Remember A Day | Typhoon Hope causes despair in Hong Kong, manure pit suffocation and Cathay Pacific receives its first Boeing 747 in city: headlines from 40 years ago
- A journey back through time to look at significant news and events reported by the South China Morning Post from this week in history
Seven people being suffocated in a manure pit in an Indian village and a local newspaper carrying no news for a day made the headlines four decades ago this week.
July 29, 1979
● A chunk of the wrecked US spacecraft Skylab, packed in a plastic ice cream container, arrived in Hong Kong to snatch the US$50,000 “gold prize” from currency dealers Deak and Company. Deak had offered to buy up to a kilogram of Skylab for the price of the same weight in gold. A group of Australian farmers had picked up the debris, believed to have been part of an oxygen tank, when the spacecraft crash-landed in the Western Australian outback three weeks earlier. The piece would eventually be sent to Switzerland for minting into “Sky Coins” to raise money for Vietnamese refugees worldwide.
July 30, 1979
● Six people died when they tried to rescue a student who fell into a manure pit. After a youngster slipped and fell into a dung pit in a western Indian village, a fellow student tried to pull him out but lost his footing. Five more people met the same fate when they attempted to help. All including the first student died of suffocation.