The eyes of the world have been on the tragedy in Japan these past few weeks. We marvel at the devastation we see on our TV screens from the recent earthquake and tsunami.

It all happened about a year after a powerful earthquake laid waste to homes throughout Haiti’s vulnerable coastal capital of Port-au-Prince. The cameras and newsmen have been there, and at other calamities around the world, to show us the destruction as well as the determination of the victims to survive.

How many times have you heard your family members, friends and neighbors ask, “What would we do if something like that happened here?”

It did happen here. It was May 16, 1933, and fire swept through New Auburn leaving many families homeless. Edith Dolan, my aunt, who wrote many columns for the Lewiston Evening Journal’s Magazine Section every Saturday, typed many pages of notes from news reports, and I am repeating here many of the details that caught her eye. They were the small incidents that were common to tragedies of even catastrophic proportion.

She documented the danger that firemen faced by noticing that great lengths of canvas fire hose were abandoned.

“Long stretches looked like sieves in the late afternoon where it had burned through from hot sparks,” she quoted from a news report.

She continued with dozen of short items that painted a remarkable on-the-street picture.

When the first reporters reached the scene, they often called the office from any phone they could find, and then had to leave as the building they were in caught fire.

Two young men saved a home with a bucket brigade, she wrote. One was perched on the roof going from one end to the other with pails of water handed to him from an upstairs bathroom window. Water pressure was low and it seemed a losing battle to stay ahead of the flames.

Leo Donovan, a mailman in the area, provided valuable information about children of the area because of his house-by-house knowledge. Families were frantic to learn where children had been taken as schools were evacuated. The notes made by my aunt said, “One mother was able to locate only three out of her five children by midnight.”

In the Franciscan nuns’ convent, a statue was placed in every window facing the panes of glass with a view of the fire. It was reported, “Monday afternoon, the paint was blistered, but the building was protected.”

The work of employees and volunteers of the YMCA in Auburn and the YWCA in Lewiston was extraordinary. Many victims were sheltered by those agencies during the tragedy and in the days after.

“One man sheltered at the YMCA sobbed brokenly,” the notes said. “He came here from a foreign land. His daughter’s husband had died and he was helping her and her child. Now he had lost all.”

At the YWCA, a 9-year-old boy said, “I’m hungry and I know where there are three more hungry boys.” All were fed.

With flames just feet away, residents struggled to save as much as they could. One of the first things they grabbed was often the family’s radio.

One man saved a cat and an electric clock. He told a reporter, “I won’t need my clock to get me out of bed as I have no bed, and there are no rats in my house for the cat, so I will sell it to the highest bidder.”

Late in the afternoon at the Main Street bridge, a woman was telling those around her, “Yes, my house is flat, and this is all I saved.” She had two bed boards.

Red Cross workers also assisted in many ways with food and housing. They checked lists of missing people and they used a sound truck well into the night to drive through the area. The loudspeaker would call out children’s names and ask anyone who had information to call police headquarters immediately. Within hours of the fire coming under control, it was reported that all people were accounted for except one 8-year-old girl who soon appeared.

The New Auburn tragedy was smaller in scale than the events in Japan and Haiti, but that’s true of every similar event … hurricane, tornado, flood or a single house fire. All such tragedies take place on a neighborhood level.