Flood & Fire

St. Swithin's Day, if thou dost rain For forty days it will remain. St. Swithin's Day, if thou be fair. For forty days 'twill rain nae mair.

People of the East last week muttered about St. Swithin because it had rained in a few places along the Atlantic Coast on his Day (July 15),* and on day after day thereafter the skies opened, the clouds burst and most of the East from Maine to Georgia was drenched to sogginess. Meteorologists explained that a "cold front" had merely come to a halt at seaboard, meeting warm, moist airs from the sea. This knowledge "was small comfort to marooned motorists in New Jersey, stalled train commuters in New York, flooded manufacturers in Pennsylvania, growers of damaged tobacco in Connecticut, potatoes on Long Island, cotton in Georgia. Big League baseball games were repeatedly postponed, golf tournaments delayed, resort business washed out. A naval bombing plane, rain-blinded, crashed in Connecticut with three fatalities. At Liberty, N. Y., 25,000 tenpins worth $1 each were swept away--along with a shed where they were stored--down the trout-famed Beaverkill. In Delaware, bridges were carried away; the Delaware River rose six feet.

Across the South into Texas and Oklahoma went St. Swithin's trouble. The San Saba River (southwest Texas) flooded an area 100 miles long, 50 miles wide, making ranchers swim for their lives, when 14 inches of rain fell in a week.

While the East drowned, the Northwest prayed for rain. From Mt. Shasta to Vancouver Island and eastward into Montana, hundreds of fierce fires raged in tindery forests. In ten days, 17,000 acres of National Forests had burned and thousands more burn every day. Near Ryderwood, Wash., 35.000 acres of timber went up. Dry electric storms were the main cause, but in some cases miscreants were suspected of making jobs for themselves as fire fighters. On St. Swithin's Day alone, electric storms had started 200 fires in northern Idaho and western Montana. Klamath, Trinity, Siskiyou and Columbia National Forests were all on fire. Smoke hung over the high Sierras as far as Reno. Nev. It blinded forest lookouts, prevented them from spotting new outbreaks. Ships in Puget Sound used fog horns as the pall from the biggest fire of all, the worst in British Columbia's history, swept unchecked over 100,000 acres of Vancouver Island. Millions of feet of felled timber were consumed as well as standing trees. Brick-dry, the forests virtually exploded.

*St. Swithin, a Bishop of Winchester who died July 2, 862, was moved to a shrine in 971 on July 15, He had asked to be buried "exposed to passing feet and rain falling from the sky."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.