DISASTER IN PARIS

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LVII, Issue 23, 17 June 1914, Page 5

DISASTER IN PARIS

DESTRUCTIVE THUNDERSTORM AND TORRENTIAL RAINS. PEOPLE DROWNED IN FLOODED' STREETS. WATER ENTERS SUBTERRANEAN RAILWAYS. YAWNING CHASMS EVERYWHERE.

By Cable—Press Association-Copyright Received 16,11.33 p.m.

Taris, June 16. Tlie worst thunderstorm in fifty years has occurred. There was a torrential downpour for two and a-lialf hours. Several sewers burst. A subsidence caused a hole 130 square yards liy forty feet deep in the Place St. Philippe. At Duroule, a crowd was standing under an awning. Fifteen were whirled away in the flood and momentarily engulfed. Five were drowned. Yawning gaps, ten feet across, appeared in many of the roads, which collapsed into the excavations for the electric underground railway, some 50ft deep. Into one of these a motor-bus fell, killing a number of passengers.

Two taxi-cabs fell" thirty feet into a hole, 'three persons being killed. Several buildings collapsed. Many cellars were flooded. The gas mains exploded, blowing up the pavement. The electricity failed on the underground railway in the Place Concorde. The passengers were in a state of panic. A similar panic occurred in the street, where there was a wild rush to esape from the crumbling earth. Even the police fled. The damage in Paris amounts to at least half a million.

The storm struck a building in course of construction at Choisy le Roi, where of twenty masons two were killed and eight seriously injured. It is believed that thirty may be found beneath the debris of the Metropolitan' Railway, which collapsed in various places.