Twenty-seven people who died in November 1929 when a 7.2-magnitude undersea earthquake unleashed towering tsunamis on the isolated Burin Peninsula, shattering houses and fishing gear and wiping out livelihoods. It was the first of two disasters to befall the hardscrabble region. The other was human-made – mines established in the community of St. Lawrence to extract the mineral fluorspar, which offered jobs and hope to unemployed fishermen. Radiation and dust slowly killed hundreds of them. “It started with an earthquake,” acclaimed author Linden MacIntyre writes of this twin disaster. “It ended with a plague.”
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