The Cordele Dispatch And Daily Sentinel

CRUMBLING SUBSOIL PLAYS TRICKS WITH STREETS OF ROME

ROME, May 6.—Despite reassuring statements and glib explanations which have been made by the Roman municipal authorities of an unusual series of street collapses and cave-ins, the fact that six of these disquieting accidents have occurred within the brief space of several weeks is causing considerable alarm here.

The first of these incidents was a cave-in which caused a large section of the Via Ripetta to fall to a depth of about six feet. The collapse occurred in broad daylight, the ground falling away several feet in front of a crowded tramway.

But the proximity of the Via Ripetta to the Tiber River offered the apparent explanation that the recent heavy rains and flood condition of the river had caused a weakening of the alluvial subsoil along the river bank.

Within a fortnight after this collapse, however, there were five other more or less similar accidents in various sections of the city, some of them far from the river, and the Romans, always ready to inject the melodrama into the simple facts of daily existence, saw in the series the presentation of a new source of terror. The inhabitants of Southern Italy and Sicily live under the Damocletian sword of the ever-present prospect of telluric disturbances; would the Romans have to live in constant dread of the possible effects of a crumbling subsoil?

To this question the authorities have hastened to give an emphatic negation, asserting that each accident has a special cause and that there was no underlying cause for all of them. In some places, it is explained, too much new construction was weakening the subsoil; in others, rain water seepage had caused weakness, while in still others excavations for building foundations had unearthed ancient sewage systems.