GREAT FOREST FIRES.

Taranaki Herald, Volume LIV, Issue 13843, 24 December 1908, Page 10

GREAT FOREST FIRES.

THE MICHIGAN DISASTER.

Compared with the forest fires which swept through Michigan in October, our bush fires seem to be small affairs. Messages from New York to London state that a solid bank of flames ten miles wide and nearly seventy miles long advanced irresistibly across the peninsula. Towns and villages, residences and camps by the score, wero wiped out. The flames reached a height of a hundred feet, so the difficulty of fighting them may be imagined.

Anything more terrible than the fate of the refugees from Metz could not well be imagined. The train left at midnight, the carriages covered with blankets soaked in water. Slowly it crawled up tho hill out of the town, surrounded by fire. At the top the track was found to be on fire, so the only thing to do was to make a dash in the other direction. "Crouching in the cab of the engine I gave her full speed," said the enginedriver afterwards.- "I could hear the agonised shrieks of the scorching passengers cooped in the hot cars as they rushed through the flames. The end came near Nowincki, where the engine crashed through a burning culvert amid flames which swept over the train in great billows. It was impossible to move, and I could do nothing for the passengers. The fireman, the guard, and I took refuge in the engine tank until the water almost boiled, then the guard and I decided to* try to escape. We were joined by two of the passengers, one of whom disappeared later. We had an awful time, sometimes Avalking and sometimes crawling over ,the hot ground." The last man to leave Metz was a telegraph operator. He sent his wife and baby away by the train and remained at his post until the building caught fire. . Then he tapped out a final message, "Everything burning," jumped on a horse, and escaped. His wife and child were among those who met a horrible death. As is too often the case, this terrible loss of life and destruction of property was largely due to preventible cause 3. The woods were full of dry fallen timber, left by the lumbermen, and the clearings round the towns were not sufficient. With everything parched by drought, people actually employed fire to clear their land.