WIND & LIGHTNING

Wairarapa Times-Age, 17 January 1939, Page 6

WIND & LIGHTNING

STORM DAMAGE IN WANGANUI

MUCH REPAIR WORK NEEDED

ON POWER LINES.

HURRICANE LIFTS MASSES

OF SAND.

(By Telegraph—Press Association.) u WANGANUI, This Day

Damage caused by yesterday’s cyclonic storm was mostly confined to power and telephone reticulations. The Power Board’s lines throughout the district suffered severely. Fuses were blown out by lightning and the gale tore down power lines and damaged poles over a wide area. The city was plunged into darkness for 15 minutes through a flash of lightning blowing out a fuse.

In many country districts farmers were unable to use their milking machines yesterday morning or at night. It is expected that several days will elapse before the service is back to normal, much repair work to broken and twisted linos and shattered insulators and fuses being necessary.

Lightning struck an area in the College Estate and a blinding flash wrecked wireless aerials and struck power and telephone lines. An aerial and the top guy wires on one wireless mast were burnt to fragments. Black marks on the side of a house bear witness to intense heat. A neighbour's wireless set was smashed, lightning bringing down the aerial. The noise accompanying the explosion was terrific and the air above homes in the vicinity was filled with shooting flames and the houses all appeared to bo ablaze. A. mass of sand, five feet high, was driven along the Castleci if! Beach toward the breakwater. Thousands of tons on the move presented an amazing sight and looked like swirling black smoke as the sand was lifted in columns by the hurricane and swept along the beach. Tremendous seas pounded the beach and moles, but no damage is reported to the latter. The storm is still raging, though abating somewhat.