September 6, 1935-Pyle Witnesses Tragedy of Village Swept by Forest Fire
The Washington Daily News—Friday—September 6,—1935
Pyle Witnesses Tragedy of Village Swept by Forest Fire
By ERNIE PYLE
CAMPELLTON, New Brunswick — This afternoon I saw a town ready and waiting to be destroyed by forest fire, and I have never seen anything so pitiful in my life. When I left, the houses were burning.
There are 60 forest fires raging all over New Brunswick tonight. The wind is blowing hard. It is hot and dusty. There has been no rain in four weeks. People are praying for the wind to stop, and rain to come.
This afternoon I drove into Green Point, New Brunswick, just as the fire arrived. The fire was four miles wide, and in two days had crawled six miles. The forests are dry, tho green, and the wind whips the flames thru the tree tops. They can’t fight a fire like that. They don’t even try. They just get as much out of its way as they can, and then wait.
Green Point is a farming village, with a couple of general stores, and farmers’ homes scattered along both sides of the gravel road. There are maybe 75 or 100 of them, mostly two-story frame houses in a couple of miles.
To the right, about a quarter of a mile, is the Baie de Chaleur. Between the town and the bay, the land is mostly pasture. To the left of the town are the small farms, and back of them spruce forests.
The fire was back in there, and the wind was blowing it toward the town and the sea.
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We could see the smoke 15 miles before we got there. At first it looked like white clouds. Then it began to take on a dirty look, and to roll and billow.
Then, still miles away, we started seeing big barrels of water in every farmyard, and trucks hauling water. Then we smelled the smoke.
Then, as we approached Green Point, we saw people running—men running crazily across fields, pointing; running up and down the road; in and out of houses.
Then we saw trucks of furniture being driven rapidly away. We saw trucks backed up to porches, and people throwing furniture into them. We saw yards full of furniture, with families sitting there, waiting for the trucks.
Then, farther into town, the moving had been finished. Houses and barns had been emptied last night and this morning. And nearly every empty house had a large Holy Picture, a Christ’s Head, on the front door, pasted or tacked there as a last act.
Men had hauled their gasoline engines down to the beach, and started them pumping salt water out of the bay. The government and the International Paper Co. had sent in thousands of feet of hose—small, about twice the size of garden house—and this was stretched all thru the town, and across the road in a dozen places. Groups of men were around every house and barn, shooting water onto them, trying to get them wet enough to resist the falling sparks. Futile job, for most of them.
There was none of the swift drama of fighting a confined fire. It was just do what little you can and then wait. Over it all was the thick haze of smoke. The sun was a bright red pin point thru the film.
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The evacuation of Green Point was like the movies you have seen of the evacuation of a town in war time. The same desperation, and fear, and hurry.
One old, old man had a milk cow harnessed up in horse’s harness, pulling a rickety wagon with his furniture in it.
Another man was trying to pump water onto his house out of a barrel with what looked like a bicycle pump.
Another man was savagely throwing buckets of water onto his wood pile, paying no attention to his house and barn.
We saw the first house go. When we drove away it was falling in. The barn was already in ashes, and flames were shooting 30 feet high from three sheds around it. The owner was standing in his potato patch, throwing clods of dirt at two calves to keep them away from the fire.
They had hoped the road and the clearings might stop the fire. But as we watched, sparks blew across the highway, and flames sprang up in the front yards on the other side. There was no hope for half the homes in Green Point.
In New Brunswick at sundown this evening there was an unnatural half-light over everything. The atmosphere seemed heavy with forebodings, and you felt you would be afraid of the night.
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