VILLAGES MENACED

Wairarapa Age, 15 August 1928, Page 5

VILLAGES MENACED

COLLAPSE OF MAMMOTH ICE BARRIER. MILLIONS OF TONS OF WATER RUSHING TO PLAINS CONSTERNATION IN NORTHERN INDIA United Press Association. —By Electric Telegraph.—Copyright. (Received Tuesday, 7.5 p.m.) DELHI, August 14. . Villages in Kashmir and the northern parts of the Punjab are gravely endangered as the result of the collapse of a mamoth ice barrier, holding back millions of tons of water, pent up in the former bed of the River Shayak, in the Karakoram Range, near Heh Kashmir. The dam burst at nine o’clock on Sunday night and a torrent is now rushing with great force towards the plains from a height of seventeen thousand feet. ..Ail villages below the flood level of the Indus have been evacuated and thousands of refugees are pouring into Peshawur. Colonel Howell, British Resident in Kashmir, had been encamped at the site of the dam for several days and.’ was the first to give a warning of the break. Immediately a chain of giant bonfires were lighted, stretching two hundred miles along the loftiest mountains and river banks. To assist the evacuation large forces of police and soldiers are posted on the banks of the Kabul and Indus rivers. Now shera, a big military station, has been evacuated. It is feared that if it is attacked and the bridge swept away the North-west frontier will be cut off. Before the collapse of the ice barrier the lake was nine miles long and five hundred feet deep. In- ptaces the- ice wall was twelve hundred' feet thick and a thousand feet wide. The water level had been rising two feet daily for several weeks past.—(Australian Press Association.)