HOMESTEAD WRECKED

Wairarapa Times-Age, 30 December 1939, Page 6

HOMESTEAD WRECKED

-!■ I I — —II ■ DEVASTATION AT ORONGORONGO TORRENT OF ROCK & WATER. . (By Telegraph—Press Association.) WELLINGTN. This Day. No more extraordinary disaster has occurred in the Wellington Province than the wrecking of the homestead of E. L. Riddiford near the mouth of the Orongorongo on Tuesday night by a rushing torrent of rock and water, the consequence of the terrific fall of rain which hammered a small area of coastal lands for five hours. The reseult on the countryside was comparable only to the result of a terrific earthquake. A huge task, if it is possible of achievement at all, is ahead in clearing the homestead grounds of tens of thousands of tons of wash or rock but the main mass cannot be moved, for that would entail shifting a million tons. It was not rainfall in the ordinary sense that ate into the hillside and brought down in a few square miles of country hundreds of such rock washes. The guage at Baring Lighthouse, west of the homestead, registered 15.3 inches in five hours. The wreck was not revealed fully to the outside till Wednesday. Boulders are so high at the back of the house that one can step from the piled mass to the roof. Boulders filling the bedrooms almost to the ceiling burst through the doors and walls into the hall.l Had the doors and walls failed here, the disaster would have been fatal, for escape would have been hardly possible. The run of rock flowed from room to room as silt flows, so fierce was the rush of the flood.