MANAGUA’S ’QUAKE.

Waikato Times, Volume 109, Issue 18344, 2 June 1931, Page 3

MANAGUA’S ’QUAKE.

TERROR AND DESOLATION. A yiVID PEN PICTURE. A little brown-skinned girl, wearing a Marine’s shirt for a dress, "plucked a cheap yellow rag doll from ruins where twenty , had died." Here and there phonographs began bo play lively Spanish tunes in adobe houses. "The spell of death," continues Charles J. V. Murphy in a dispatch to the New York Herald Tribune, " still hangs over the wretched, gaping ruins, and United States Marine and soldiers of the Nicaraguan Guardia Nacional still stand with fixed bayonets on the corners, but they are beginning to smile and chaff for the first time in six days." Thus Managua, capital of Nicaragua, began to pick herself up from the smoking crumble of ruins leit by the terrible Holy Week earthquake, and struggle back to the normal course of life. The Death Roll. The death toll can only be estimated—at from 1000 to 1200. The property damage remains a matter of guesswork, as does the effect of the calamity on plans for the Nicaraguan Canal. "The evacuation of the city has been accomplished, and,” Mr Murphy, continues, "already those who, notwithstanding fear of new calamities, strife, and hunger, have refused to movei are nosing among the rubbish, salvaging here a piece of tile, there a sti’ip •’of tin, with which to make a place to live. "Water continues short in Managua, and what is available is heavily chlorinated, burning and offending the throat, and sharpening the overwhelming thirst. •‘The bread lines still are moving and trucks still roll out to the common graves with dead," the dispatch continues, "but the hysteria is going, and honest men are trying to get their feet on the earth again. “Order and recuperation are on the way, thanks to Gol. Frederic L. Bradman, commanding the Second Marine Brigade; Lieut.-Col. William C. Wise, Jr., his chief of staff; Lieut.;Col. Calvin B. Matthews, Director "' of the .Guardia; Matthem E. Hanna, the American Minister, and President Jose Maria Moncada. “President Moncada sits all day and night in a red-and-yellow building with walls cracked and broken as if by a shell, and strives to reassemble, piece by piece, his badly mutilated machinery of government. “Even the doctors who fled from the hospital and let 100 patients die in the smother of stone, even the Government officials who decamped and left the President and his everfalthful aid, General Somoza, to thread their way through the maze of calamity alone, are returning a trifle ashamed, and hoping to make up. Pain Qulokly Forsotten. “If anything appears striking during these hot, listless hours, it is the quickness with whioh pain can be forgotten. Business men were looking forward to re-opening the ohannels of oommerce. Irving A. I. Lindberg, The High Commissioner and Collector of Customs, had opened an office in the tented city within the Campo de Marte, and was reopening his books. The British Charge d’Affaires, Hugh W. Border, in an adjoining tent, was making plans with the British business men. “Moreover, the Government and Red Cross are paying labourers fifty cents a day for work about the city, which really is the pay to which they are most accustomed. It is hoped that this pitiful start will be the beginning of commerce. Several abandoned sawmills will be reopened to provide timber for temporary shelters. Out of such groping efforts is coming another beginning, and it is fascinating to watch. “According to Col. Gordon Hale, medical director of the Guardia, the total number of dead, as determined by an official survey, will be between 1000 and 1200.”