A REMARKABLE STORY.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXIX, Issue 3774, 19 September 1907, Page 3

A REMARKABLE STORY.

More like romance than fact reads a story that has just come from Minneapolis, a busy American city of more than 300,000 population. For some years past there has been continued dissatisfaction with the successive city administrations. Great sums of money have been spent for which no satisfactory accounting could be made by the Mayors and their officers, and repeatedly these men have been denied re-election because of this very thing. Recently the truth has become known, and the very 7 men who were turned out of office in disgrace, are now being recognised as men of a heroic and self-sacrificing mould. It seems that in the excavations for a very deep cellar some seven y 7 ears ago, workmen found large, and hitherto, undiscovered caverns. The matter was kept quiet, and the city engineers made the astonishing discovery that the entire business part of the city. was built on a honeycomb series of caverns in a deep stratum ot shale rock, and than Minneapolis stood in peril of a very great disaster upon even the slightest earthquake shock. Such an alarming discovery was followed by many secret conferences of city officers and men high in standing in the community, and it was decided that no part of it must be allowed to become generally known for fear of creating a panic in the community. It has cost many 7 millions of dollars to fill some of these caverns with concrete and to erect concrete and steel colums in the largest of these, and these mysterious expenditures, coming year after year, have resulted in severe strictures upon the city administrations by both Press and public of the city. The work having been completed last week, every detail of the city’s peril and how it was averted was made public. The account books, audited by bankers, who had been sworn to the city secret, were bared, and Minneapolis congratulated herself that she had escaped the fate of San Francisco.