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WOMAN’S STORY OF DISASTER
Miss Carrie Blanchard Arrives Home From San Francisco
The Iron Stairway Fairly Danced Under Her Feet-Walked Eight Miles to Escape From the Stricken City
[Welland Telegraph, 10 May 1906]
Miss Carrie Blanchard, who was through the horrors of the San Francisco earthquake and fire arrived home on Saturday and is at present staying with her parents, Mr. and Mrs. Thos. Blanchard, Merritt St. Miss Blanchard gave The Telegraph a vivid description of her experience during the awful minutes of the shock.
“I was sleeping,” she said, “in my rooms in a seven storey office building of the city and had to be at the college at eight o’clock, and it was my custom to rise shortly after five. I was awake and thinking about getting up when things in my room began to dance about. I feared the collapse of the building and jumping up ran downstairs; it was only two flights to the street. The iron stairway fairly danced under my feet and I was tossed about from the wall to the elevator all the way down.
The great doors at the street were locked so I stood watching the bricks fall on the pavement. Every moment I expected the walls and roof to come down upon me.
Then in a minute or two that seemed an age, stillness began to reign again, and with it came thoughts for my preservation. I went back upstairs and dressed. It was a painful operation for though the earthquake was over, the cracking and grinding and twisting of the walls and girders made an unceasing din.
I got out in the street at last. I don’t know how. The thoroughfare was crowded with people, a vast, surging, dazed, bewildered throng-men, women and children, some like myself dressed, many in their night robes.
The whole thing was so appalling that we had but one vague conception of the disaster, though on every side we saw the ruins of the earth’s convulsion. As we stood wondering we saw the flames shoot up from the lower part of the city. Higher and higher mounted the forked tongues, wider and wider grew the fire swept area, and almost before we could realize it, we read in letters that flamed across the sky, the doom of the beautiful city of the Golden Gate.”
Miss Blanchard journeyed to the home of a friend in a distant part of the city, and on Thursday morn, the first morning after the earthquake, she resolved to leave Frisco if she could. It was impossible to get any reliable information, so she walked on and on for eight miles, passing scenes of indescribable horror until at last she reached the ferry. Thursday night she was in Los Angeles.
Miss Blanchard was attending the California College of Osteopathy and she has been unable to ascertain if the college survived the quake. She lost all her personal belongings, except the clothes she wore as she escaped from the creaking building. The building, like thousands of its fellows, stands today a charred and hideous ruin.
[See related article: THE FIRST WELLAND GIRL TO GRADUATE IN OSTEOPATHY]
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