Foreign News: Neunkirchen

Sound travels through air 1088 feet per second. At about ten minutes past six one evening last week the people of Basel, Switzerland heard a dull and distant rumble. It might have been thunder, but the sky was clear. A minute and a half later the same sound reached Cologne, Germany, 250 miles to the north. Between 6:00 and 6:15 that dreadful roar echoed the entire length of the upper Rhine, and had been heard in five countries: Germany, France, Belgium, Luxemburg, Switzerland. It marked the death of 62 people, injury to over 1,000, total destruction of a gas tank, iron works, benzol plant, all belonging to the Neunkirchen Iron Works, and most of the industrial section of Neunkirchen, a manufacturing city of 40,000 souls in the Saar Valley.

First explosion occurred in one of the great tar reservoirs adjoining the benzol factory. Alarm whistles sounded instantly. While fountains of blazing tar shot into the air, a rescue squad hurried toward the plant. Not one lived to reach it. Some of the burning tar fell on a gas tank 270 feet high, 150 feet in diameter. Houses crumpled like cards. Like a vast clay pigeon the top of the tank skimmed over the city and crashed on the railway tracks 2,500 feet away. Parts of a freight train were picked up seven miles away. There was not a whole pane of glass within five miles of Neunkirchen. An hour later when a filling station blew up it seemed no louder than a handclap.

Ambulances brought doctors and rescue workers from a dozen towns. Priests gave absolution and surgeons operated in the middle of the streets. One woman was dug from a rock pile that had been a house. “There were eight of us, drinking coffee,” said she, and died. Others wandered about all night, calling. That night villagers miles away could still see the benzol plant flaming like a candle to the dead.

—

A steam boiler in the Renault motor works near Paris exploded, caving in the roof of one of the buildings, injuring 150 people, killing eight.