482 



Yearbook, of Agriculture 1949 



the 10,000 cubic yards of debris caught 

 by the hastily built catchment basin. 



FIRES CAN START in many ways. Ac- 

 cording to official records, a bay horse 

 feeding under a power line in a moun- 

 tain meadow switched his tail into a 

 slack wire at 1 : 14 p. m. 



The resulting shock killed the horse 

 and at the same time set his mane and 

 tail on fire. This ignited the dry grass 

 and spread over 55 acres of timber be- 

 fore the fire was brought under con- 

 trol. The reason the horse came in 

 contact with the power line was that 

 an insulator had been broken and the 

 crossarm burned off, so that the line 

 sagged within a few feet of the ground. 

 Because the insulator had been re- 

 ported to the power company as defec- 

 tive more than a year earlier, the fire 

 was listed in the records as a wildfire 

 due to man's negligence. 



This listing was in line with two 

 long-time Nation-wide averages. First : 

 Although lightning starts 10 percent of 

 wildfires, 9 out of 10 are man-caused. 

 (The figure is higher in some parts of 

 the West but lower in most of the 

 South.) Second: Of every 9 man- 

 caused wildfires, negligence and care- 

 lessness are responsible for 7, all of 

 which could have been prevented if 

 everybody had been careful. 



Loggers say that the sun started one 

 fire they put out. Smoke began to curl 

 upward, they say, when the rays of the 

 sun were focused by a bottle of kero- 

 sene (used to clean saws) onto a punky 

 log. That is the only authenticated case 

 of its kind I have found to date. 



It is a matter of record, however, 

 that friction of a steel cable wound 

 around a stump started the disastrous 

 Tillamook fire ; that many wildfires are 

 maliciously set to satisfy pet peeves, 

 to draw crowds and create excitement, 

 to make jobs during depressions; oth- 

 ers are started in misguided attempts 

 to kill chiggers, spiders, and snakes. 



Incendiarists start close to 28 per- 

 cent of all man-caused wildfires, but 

 farmers and ranchers are largely re- 

 sponsible for 16 percent. 



It is not that farmers and ranchers 

 set fires maliciously. They are too often 

 careless about spark arresters on ma- 

 chines like the combines and threshers. 

 Or, not realizing what flames and live 

 coals can do when abetted by high 

 winds and low humidities, they neglect 

 to keep complete control of the fires 

 started to clear land, burn sedge or 

 grass or debris, make berry patches and 

 swamps more accessible, "green up" 

 the woods for livestock, or smoke out 

 bees. 



Incendiarists are haled into court 

 and prosecuted. As a preventive mea- 

 sure, so are people who are careless 

 with outdoor fires there are many 

 more of these. Who are the careless 

 people, who, in the aggregate, are re- 

 sponsible for most of our wildfires? 



Among them are the people away 

 from home who, in cars or on saddle 

 horses or afoot, flip glowing matches 

 or drop burning cigarettes and cigars, 

 with no regard as to whether they roll 

 into dry grass, brown pine needles, or 

 dry leaves; logging bosses who fail to 

 keep patrols on the job and to make 

 frequent inspections of equipment and 

 tools during fire weather; trainmen 

 who dump hot ashes from dining-cars 

 on railroad rights-of-way ; hunters, 

 campers, fishermen, and picnickers 

 who, besides being careless with 

 matches and cigarettes, forget or do 

 not know how to put campfires com- 

 pletely out dead out. In brief, these 

 people are average Americans the 

 otherwise law-abiding citizens who 

 visit or travel through forests and fields, 

 who live in or near them, or who make 

 their living in them. 



SHORTLY AFTER PEARL HARBOR the 

 armed forces called for intensified ef- 

 forts to stop man-made wildfires before 

 they started. Their reasons are worth 

 repeating for the persons who, when 

 they think of forests and fields at all, 

 think of them only as pleasant places 

 to visit: 



1. Conservation of wood for war- 

 time needs. (More wood than steel 

 was used in war activities in 1942.) 



