STRUCTURAL PURPOSES 



Fire A stick of timber will burn and so will a wood, a 



Hazard brick, a concrete, a steel or a terra cotta building. 

 Buildings burn, not because of the materials of 

 which they are built, but on account of faulty construction, 

 lack of fire precautions, hazardous contents and carelessness. 

 The enormous annual fire losses in the United States very 

 properly constitute a subject of national concern and every 

 possible measure should be taken for their reduction. But that 

 the general use of wood in the ordinary types of buildings is 

 the basic cause of fires is not a reasonable assumption. 



To condemn wood in any form and to advocate the use of 

 noncombustible building material has been the aim of several 

 publicity campaigns. The American people are too sane to be 

 led into a frenzy of condemnation against a material which has 

 sheltered and served them from time immemorial, and certainly 

 engineers and architects will continue to select building mate- 

 rial on its merits. The first consideration in the use of timber 

 is that it should never be placed in a structure where underwrit- 

 ing experience has not shown it to be reasonably safe. On the 

 other hand, its elimination because of the wide-spread slogan 

 that "wood burns," and in favor of more expensive, less adapt- 

 able and less beautiful materials which have not stood the serv- 

 ice test of time, is as unreasonable as to drink wine instead of 

 water because the latter may contain disease germs. There is 

 a happy medium based on common sense and statistics. 



One of the greatest fallacies is that of drawing conclusions 

 regarding fire losses from per capita data. To say that the 

 annual fire loss in the United States is $2.50 per capita against 

 58-cent per capita loss in Europe is to ignore a necessary meas- 

 ure of value. The fact that the United States has about three 

 and one-half times the number of fires and also very nearly 

 three times the number of buildings, leads to the simple con- 

 clusion that Europe has fewer fires because it has fewer build- 

 ings. Not only do we have nearly three times the number of 

 buildings but substantially twenty-five per cent less population. 

 These figures are gleaned from the Underwriters' report for 



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