The Bridgeport evening farmer., 1910-02-18
E. H. DILLON & co.
A BLU;v IN JAMAICA Things That Happen When a Big
 Storm Breaks Loose There.
 A WEST INDIAN HURRICANE.

1t Will Leap Out of Clear Sky and
 Level Almost Everything In Ifk-
 Path - Then Comes a Torrentiai
 Downpour That Ends In Flood.
 Have you ever been through West Indian hurricane" said a man who has lived in the tropics on and off for a number of years. Do you want to know what the experience is like?
 "A hurricane will leap out of clear sky. swoop down on city, blow ev- erything in it's path fiat and pass on. Then follows the tail >of the hurricane. steady breeze blowing in the same direction, but at a much lower veioci- ty. This is likely to continue for many hours, sometimes for many days, md is always accompanied by a tor rential downpour of rain.
 "I was in Kingston. Jamaica, at the time of the hurricane of 1903. At 3 o'clock in the afternoon I was in my office on the top floor of rickety wooden building. As suddenly as a clap of thunder the room went dark.
 'i had q pretty good idea of what was about to happen and, going to the window, looked out across the roofs. A black cloud had whirled up out of the southwest. obscuring the sun, but the mountains back of the city were still golden with light.
 "In less than quarter of an hour the wind reached us. The first struc- ture that went was a wooden watch tower about 200 feet high that had been used in the old days to locate ships approaching the harbor. It had weathered all previous hurricanes. but this time it went down like house of cards. Spars of lumber from that tower were carried as far as twenty blocks before they came to the ground.
 ''Then the spire of the church went. the roofs of a good many residences were torn off. and some fine palm trees in the public gardens snapped off about halfway from the ground. Buildings ill Kingston. however. are calculated to stand pretty severe blow, They are built only few stories high. and the roofs present a broad and compara-
 
 ering the velocity at which that hurri- cane was travelling, the damage was not great. Even my crazy office build ing withstood it. But the tail of the thing followed. with heavier rain than l have ever seen before or since. To say that it came down in bucket fuls would be mild. It was as if the clerk of the weather had taken the plug out of some huge vat suspended above our heads and allowed the wa ter to plump straight down on us.
 sIn three hours the macadam on the streets had been washed into the har- Dor. The street outside my window was rushing river as much as four feet deep in places. l saw cart try to cross it, but with the water above the axle of the wheel and the horses legs being washed away from under it it was an impossible task. and the driver turned back. Big casks and packing cases were dancing on the sur- face like corks.
 "As you can imagine, did not get home to supper that evening. It was 8 o'clock before the rain stopped and the water in the streets had drained into the harbor. Even then traffic had not begun to reorganize itself.
 The trolley car tracks had been washed out. and no cars were run ming. Cabs. however. were doing a roaring business, and eventually 1 got cabman to drive me home for three times his customary charge
 '"The damage to property in King ston mounted up to hundreds of thou sands of dollars. but the real destruc. tion was wrought in the country dis tricts. Floods wiped out many negro village and sent the fiimsy houses floating down the rivers. The railroads were tied up for Eearly a week Every banana tree in the path of the hurri- cane was uprooted. Oh. yes, West Indian hurricane can do lot of dam age when it gets busy.
 Loss of life, did you say? Of course there was. Nearly 200 people were killed throughout the island on that oe- casion, but we grow accustomed to that in the West Indies. We expect a hurricane every once ill awhile, and we know that it will take its toll of human life when it comes. If you had been telling the story you would prob ably have mentioned that first of all. but sudden death is so common below the tropic of Cancer that we get cai- Ious, suppose. ."-New York Sun.