THRILLING ESCAPES.

Gisborne Times, Volume XXIX, Issue 3383, 25 November 1911, Page 4

THRILLING ESCAPES.

EX TR AO HI) IN ARY CO URAGE OF IMPRISONED GIRL. The ruins of the lumber town of Austin, Pennsylvania, which was swept away by the bursting of a great dam recently, present an appalling spectacle. Thrilling stories of rescues effected during the progress of the flood and the fire are told. There is no doubt thatm any lives were saved b.v two heroic telephone exchange girls, Lena Binokey, aged nineteen, and Katherine Lyons, aged sixteen, who received the warning of the bursting of the dam over the telephone. They called up over a hundred subscribers, to whom they gave the alarm, and then escaped themselves. A young girl was mimed by a falling structure, but freed herself except one leg, which remained caught between two stones. All attempts at rescue were unsuccessful, and as the water was creeping on her she begged the rescuers to take an axe and cut off her leg. No one had the nerve for the task, until a boy seized an axe and severed the limb with half-a-dozen blows. The girl was carried up the hillside to a place of safety, and will live. Another girl was fleeing with her parents' when she turned back and' entered the bouse to recover a coat. Her parents were overtaken by the flood and drowned, but as the girl was in the house it fell. She clasped a feather bed, and was carried on the Hood for half a mile, when she was rescued. A night watchman who was asleep when the flood came heard the roar and went to a window facing in tile opposite direction to the flood. The same instant tho water struck the house. The watchman was pitched through the window over tho top of the opposite building, and landed in the water, which reached his waist. He was fished' “out with a broken jaw and a dislocated shoulder.