Tag Archives: economic devestation

A disastrous tsunami’s lethal legacy in Newfoundland

On Nov. 18, 1929, fisherman Patrick Rennie watched from higher ground in Lord’s Cove, Nfld., as a barrelling tsunami washed over his home, his wife and their four youngest children within, and pulled it into the harbour. Just over two decades later, in January 1951, Rennie fell victim to whatever combination of diseases had been ravaging his lungs for years—TB, silicosis, cancer—and died at age 60. There is a through line between those two events, hard to discern on the surface but laid bare in haunting prose by Linden MacIntyre in the most evocatively titled book of the year, The Wake: The Deadly Legacy of a Newfoundland Tsunami. >click to read< 13:52