Quake

Citizens of Villa Atuel in prosperous wine-growing Mendoza Province awoke one night last week with a great roaring in their ears. Houses fell. The earth swelled and cracked open beneath them. In a few moments the town was completely wiped out, 40 were killed, 100 injured, in the worst earthquake of recent South American times, an earthquake that shook the needle of Harvard's seismograph in New England almost 6,000 miles away, broke submarine telegraph cables off the coast of Norway. The outward focus of the disturbance was a new volcano which had burst like an inflamed earth carbuncle on the slopes of the Andes near San Carlos.

Relief trains rushing to aid the stricken Mendoza vintners encountered great fissures in the earth, filled with spouting, boiling water.