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Show IMPERILS MANY TUBE DARKENED AND FILLED WITH SMOKE AND FUMES BY SHORT CIRCUITED CABLE. Two Hundred Persons Injured, One Fatally, Men and Women Fighting Guards and Trampling Each Other in Frantic Struggle. New York. The worst accident in the ten years' history of New Yoik's subway occurred during the morning rush l ours Wednesday, when 700 passengers pas-sengers in two stalled trains wer-3 stricken with panic in the darkened tubes, by the dense smoke and acrid furuvs from a short circuited cable. In the ensuing struggle to escape about 200 persons were injured, one a woman fatally. Others were over-como over-como and were rescued, unconscious, by police and firemen, while scores of others struggled to the streets, unnerved un-nerved or hysterical, their clothing torn and faces blackened by smoke. The demands of some of the passengers pas-sengers that the doors of two trains Mailed in the darkness be opened were refused by the guards, it was said. Fights ensued and there was soon in progress on both trains a desperate struggle to get out. Windows were smashed by the score; men and women trampled each other and tore each other's clothes in unreasoning fear. Policemen and firemen were busy more than three hours in rescue work. They found abandoned in the two trains many passengers, mostly women, wo-men, half asphyxiated by smoke. Oth-trs Oth-trs had collapsed on the floor of the tube. Some were brought up by ladders lad-ders through manholes, some through ventilating apertures in the street ordinarily or-dinarily covered with steel grating. |