SCHOOL TRAGEDY

Evening Post, Volume CXI, Issue 30, 5 February 1931, Page 14

SCHOOL TRAGEDY

TECHNICAL COLLEGE COLLAPSES

One of the worst tragedies occurred at the Technical School, a brick building, which collapsed while the scholars were still inside. Dozens were trapped and buried under the avalanche of ibricks and tiles. It was impossible to estimate the number killed, but it is thought that at least 20 have perislttd.

Another centre of death\ was the 'Nurses' Home at the Public Hospital, la three-story structure, which collapsed in a tangled'mass as though soma giant hammer had smitteu it a blovr from above. ,All the night nurses wero sleeping on the ground floor, and not one of them escaped alive.

The Marine Parade presented a strange spectacle of residents from the houses opposite who had snifted out into the open and were erecting tenfi on the beach to spend the night in the open. As the shakes continued with varying intensity throughout the day there was considerable danger in remaining in the houses. /

On all the open spaces in the city tents were erected. On the spot near the railway station about a hundred tents made a little canvas city.

The Courthouse, which is a wooden building, has not suffered so much aa the brick and cement structures, but it had yesterday a grim arid pathetic reminder of the. awful suddenness of the visitation. The Court room had been turned into a morgue, and on the floor we're the bodies of ten of the victims. Eight of them were men whose clothes proclaimed them to be labourers. One was a woman and one a child.

Dr. W. W. Moore's private hospital on Marine Parade presents a sighi that beggars description. It is a large twostory concrete building, and now lies back at an angle of 60 degrees off the plumb. The whole of the interior is a mass of fallenmasoury, roof tiles and wrecked furniture. Yet the marvellous thing is that no one was hurt.

Latest reports from Napier indicate that the fire, which started in the Masonic Hotel ruins, worked its leisjurely but deadly way in every direction till at nightfall nothing inflamlinable remained from the Fire Station to tho Albion Hotel. The brigade was powerless, to do more than handle isolated outbreaks, and at 8 o'clock last night large fires werel still burning in the main street, while another big blaze ' was burning unchecked in a group of houses behind the Fire Station, and near the Manchester Unity building, which was also threatened with destruction.

Millions of pounds' worth of damage has been' done. It can be safely said that not a single building of any consequence has escaped the twin destroyers within a radius of half a mils of the Masonic'; HoteL . The streets ar« unrecognisable, much less the individual stores, hotels, etc.