Encroachment

“ These coats, called ‘earthquake coats,’ might also, with properly constructed houses, be rendered unnecessary.
Destruction due to the nature of the underlying rocks.—That the nature of the ground on which a building stands is intimately related with the severity of the blow it receives is a fact which has often been demonstrated.
One cause of destruction is due to placing a building on foundations which are capable of receiving the full effects of a shock, and transmitting it to the buildings standing on them. ”

“ Once drawn within the down-draught of that hideous vortex, a whole army might be destroyed more certainly than even by the manifold death-dealing contrivances of modern science, a whole legislature lost in a single hour of ghastly and unhonoured catastrophe!
Oh, the sickening sweep of that descent! With what sensations of awe, horror, and strange, distraught admiration, must a doomed victim, once within that whirl, gaze about him!—for he has leisure to observe. The downward draught of those swift, wide-sweeping, spirally-whirling water-walls is comparatively slow. ”

“ The rushing sound which fluttered in the air was succeeded by a splintering crack or dull thud, or heavier groan, as the shafts flew home. And many a gallant man-at-arms fell to the ground in the death sob. ”

“ The Destruction produced by Earthquakes is not irregular.—If we were suddenly placed amongst the ruins of a large city which had been shattered by an earthquake, it is doubtful whether we should at once97 recognise any law as to the relative position of the masses of débris and the general destruction with which we are surrounded. ”

“ When an earthquake shock enters and proceeds along a line of buildings, the last building in the row will, of course, suffer the most, and will exhibit the greatest tendency to fly away from its neighbors. If the house stands on the edge of a canal, or cliff, this tendency is increased by the similar motion of the escarpment. ”

“ If by chance the mountain of water should, by an awful upheaval, rear the wreck upon its crest at landing, we would be engulfed in a moment of time. No power could save the buildings [Pg 148] which would be instantly shivered to heaps of floating debris. ”

“ The directions of cracks in a building are undoubtedly due to a complexity of causes, but for buildings situated in the region of shock the impulsive effect of the shock is probably107 the most important function to be considered. The method of applying the directions of emergence, deduced from observations on fractures, to determine the origin of a disturbance will be referred to in Chapter X. ”

“ An open ditch cut by the most skillful workman, in the summer, affords the best illustration of this underground mischief. Nothing can look smoother and more even than the bottom, until that uncompromising test of accurate levels, the water, makes its appearance: all on a sudden the whole scene is changed, the eye-accredited level vanishes as if some earthquake had taken place: here, there is a gravelly scour, along which the stream rushes in a thousand little angry-looking ripples ”

“ Breach, is on opening or gap made in a wall or rampart, with either cannon or mines, sufficiently wide for a body of troops to enter the works, and drive the besieged out of it.
Practical breach, is that where men may mount, and make a lodgment, and should be 15 or 20 feet wide.
Capital of a work, is an imaginary line which divides that work into two equal parts.
Capital of a bastion, a line drawn from the angle of the polygon to the point of the bastion, or from the point of the bastion to the centre of the gorge. ”

“ It is imagined that seven-eights of the houses in this city are demolished, and of those which still stand there are not perhaps twenty that will be found tenable. The customhouse, which was built very strong, is not much injured—the house which I occupy is three stories high, and was likewise very strong—it stood the shock without falling, but it was so much injured that I do not intend to sleep in it, especially as we are continually kept in a state of alarm by the frequent shocks which have daily taken place ever since the 26th ult. ”

“ I am wise, I figure that a friendly quake will soon again set the earth aquiver, and once again it will destroy your city; and the walls will crumble, and my stone will drop and shatter the jailer’s head. And having shattered it, it will leave upon his soft waxy blood-grey brain the impress of my song of freedom, like the seal of a king, like a new commandment of wrath—and thus will the jailer go down to his grave. ”

“ Breaches, or crevasses as they are termed in the United States, resulting from a deficiency in the strength or consistency of the banks, or from their being over topped or eroded by the current, produce a sudden rush of the flood-waters through the opening, which is much more damaging to the land in the neighbourhood of the breach than a gradual inundation. ”

“ The tremendous noise occasioned by the wind and rain—the roaring of the waters, together with the shock of an earthquake, which was sensibly felt about midnight—the shrieks of the poor sufferers crying out for assistance—the terror of those who in their houses heard them, and dared not open a door or window to give succour, and who momentarily expected to share the same fate, formed a scene which can hardly be conceived, and is still more difficult to be described. ”

“ The breach was by slow degrees made good with bricks, meaner ware borrowed from France; and since those times, the work of destruction and reparation has gone on, though to a lesser extent than before. We may put up with the building as it now stands, but we cannot help sighing when we think of what we have lost. ”

“ Like a flood that slowly undermines a bank, and which the proprietor regards not when he sees so tiny a current dribbling and oozing through, and scarcely bowing the grass between which it trickles, so came the Destroyer—slowly and almost imperceptibly undermining the current of life, and eating out the foundations, until there needed but one mighty rush, and all was over beyond recovery, and the work of destruction was completed. ”

“ It is impossible to conceive the effect of this eruption—five hundred and seventeen fellow-creatures, of all ages and sexes, some children, some adults, some old men and women, all entirely destitute of clothing, scrambling out together to taste the luxury of a little fresh air and water. ”

“ If the serpent will cast out a flood of waters after the woman who has fled into the wilderness from before his face, the earth may kindly open her mouth in the form of an earthquake, and drink up the flood or army. ”

“ Material is constantly being eroded from some and piled upon others. The time finally comes when they snap or spring, and, striking the rocks above, send out an earthquake shock. Quarrymen frequently feel a slight shock, and immediately after hear a report, showing that the strain in some rock has been relieved. ”

“ I was now going, with wind and current, to destruction; and cold, hungry, and fatigued, was obliged again to sit down in the water to rest, when an extraordinary circumstance greatly relieved me. On examining the wreck, to see if it was possible to detach any part of it to steer by, I perceived something loose, entangled in a fork of the wreck, and so carried along. This I found to be a small trunk, bottom upwards, which, with some difficulty, I dragged up upon the barge. ”

“ A breach is indeed an awful mound of6 dilapidation to look on, or rather a heap of disagreeable rubbish, particles of which sparkle brightly in the sun beams, while the whole seems to the amateur easy of ascent, but the wary veteran knows it to be a deceitful slope, re-entrenched from behind, and most probably cut off from all communication with the interior of the town. ”

“ The slight shock of earthquake that usher'd in our Fast Day here, and frighted many of our neighbours, not us, is a light matter compared with mobs and insurrections. Let us, as King David said of old, fall into the hands of God, and not into the hands of men. ”

“ D. J. LAWLOR.
13
An inquiry naturally suggests itself, By what means has a wreck, so perfect that a “working model” could be constructed from it, been so long preserved? Ordinarily, wrecks, being exposed to the direct action of the winds and waves, soon break up and disappear. How does it happen that this wreck formed an exception? That it was preserved by being embedded and buried in the sand, has been already intimated. The causes which at first operated to bury and conceal, and, at length, by their continued action brought the wreck to light, will be considered in the following chapter. ”

“ It is almost folly to attempt to effect a practicable breach in a fort built of such materials. The crust you knock off the face of a bastion or curtain, forms a great barrier to your approach to a solid footing. Young engineers are too apt to judge, from the appearance of the fallen mud, that the breach is practicable; when, the first step the storming-party takes, they find they sink up to their necks in light earth. ”

“ At the same time, the thuddings of the earth grew more severe than ever and they were accompanied by rumblings, roars, and reverberations of terrifying force and insistency. Crash after crash burst upon our ears as if from some remote storm-center—crash after crash that echoed and re-echoed eerily in that narrow corridor, until our ear-drums ached from the strain and our agitated hearts pumped with a thumping rapidity. ”

“ Suddenly the rock upon which we stood began to crumble; huge fragments broke away at our very feet and went whirling down into the yawning gulf.
Hope!
The word was but mockery!
Chaos would have been more befitting, for chaos had surely come! ”

“ It is true, of course, that avulsive action ordinarily calls to mind something somewhat sudden or, at least, of short duration, whereas accretion has as its essence the gradual deposit of material over a period by action of water flow. ”

“ After the great shock, those people who escaped got on board ships in the harbour, where many continued above two months; the shocks all that time being so violent, and coming so thick, sometimes two or three in an hour, accompanied with frightful noises like a rushing wind, or a hollow rumbing thunder, with brimstone blasts, that they durst not come ashore. The consequence of the earthquake was a general sickness, from the noisome vapours belched forth, which swept away above 300. persons. ”

“ Figures of men crawled out of the holes, or disappeared into them, or, on raised platforms of hand-hewn timber, windlassed the thawed gravel to the surface, where it immediately froze. The wreckage of the spring washing appeared everywhere--piles of sluice-boxes, sections of elevated flumes, huge water-wheels,--all the debris of an army of gold-mad men. ”

“ A mass of wreckage consisting of a small tree and a quantity of newly cut timber had come down the stream and become caught among the jagged rocks above the Bend, and in the midst of this wreckage, with the water rushing and foaming all around them, were a man and a boy, struggling wildly to save themselves from drowning! ”

“ Every once in a while the workmen about these wreck-heaps will stop their shouting and straining at the ropes, gather into a crowd at some one spot in the ruins, and remain idle and quiet for a little while. ”

“ Where the body is large, such as a house or church of masonry, or even a single wall exposed to shock in the plane of its length, overthrow may be impossible with given dimensions and given angle of emergence of the wave; but in such case dislocation or fissuring occurs, and the severed parts may or may not be overthrown, dependent upon the amount of the applied velocity consumed in producing fracture only. ”

“ By closing up the shafts and pouring down water, it was thought that the fire might have been extinguished, but to have done so would have been equivalent to saying that all below were dead—and would, indeed, have been death to any that might have been living—besides, the order to close the shafts would have drawn from all present at all interested in the fate of those below such a wail as no one would have cared to hear. ”

“ Even the very churches and shrines and all property, both public and private, had been ruthlessly despoiled everywhere by everybody, one's ears were deafened by the cries and shouts raised on all sides-in fact, an onlooker would have said an earthquake was taking place. ”

“ Direction determined from destruction of buildings.—When an observer first sees a town that has been partially shattered by an earthquake, all appears to be confusion, and it is difficult to imagine that in such apparent chaos we are able to discover laws. ”

“ A shock in whatever general direction acting here upon the houses and towers, perched on declivities, now rocky, now diluvial, and scattered here and there and facing every point of the compass, must produce effects in the highest degree complicated, or even unaccountable. ”

“ The soldiers of the vanguard who escaped the disaster were seized with terror, turned upon their heels, rushed back upon their center, trampled it down, threw it into a panic, and spread consternation, crying that the passage of the breach was mined under the feet of the besiegers. ”

“ We have had another slight shock of domestic earthquake here this morning, and Ann, one of our young married women, after rating her husband, started off for Naruru, and we were quite in a ferment here for a short time. However, this evening, her parents went for her, and I have had to give her a scolding. I told her that anger was like a charge of dynamite, it not only exploded itself, but it produced destructive effects far and wide, indeed there was no knowing what the extent of its mischief might be. ”

“ There being two concurrent causes of the damage,-the explosion of the detonators, and the inflow of the water,-without any appreciable interval of time, or any possibility of distinguishing the amount of damage done by each, the explosion, as the cause which set the water in motion, and gave it its efficiency for harm at the time of the disaster, must be regarded as the predominant cause. ”