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TEN LIVES AND TWO MILLION DOLLARS LOST
[People’s Press, 12 August 1919]
Sunday was a sad day in Port Colborne. The above scene where the disaster of the day previous occurred, represented to but very few Port Colborne citizens a monetary loss of over two million dollars. The ten men who were killed in the explosion leave sixty mourners of their immediate families bereaved. To these, the sympathy of the entire town and district went out. The human side of the disaster gripped the people. The property loss was forgotten for the day.
Scenes of indescribable pathos were witnessed as one went from home to home on Sunday afternoon. The two sisters who were bereaved when their husbands were killed side by side; the relatives of the young winner of the Military Medal who had left the war but lately to help in handling grain destined to feed hungry Europe; the widow and family of nine left by another victim; the relatives of the two men still missing; the father of the young man whose body was lacerated almost beyond recognition, how can the sorrow of these be described?
Even at the piers about the elevator, shown in the postcard above, with the ruins standing, a charred and tangled mass, fringed around the tops of the shattered walls with twisted steel work, with huge slabs of fallen concrete lying about under foot and an odor of burnt grain filling the air, the crowds of citizens and visitors from all over the Niagara Peninsula were almost oblivious to the material losses incurred. Two of the bodies were still missing and a tug maneuvered in the slip between the elevator and the Maple leaf Mill searching for one of the corpses believed to be in the water. This scene was the centre of interest.
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