364 



CONSERVATION 



may be pruned rather than felled. 

 Standing trees must be not less than six 

 feet apart. 



The Forest Park Reservation Com- 

 mission is made the administrative 

 body, with power to authorize the omis- 

 sion of a fire line or to enforce the 

 construction of such lines, the decision 

 of the commission in all such cases be- 

 ing final. 



Copies of this act may be obtained 

 from Mr. Alfred Gaskill, Forester, 

 Trenton, N. J., and may well serve 

 as the basis of similar legislation in 

 other states where fires are frequently 

 kindled by sparks or hot cinders from 

 locomotives. The lessons taught by the 

 experiences of recent years, notably of 

 last fall, regarding damages from for- 

 est fires thus kindled should not be for- 

 gotten. If they lead, as they are ap- 

 parently leading in New Jersey, to the 

 enactment and enforcement of appro- 

 priate protective legislation the great 

 loss resulting from these fires may, in 

 part at least, in the future be compen- 

 sated. 



)^ )^ )^' 



Waste of Resources Due to Fire 



AT THE recent joint meeting of four 

 great national engineering societies 

 held in New York City, Mr. Charles 

 Whiting Baker spoke from an engi- 

 neer's standpoint of the meaning of the 

 continuous waste of property due to 

 fire. His paper, as published in Insur- 

 ance Engineering for April, deserves a 

 resume. 



The fire losses of the United States 

 for 1907 totaled $215,000,000. About 

 half this loss was upon buildings 

 burned or injured; the other half was 

 upon contents. One thousand four 

 hundred persons lost their lives in fires 

 and 5,650 were injured. These fires oc- 

 curred in 165,250 buildings, and the 

 average damage to each building and 

 its contents was $1,667. ^^ addition to 

 these direct losses by fires were indirect 

 losses, as through interruption to busi- 

 ness, maintenance of fire departments, 

 insurance companies, etc. 



To comprehend the magnitude of 

 this fire loss, Mr. Baker asks us to 

 picture a city street, on lots with an 

 average frontage of sixty-five feet, and 

 with buildings placed closely together. 

 This street would be a thousand miles 

 long, and would reach from New York 

 City to Chicago. At every thousand 

 feet would be found the ruins of a 

 building from which an injured person 

 was rescued ; at every three-quarters of 

 a mile, the blackened wreck of a house 

 in which some one was burned to death. 



Let this fire begin on January i anrl 

 be driven by a high wind ; eating its 

 way forward at a rate of nearly three 

 miles a day, it would have to burn for 

 a year before consuming the entire 

 double row of buildings. On finishing 

 this street at midnight on December 31, 

 1907, it would immediately begin upon 

 a second, similar street, burning it 

 throughout the entire year of 1908. 



Nor is this the showing for an excep- 

 tionally bad year. "The statistics of 

 fire losses gathered for many years by 

 the National Board of Fire Underwrit- 

 ers show that the annual fire loss has 

 been steadily increasing." In the ten 

 years ending with 1887, the annual loss 

 averaged $92,000,000 ; in the ten years 

 ending with 1897, it averaged $132,- 

 000,000; and, in the following decade, 

 $203,000,000. 



Let us compare our fire loss with 

 that of European countries. The losses 

 for the people of the United States in 

 1907 "represented an annual per cap- 

 ita tax of $2.50 on every man, woman 

 and child in the population," or $15 

 on every head of a family of six per- 

 sons. The per capita fire loss in the 

 principal European countries reads : 

 Italy, 12 cents; France, 30 cents; Aus- 

 tria, 29 cents ; Germany, 49 cents. "It 

 is only in Russia and Norway, where 

 wooden buildings form a considerable 

 portion of the whole, that the fire 

 loss per capita approaches even half 

 of our own per capita rate." 



A chief cause of this loss Mr. Baker 

 finds in the disposition of our people, 

 including our engineers, to "run on in 

 a rut." Wooden buildings were once 



