806 A NATIONAL PLAN FOB AMERICAN FORESTRY 



From the glass-enclosed cupolas on top of the towers qualified men 

 maintain a watch for the first sign of rising smoke that betokens the 

 beinning of a fire. Equipped with binoculars, maps, and instruments, 

 they are able to place the fires reasonably closely. When one is dis- 

 covered the alarm is immediately transmitted by telephone to rangers 

 or wardens, who are expected to be in readiness to start at once for 

 the reported location of the fire. They are provided with up-to-date 

 fire-fighting equipment. It still includes shovels and hoes, but 

 increasing use is made of horse-drawn or motor-drawn plows and of 

 special implements and machinery of various kinds. Water-throw- 

 ing devices are very generally employed; they include not only 

 knapsack pumps that are operated by hand but also portable power 

 pumps that can be set down wherever water is obtainable and will 

 deliver a stream through a hose to a fire that may be a mile distant. 

 There are hundreds of these power pumps and thousands of the 

 knapsack pumps in use today. 



This is only a glimpse at a single part of the entire organization 

 necessary for an efficient system of protection, but it will give some 

 idea of the care and thoroughness with which the work must be 

 planned beforehand and every eventuality made ready for. For fires 

 which reach a size too great for one man to handle crews must be 

 assembled and dispatched, in accordance with arrangements previ- 

 ously made for bringing them together and getting them off swiftly, 

 with the necessary equipment and competent leadership. Fire fight- 

 ing is an art which must be learned through special training and 

 experience, and the leaders must be given this training if the crews 

 are to function effectively. The greatest possible speed in discover- 

 ing, reporting, and moving against the fire is one of the fundamentals; 

 competence in handling it is another; not to leave until it is dead 

 out, another. Detection and suppression, however, are far from con- 

 stituting the full field of the activities of a modern protective organi- 

 zation. The State foresters lay nearly, if not fully, as much stress on 

 measures of prevention. 



Regulatory laws make possible some control of the conditions which 

 tend to cause fires, and law enforcement through discovering the 

 persons who have set or caused fires, collecting the evidence neces- 

 sary to establish their guilt in a court of law, and bringing about their 

 prosecution, is an important deterrent of subsequent negligence or 

 incendiarism. Still more important is effective use of all possible 

 instrumentalities of public education. The press, the radio, publi- 

 cations, lectures, moving pictures, and even proclamations by the 

 governors are made use of. 



There is pretty general agreement as to the best type of organi- 

 zation for a State protective system and the best methods to be used 

 in the protective work, and the States are gradually approaching a 

 common pattern. However, there is still a decided diversity in their 

 organization, their methods of financing the work, the progress they 

 have made, and the results they obtain. The State foresters are 

 circumscribed in what they can do by controlling legislation and by 

 their appropriations. The length of time that the Forestry Depart- 

 ment has been engaged in the work of protection also has a good 

 deal to do with the stage of progress reached and the results ob- 

 tained. For example, educational work is cumulative in its results 

 as the years pass. 



