HEAVY WEATHER

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIV, Issue 77, 21 September 1911, Page 6

HEAVY WEATHER

SHIPPING HAMPERED. By Telegraph—Press Association. Wellington, Wednesday. The Kftpiti, which left *Lyttelton at noon, yesterday, arrived here at 8.30 a.m. this morning, after a rough passage. As she was coining into the Heads an immense sea came over the poop, sweeping the lifeboat and everything movable 011 deck overboard, and injuring two of the crew, P. Brien, able seaman, and E. Milson, lamp trimmer, who were thrown against the winch. The vessel .broached to, but was quickly got on her course again.

The Tarawera mad? a very long trip from Napier' She left there for Wellington at 5 p.m. 011 Monday and reached here shortly before i) a.m. this morning. She was plugging against a heavy southerly gale for the greater part of the time. The forecastle was flooded and some deck cargo damaged.

THE GALE IN WELLINGTON. LYALL BAY BEACH. DEVASTATED. Wellington, Last J^ight. It is still blowing hard and •raining' to-night, and the weather is very cold. The force "of the gale was felt very keenly at Lyall ibay, where the breakers have rushed in with tremendous force.

On Tuesday night the water reached the termination of the tramway line, and undermined the foundations of many buildings on the bea«h. The men's dressing shed, thirty feet long, was almost entirely swept away and ihe almost completed club house of the Lyall Bay Stirf Club, ■forty feet long, had disappeared. A iraised stand on the beach had gone and left no trace. A shed of the Wellington Chair Company had fared badly, but still stood.

The beach is strewn to-day with debris | and Wreckage of every description. The,' breakers rushed shorewards at express speed, their boiling crests ten feet abovfc the sand.

Almost everything movable has disappeared, a clean sweep having been made of the -beach. The few building* remaining seem doomed. The sides of the sandhills are covered with lifebuoys, seats with legs and backs broken, notice to bathers, life-saiving reels, chairs, boxes which had been hastily moved out of reach of the sea, and the concrete foundations oi rue dressing-shed, broken into pieces ten feet long and about half a ton -weight.