SHOP WRECKED

Gisborne Herald, Volume LXVI, Issue 20036, 7 September 1939, Page 7

SHOP WRECKED

CRASHED INTO BY BUS SCENE OF CHAOS (Pei- Press Association.) CHRISTCHURCH, this day. Swerving across the roadway after striking a light delivery van at a corner shortly before 7 o'clock this morning, a six-ton Diesel bu.; belonging to the Christchurch Tramway Board leapt on to the footpath and smashed through the side wall of a grocer’s shop owned by Mr. 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 l ad a miraculous escape by being thrown on to the floor, where lie escaped the flying glass and smashed in metal work. The bus struck the wooden wall at a slight angle -and crashed through as if it were matchwood, the nose disappearing into the storeroom at the rear of the shop with jagged, 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, 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.