WHIRLWIND AT GREYMOUTH.

Kumara Times, Issue 1442, 12 May 1881, Page 2

WHIRLWIND AT GREYMOUTH.

GREAT DESTRUCTION OE PROPERTY. At half-past four o’clock this morning Greymouth was again visited by one of those calamities which are produced by the meeting of two currents of air blowing in opposite directions and causing a whirlwind. Whether it was produced by one current sweeping down the Gorge and coming into contact with another from the sea, or whether one current swept along the coast from the north meeting another from the south, -and finding vent on the comparatively flat ground on which the town is built, we are not at present informed; but it appears to have been more destructive than on either of the two previous occasions,—the first on the night of Sunday, the 14th March, 1872 ; and the second one about three years ago. From what we can learn the wind seems to have commenced a breach at M'Gregor’s smithy and Ashton’s stables, taking off the roof and front of both places. Crossing Boundary street, it takes off the verandah of the butchery and breaks in the front of one or more houses on the north side of Mackay street; then across the lastnamed street, it makes a heap of ruins several houses at the back of Duncan M‘Lean’s store, among which were Jones’s bakery, Noyes’ smithy, and the front part of Stratford and Cook’s new store. The whirlwind, its track about forty or fifty feet wide, then struck the transept of the English Church at the corner of Albert and Haspital streets, and completely demolished the new chancel. .- Coates’s bonded store is also entirely destroyed. Many verandahs have been uplifted and windows smashed. But it seems wonderful that all this destruction should take place without loss of life, or injury to anyone—at least so far as at present known here; and we sincerely hope this is the case. The path of the whirlwind seems to have been only a chain further north than the one in 1872, which at that time struck the south-western corner of the English Church. On that occasion, we remember, a piece of galvanised il-on, after being lifted off the roof of Wickes’s timber-yard, cut a chimney of the same material in two, shot through the weatherboards of a gentleman’s house, knocked a picture frame that was suspended inside off the wall, and finally alighted on the parlor table. A house close by, in \Vhich a happy couple were, perhaps “ fondly dreaming,” was heaved off the piles, and the roof lifted clean off. The occupants skedaddled into the street in their nightclothes, in torrents of rain, to find shelter elsewhere.