Explosion Wrecks City Music Shop

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 809, 1 November 1929, Page 1

Explosion Wrecks City Music Shop

ELECTRIC CABLE FUSES

MOST STOCK DESTROYED An explosion caused by the fusing of an electric cable about 2 o’clock this morning wrecked the gramophone shop in Karangahape Road of Messrs. Howie, Limited, and shattered the plate glass window of an adjoining shop. The force of the explosion was sufficient to smash two small windows across the street. The damage is estimated at between £2,000 and £3,000. from the broken windows, tangled masses of woodwork and machinery which once had been gramophones, shattered gramophone records and thousands of needles lay in a jumbled heap inside Howies’ depot this morning. Doors half torn from their hinges and partitions leaning drunkenly, bore testimony to the force of the explosion, which had almost completely wrecked the shop. Rainwater which had driven in through a shattered skylight added to the scene of destruction.

NO FIRE DANGER , Everything was in order when the j shop was closed at about 10.30 last ; evening. The City brigade received j a call early this morning, but there | was at no time any danger to the shop from tire, although the roof of the street verandah was blackened by smoke from the bitumen in which the cable is set. Although the window j was shattered completely, the double doors which lead into the shop were untouched. The fanlight directly above, however, was broken. Every gramophone in the shop is damaged, many being beyond repair and others having legs missing or mechanical faults. A heavy electric generator attached to a panatrope near the door was thrown several feet by the concussion. The partitions of a number of sound-proof rooms along one side show gaping cracks where they had been pushed away from the wall and ceiling, and records in many cases have been hurled from one room to another through gaps in the walls. Windows were broken at the rear of the shop and in the basement. Rows of records in a recess under a stairway appear to have escaped damage, and a telephone, hanging to a swaying partition in the middle of the wreckage, was still functioning this* morning. The plate glass window of the Economic Cash Stores, adjoining, was broken by the force of the explosion and a few china articles on display were smashed. A stairway on the other side of the wrecked shop was thrown out of alignment and a small fanlight above the display window of the Bristol Piano Company’s shop broken. Small windows in upper ■ stories of shops across the street were j also shattered.