Medicine: Earthquake Aftermath

Snugly tidied for the winter last week were the fishing villages along the Burin peninsula, which projects southward from southern Newfoundland. Provender was in the butteries, coal within the bins. Warehouses held stacks of dried and salted codfish, the season’s catch, ready to be shipped for profit—to buy calico, yarn, sweaters, boots. Men prophesied a serene winter. Then the fish-giving sea howled unwontedly. A great swoop of water slapped against the shore. It fell back, slapped up again and again. Rent, twisted, smashed, into flotsam went wharves, stores, homes, people. Devastation: more than a score killed and drowned; hundreds maimed and mauled; 500 homes, 100 fishing boats and 26 schooners smashed; 70 miles of coast stripped of wharves and fishing gear. At sea the quake shook ships. Nine of the 21 cables across the North Atlantic tore apart. Cable repair boats, always waiting for trouble, sped from ports to a point about 900 miles northeast of Manhattan. The breaks were found by exact instruments which measure the resistance of a continuous electrical conductor. Great grappling hooks groped for the cables on the sea floor. Healthy, temperate mechanics— spliced the broken wires to restore the intercourse of the hemispheres. Every half minute an earthquake occurs somewhere on earth. Great ones powerful enough to destroy towns happen about four times a year. Two especially sensitive zones exist: i) along the almost continuous stretch of the Alps, Caucasus and Himalaya mountains; 2) along the whole mountainous circle of the Pacific. Often shaken Italy is in the first zone, California and Japan in the second. Eastern North America, along the Appalachian chain goes through a noticeable, but usually harmless quake at least once a year, and a damaging one at about five year intervals. The probable cause of last week’s quake, according to Arthur Keith, chairman of the National Research Council’s Committee on Geology and Geography, is counter pressure. When glaciers and icecaps a mile thick covered eastern Canada and northeastern U. S., their weight squeezed the land rocks downward. Now the rocks are slowly bulging upwards.

“Intemperate or diseased men are not allowed to work on cable repair ships. Secretions (“clamminess”) from the pores of their fingers are injurious to the fine wires of a cable.