MANAGUA’S QUAKE

Hokitika Guardian, 27 May 1931, Page 5

MANAGUA’S QUAKE

SCENES OF TERROR AND DESOLATION.

A VIVID 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 bad died.” Here and there phonographs began to play lively Spanish tunes in adobe houses. “The spell of death,” continues Charles J. Y. 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 Nacionnl still stand with fixed bayonets on the cornel’s, but they are beginning to smile sit’d chaff for the first tint© in six days.” Thus Managua, capital of Nicaragua, began to pick herself up from the smoking crumble of ruins left by the terrible, Holy Week earthquake, and struggle back to the normal course of life.

The death toll can only he 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 tile city has been a.ccoinplished, and.” Mr Murphy continues, “already those who, notwithstanding fear of new calamities, strife, and hunger, have refused to move, are nosing among the rubbish, salvaging here a piece of tile, there a strip of tin, with which to make a place to live.

“Water continues short iu Managua and what is available is heavily chlorinated, burning and offending the throat, and sharpening the overwhelmtliirst.

“The bread lines still are .moving and trucks still r oll 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 a»d recuperation are on the way. thunks to Col. 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; Matthew E. Hanna, the American Minister, and President Jose Maria Moncada. “President Mo»cada sits all day and night in n red-and Well/ow building with walls cracked and broken as if by a shell, and strives to reassemble, piece by piece, bis badly mutilated machinery of government. “Even the doctors who lied from the hospital and let 100 patients die in the smother of stone, even toe Government officials who decamped and 'left the President ami his everfaithful aid, General ffomozu. to thread their way through the maze of cuhunity alone, are returning, a trifle ashamed, and hoping to make up,

“If anything appeal's striking during These hot, listless hours, it is the quickness "'ith which pain can he forgotten. Business men were looking forward to re-opening the channels of commerce. Irving and A. I. Lindborg, the High Commissioner and Collector of Customs, had opened an office in the tented city within the Campo de Marte, and was was re-opening Ins hooks. 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 lor work about the oitjv, which realty is the pay to which they nr© most accustomed. Tt is hoped that this pitiful start will he the beginning of commerce. Several abandoned sawmills will be re-opened 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 Halo, medical director of the Guardia. the total number of dead, as determined bv an official survey, will he between TOGO and 1200.”