Yesterday's Weather

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXXVII, Issue 86, 11 December 1913, Page 5

Yesterday's Weather

JUST ABOUT A RECORD.

WORST FOR MANY YEARS. An old resident of Stratford, interviewed regarding the pretty general topic of conversation, yesterday's weather, stated that in his opinion it was nearly a record. He had known heavier rain and thunder as severe, but not often. He recalled one occasion, some years ago, when he got soaked to the skin while riding a distance of about two hundred yards. The scnool guage sliou-s that during the twenty-four hours ending at 9 o'clock tiiis morning the total rainfall was 2.57 in. The fall yesterday morning to 1 p.m. is not far from a record for the town. It worked out at about an inch and a-half per hour, which is "some rain." Some of the "forest giants" were not over well treated. On Mr Hancock's property on Flint Road two trees were struck by lightning and one was burnt. On Mr Brocklebank's land on Regan Street west a dead tree was split. Those who were in the open at the time the storm was at its worst report that the telephone and electric light wires played 'some very strange tricks, rather uncanny to behold.

The telephone wires apparently suffered somewhat severely. In the town several fuses blew out, about eighty being disabled. Talking to Whangamomona was like arguing the point with a circular saw, the Midhirst wire behaved as if it suffered from mil de mer', and the Mountain House bureau was temporarily wiped off the map, no telephonic communication being possible. At Harkness' foundry a singular accident occurred to a light switch situated inside a building just below where the current wires entered the building. A flash of lightning (said to be the third) apparently travelled in through the current wires and broke the porcelain base of the switch. There was a brass cap on the switch, screAved on, and this was forced off, despite the worm, and thrown to the other side of the room, a distance or about twenty feet.

A visitor to the quarry barracks on Mount Egmont states that the thunder and lightning was particularly impressive there, the whole of the thunder being of a fearsome sound and appearing to occur directly overhead.

The incidents were to some of the more nervous as the approaching of the'end of the World';■ |j ,>"[