce gale began to rage from the west, fanning the dying fires of the previous night into fresh vigour and choking ths beachcombers in dense , clouds of eipoke.

An inspection of the town in daylight showed that the damage had been nothing less than appalling. Every hank in the town has been razed, and in some cases the strongrooms have succumbed to the earthquake. Fire did the rest.

Gone are all the books, and the statements and the bundles of notes, and no banks, of course, can under the circumstances pay out anything. Consequently most people are penniless. Even in Napierls darkest hour there Was, the optimist who could make a joke of everything. “Let the cockies rejoice,” he said. “Where are their deeds of mortgage?” And the listeners were courageous enough to laugh even at this grim humour. INJURED ROAM THE TOWN. To see the maimed and injured walkinw hopelessly about, some of them with their wounds dressed and some not. was as tragic as it was pathetic. The Marine Parade war memorial and the baud rotunda alongside it have suffered with everything else. The statue from the war memorial has toppled to the ground, and the rest of the ponderous masonry is in a precarious condition. The band rotunda is annihilated.

Daylight revealed the place in the Marinb Parade buildings where explosives were used to blow up a building and thus arrest +he progress of the fire. Several hundred yards of battens were laid down to the water’s edge, and a hole breached in the sea wall so that the fire engine cOuld draw on sea water. AH the usual water supply is completely Out of. Commission through the breaking of the mains, as is also the efewferage - system. Motor-cars were in commission everywhere; but unless the business was urgent no conveyance for private use could bo had for love or money. Systematic. inspection of the remnants of the town could be made only by walking. So the News representative trudged on foot, and he covered many long miles before the day was done. It w as marvellous how so many of the wooden residences perched on the edge of the many steep faces of the hilly portion of Napier escaped. Many of them were hanging precariously, it is true, but still tliey were there. And the only apparent-serious fire that ruined a large portion of the elevated residential portion of the town was one that swept the slope of Shakespeare Hill above Tiffin Park? A walk to Port Ahuriri along the main tram route via Shakespeare Road revealed huge landslips along the whole length of road. In fact round the steep edges of the hills there have been hundreds of huge slides. It is difficult to find a gap where the edge of the hill has not slid away. Giant pinris insignifi trCes have been rooted up and carried bodily away, and many of them 114 in the strangest positions against th- road at the bottom. HOUSES CARRIED AWAY. Houses have been carried away too—not many of them fortunately, for most of th 6 houses near the edge were built just far enough back to escape the slide. But with the houses situated at the bottom of the slopes it is anothe: matter. Not dozens but scores of them Have been overwhelmed.

Here and .there an eave or piece of mf iron or timber sticking out of a great mass of soil, shows that a whole house is buried somewhere ufidOrnfeUh. Who knows how many people may be buried finder these moufidS? Presuming that the great majority escaped by running outside, this still leaves a large number who must have been caught unawdres.

It is difficult to imagine how the excavation of these houses can ever be completed, for it would be almost impossible to disturb some .of those mounds of earth without further huge Slips occurring that would engulf the excavators. All alon<v Shakespeare Road, where houses hare not been completely buried, homes Be at all sorts of odd angles. Some subsided in the middle; btlicrp at the corners. Many appear to have escaped any form of serious structural damage, but in practically every case the chiniriey, unless built of ferro-concrete, has snapped off at the poof. Some of the tops of the chimneys have slid off the roof; some have remained bodily on the roof; and some have crashed through the roof into the rooms underneath. The state of affairs existing on Shakespeare Road may be taken as existing on practically every other residential road in Napier, though of course on the level areas there have been no landslips—only huge cracks in the ground. , „ , ~ Alono- the waterfront at Port Ah<Jriri the force of the earthquake seems to have had most effect, judging by the enormous fissures in the ground. Ou every fii.dc they extendi Roads have beftn raised and lowered, and tram rails twisted inconceivably or snapped actually 'into pieces. The site of the v.ool and other bulk stores at Port Ahuriri. is one of complCte desolation. What the earthquake started fire completed, and the whole block has been fazed to the ground. The wonder of it is how tlie oil store,-, on the waterfront escaped destruction. What would have happened had they caught alight one can only imagine. The heroism of the fire brigade, like that of the nursed at the hospital, .the doctors, and, in fact, hundreds of other people, is almost beyond comprehension.

As the Daily News representative parsed the brigade wag still fighting the dying fire, which was frequently breaking out afresh in some unburnt portion °of the wrecked block. As the firemen worked they stood on a petrol conduit from the oil stores that had buckled up with the heat like a figure S but had not burst, and for nearly twenty-four hours the brigade had been.

doing that continually, fighting desperately to prevent the fire from spreading across the street to the oil tanks situated only a few yards from them.

PITIFUL GROUPS OF HUMANITY.

On every side as one moved along were pitiful groups of humanity fearful of entering their homes. Children wrapped up in blankets under tarpaulins. men and women out in the open with nothing but a little food and some meagre furniture. The seashore in every direction was lined with these wayside camps—thousands of them. And in face of the fact that many of the people were absolutely' ruined, even if they escaped the worse fate of death or cruel injury, it was marvellous how they could smile and joke as they did. There was a feeling of tenseness, however, that was a manifestation of the real state of mind, and when an extra heavy ’quake came women sometimes fainted, and men too. Children merely cried hysterically, wild-eyed with an awful terror that gripped unmercifully. In the near distance across the harbour one could see where road connection with Wairoa and Gisborne had been very effectively severed. Both of the end spans of thp magnificent new concrete North bridge were tilted at an impossible angle, one end in the sea and the other skywards. Temporary repairs of a safe and immediate nature would be out of the question from the appearance of the bridge at that distance.

That queerly tilted bridge was the characteristic of the sea view, together with the tilted beacons that ones used to guide steamers into port. The harbour itself looked just the same size as before, but when one was told it was seven feet shallower than it used to lie the placid streteh of blue water engendered an interest of a morbidly fascinating kind. Who knew, everybody was asking himself, when the sea bottom was going to rise further, or perhaps drop back to its old position, which would be just as bad? ■ To landward one’s eyes strayed everlastingly to those desolate landslips—hundreds of them there were—forming a belt of bare nakedness that circled 1 residential hills. And studded in the bottom of the belt at more or less frequent intervals was a buried house, the home, perhaps, of an extinct life. Who knew? Who would ever know? That is what the dully curious people on the beach mechanically asked themselves.

Berthed snugly at the inner basin of the harbour was H.M.S. Veronica. So snugly, in fact, that it seems doubtful when she will ever sail out again—if ever. Careful soundings over a wide area Will have to be taken before the attempt is made, and,possibly a way out will have to be dredged.

The “Iron Pot,” so familiar to all Napier people, gives a good indication of the rise iii level of tlie whole of the country, for it is now high and dry above sea level. GREAT FISSURES IN GROUND. Enormous fissures have cracked into an indescribable state the ground in the vicinity of the Verpniea. Great gaping wounds in the earth up to two feet across threaten the unwary pedestrian, and huge subsidences give the locality a drunken appearance. The outer edge of the wharf against which the Veronica is moored has. become severed from the main portjon by a split along a line of underground standards technically known as “ties.” This outer portion of the wharf leans giddily against the Veronica, and for safety’s sake the warship is anchored to the “mainland” —a very doubtful appellation to give it under the existing circumstances—by a very long cable terminated by the ship’s anchor, which is somewhat lialf-liearted-ly hooked against the’railway line. Perhaps the presumption is that at the worst the ship would have to pull several miles of railway line after it should it be forced to go to sea. Nearby the premises'of the New Zealand Tobacco Company presented a very forlorn appearance. Most of the building collapsed, but it was spared destruction by fire and merely sentenced to the ignominy of exposing' the whole of its interior secrets to the common gaze? Pickets, chiefly from the warship, were on duty to see that pilferers did not help themselves to tree tobacco. All roads from the port to the old town, either round the hills or over the hills, except Shakespeare Road and Milton Road, are blocked by slips or subsidences. Even in Milton Road, as on Shakespeare Road, landslips along the entire length of each side of the road have performed ■ terrible havoc. Wrecked houses and buried houses .tell their piteous tale, and ■as if in grim re-, minder of the fate of many another now gone past all hope of relief, a huge boulder, probably twenty tons in weight, has taken up its position in the middle of the road.

One may go through the harrowing ordeal of all the other tragic sights in the stricken area, And bear it in stoic silence, but it takes • the scene on Hospital Hill to stir one to the depths. The magnificent two-storied nursing home collapsed in a heap, and it is there and in the women’s ward tha,t a terrible death roll has been provided. TRAPPED IN THEIR BEDS. All night nurses asleep in their beds were trapped, and aa, far ac is known twelve nurses were crushed to death. Women and children in the wards auso suffered severely, as well as the nurses attending them. No greater act of heroism, it is said, was ever known than the conduct of these nurses, and their names should be commemorated for ever in the annals of the service. Pen cannot write of the fearful spectacle at the hospital during the last three days. Caterpillar tractors and men with oxy-acetylene gas flames with which to bite through the steel reinforcing are engaged in pulling the tangled debris to pieces. It is a very ’oug job, rewarded every now and then with the recovery of what was once a living human being. Ghastly evidence of human suffering protrudes here and there from amongst the debris. And meanwhile nurses and others who have been working more or less continuously for the whole of three days continue to dispense their marvellous store of human kindness.and service from temporary quarters the hospital grounds. On the top of those hills the continuous earthquake shocks are, felt more violently.than anywhere else. The whole territory rumbles ominously and rocks in a sickening manner. And through jt all a pitiful strcaih of humanity drawn from all over New Zealand pours anxiously towards the hospital hill. Friends and relatives make anxious inquiries and tears and a look of utter despair show only too plainly the answer that they often get. “We are sorry but we don’t know. We can’t say where she if.” Only the dreadful pile of bricks knows the full truth.

Fire for the most part has spared the Napier hills, where twisted wooden houses, chimneyless and sometimes tilted, represent the chief structural damage. Occasionally a house, if it happened to be too near the edge, has aimply disappeared. BricXhouses invariably have collapsed. But wherever one goes, whether on the high land or the low land, the,people all camp outside. [There

is a deadly fear of the confinement of four walls. Oh Tuesday night it was not so bad, for as if in some compensation a benign full moon beamed down from a cloudless sky oh a windless world. GALE AND RAIN SQUALLS. On Wednesday niglit, as if repenting of such a show of mercy, the elements raged. A fierce gale of terrific force Swept the stricken area from the south, accompanied by heavy squalls. How the people fared in the open, racked by the eternal ’quakes that showed no mercy, can hardly be imagined. Bluff Hill, tlie edge of which has slid bodily into the sea, is not a spectacular sight. It is merely a long, bare slope of earth with a large toe of earth near the water’s edge, and the breakwater still reaching pathetically out. pathetically? When it is seven feet higher than it was and thus more of a breakwater than ever? Yes, pathetically, for it is an emblem of a thing departed. Where is Napier’s harbour now, and what would it serve if it were its old self again? It is true that Napier still has a large number of residences that have sustained very little damage, particularly on the heights, in Napier South and at the eastern end of the Marine Parade. And some of the suburban shops still remain. But there is not a great deal else. It is not an exaggeration to say that Napier as a town has, for the time being at any rate, vanished off the map. With the water supply and sewerage system completely ruptured by innumerable breaks, with constant earthquakes that might at any moment bring fresh disaster there seems no alternative to a complete’ evacuation of the town.

Hastings is little better off, and it may be necessary to abandon it also to its own fate for a time. Many residences arc capable of being lived in, but who can stand up to the rigour of those ghastly frequent