TRAPPED BY FIRE.

Taihape Daily Times, Volume XII, Issue 3571, 6 September 1920, Page 3

TRAPPED BY FIRE.

Six men were nearly burned to to death in a smoke-flllcd refrigerating chamber in the hold of a steamship on lire in New York. While they lay flat on their faces, a companion, with an acetylene torch,, cut a hole in the vessels’ steel-plate side, through which all were pulled to safety. The ship, named Powhattan, had been drydocked in a Brooklyn yard. Scores of workers, repairing the damage caused by a collision, escaped when the lire was started by a red-hot rivet dropped among inflammable materials. The men working in the refrigerator, however, were driven back by the flames and shut themselves in. The Powhattan was .afterwards floated out into New York Bay, where by opening hqr seacocks the blaze in her hold was quickly extinguished.