VIOLENT ENTRY

Wairarapa Times-Age, 7 September 1939, Page 5

VIOLENT ENTRY

CHRISTCHURCH BUS SMASHES INTO GROCER’S SHOP. CHAOTIC SCENE RESULTS. ißv Telegraph—Press Assocl-T’on.) CHRISTCHURCH, September 6. Swerving across the roadway after striking a light delivery van at a corner, shortly before seven o’clock this morning, a six-ton Diesel bus belonging- to the Christchurch Tramway Board leapt on to a footpath and smashed through the side wall of a grocer's shop owned by Mi - C.. Schumacher. So resounding was the crash that the occupants of the building, who were at breakfast, “thought they were being bombed by German aeroplanes.’’ There were no passengers in the bus, but the driver had a miraculous escape by being thrown on to the floor, where he escaped flying glass and smashed-in metal work. The bus struck a wooden wall at a slight angle and crashed through it as if it were' matchwood, the nose disappearing into a storeroefin at the rear of the shop, with jagged and splintered ends of wood encircling it. Saws and axes had to be used to free the bus. Inside the shop, shattered ends of timber displaced packing cases and sacks, collapsed shelves and cracked ceilings. A telescoped doorway and innumerable broken packets and tins of groceries, all seeping amongst the wreckage of several bottles of kerosene. combined to make the scene chaotic.