Only a Brontide

Dishes rattled, plaster cracked, pictures fell from the walls. At the first ominous rumble one morning last week, residents of Niagara Falls swept to a panicky conclusion: something drastic had happened to the city's most precious scenic attraction.

News wires soon burned with the flash that a giant rockfall had plunged from the brink of the American Falls. Buffalo hastily reported that the shock had registered on the seismograph of Canisius College. An engineer of the Niagara park commission estimated the break to be 125 feet across and 30 feet deep, added that his view had been partly obscured by the mists. The reliable Associated Press released an aerial photo carefully marking the "Break of September 20, 1946." Said a Page One headline in the sober New York Times: AMERICAN FALLS NOW A HORSESHOE.

To comfort upset honeymooners the staid National Geographic Society rushed out a Washington bulletin describing "the thundering crash of hard dolomite rock ... as a normal part of a continuing process." But the voice of calm soon fell on reddened ears. After a closer look at their instruments, Canisius seismologists blurted: "Only a brontide [a low muffled sound caused by feeble earth tremors]." After a closer look at the Falls, Niagara Park Superintendent Francis Seyfried found them undamaged. Said he: "We have checked with the Army engineers and examined pictures and surveys going back as far as 1906. ... As far as we are concerned there was no break in the American Falls."

Geologists shrugged at all the stir. Nature would wipe out the falls anyway in a scant 12,000 years.

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