On the slope, the whole community gathered to watch. "Mr. E. M. Hollett had a store where he used to keep lumber and other things. You could hear all the lumber tumbling out of his store, as the high tide took all his wharves out to sea. Some of the lumber lodged on the bank and in the landwash. All night long we could hear the men trying to salvage it and throw it up on high land."

Great Burin did not sustain as much damage as other villages on Great Burin Island. "It came in there and went down through the Reach and down in Stepaside, but in Kellys Cove it got pinned there. It brought up there, so they had more damage than the rest. Then it went on down to Port au Bras. It sort of passed along by us."

"Believe it or not, the magistrate lived in Great Burin. He was Malcolm Hollett. He served in the First World War and after the war he was honoured as a Rhodes Scholar and went to England and received his degrees. When he came back he became a magistrate and later served in the Newfoundland government.

"He was instrumental in helping organize provisions and help for those affected by the tidal wave. He was my mother's first cousin and it was to his house we went and stayed when the tidal wave was at its worst."

Two or three days after the tidal wave, Louise's father sailed into Great Burin.

"My father was Joseph Emberley. He and another man went down to Swift Current cutting wood, because hardly anybody lived there then. The other man had one of these little jack boats. They ran up in the bottom, which they call Piper's Hole.

"That evening, they noticed that the tide was pretty high, and swirling. The boat used to spin around, but he didn't know what was causing it. He didn't know anything about what was happening. But when they were coming home they met the wreckage of things and found out it was the tidal wave."