The Jack Iron phenomenon

EDITOR: Please permit me a space in your newspaper to express my views about the actual Jack Iron story.

Well, just recently, I was socializing with a friend and reminding her about the Jack Iron story that occurred during the beginning of the 1970s.

A ship that was passing through the area near Sandy Bay, suddenly found itself in extreme difficulty and in order to prevent sudden disaster, the captain and crew immediately decided that the best alternative was to throw 12 drums containing aviation fuel, overboard. Those 12 drums washed ashore at Sandy Bay and the people immediately opened the drums and they started to consume the aviation fuel, mistakenly thinking it was alcohol, better known as Jack Iron.

Some people died and others went blind from the deadly consumption and the deadly tragedy became a major headline in some of the newspapers around the Caribbean, but the captain and crew of that particular ship, probably thought that the 12 drums never really made it into shore, or they eventually went to the bottom of the sea.

Everton Mercury