Machines and Fires in the South 



cents an acre. Ninety percent of the 

 burns in national forests fall within the 

 range of 12 to 18 cents an acre. 



On a typical 15-cents-an-acre long- 

 leaf burn, the costs break down about 

 as follows: Reconnaissance and plan- 

 ning, 2.1 cents; plowing lines, 7.2 

 cents; and burning, 5.7 cents an acre. 



ARTHUR W. HARTMAN is chief of 

 the Division of Fire Control in the 

 Southern Region of the Forest Service. 



527 



He received his early training on the 

 Klamath, Natural Bridge, and White 

 Mountain National Forests. He was 

 forester for War Department lands at 

 West Point, N. Y., until he joined the 

 Army in the First World War. Later 

 he was district forest ranger, timber 

 management assistant, assistant super- 

 visor, and supervisor on the Ouachita 

 National Forest and the Kisatchie 

 National Forest. He is a graduate in 

 forestry of Pennsylvania State College. 



MACHINES AND FIRES IN THE SOUTH 



ARTHUR W. HARTMAN 



After 30 years of effort by pri- 

 vate, State, and Federal organizations 

 to protect their forests against fire, 

 some 97 million acres of the private 

 wooded land in the South are under 

 some kind of protection. An additional 

 15 million acres are protected by the 

 national forest organization. More 

 than 80 million acres of forest and 

 potential forest land, however, receive 

 no protection at all. 



Of every 100 acres under organized 

 protection by State forest services, an 

 average of 1 / 2 acres suffer burns each 

 year. As late as 1943, when fire sup- 

 pression depended mostly on men with 

 only hand tools, fires burned 29 million 

 acres and destroyed values estimated 

 at 72 million dollars. 



The record was not good. Several 

 explanations, if not excuses, can be 

 given. Because fast-spreading fires can 

 start in flash fuels in the South a few 

 hours after a rain any time during 8 

 to 12 months of the year, forest lands 

 are in almost constant jeopardy. Com- 

 binations of low humidity and high 

 wind often create conditions of ex- 

 treme hazard, when fires may burn 

 with an intensity beyond the ability of 

 men to control unless they have proper 

 machines but, although yesterday's 

 long lines of pick-and-shovel ditch dig- 

 gers have been replaced largely by 

 powered trenching machines operated 



by a few men, there are still lines of 

 sweating, exhausted men who try to 

 stop the fires with shovels and rakes. 



For the delays in getting machines 

 for fire fighting, one can assign several 

 reasons. Fires occur intermittently; 

 during times of low hazard, the fighters 

 are scattered to perform other tasks. 

 In periods when burning intensity is 

 not severe, fires are handled so easily 

 that men may lull themselves into a 

 false security. Funds and facilities were 

 insufficient to meet the requirements of 

 broad-scale planning, creating, testing, 

 experimenting, as well as developing 

 the special equipment needed for suc- 

 cessful fire-line performance. And, as 

 always, there was the human resistance 

 to change. 



Nevertheless, attempts were made to 

 adapt the available machines to the 

 need. Foresters and an implement 

 manufacturer in Florida, for example, 

 made over a heavy tractor-plow, which 

 turned out to be useful under some 

 conditions but expensive and too big 

 to be easily moved from one fire to 

 another. Elsewhere farm tractors were 

 pressed into service. Men in Arkansas 

 developed a pusher-type plow on a 

 crawler tractor. Fire fighters in Texas 

 made progress with a garden-tractor 

 plow. Others used jeeps, or any ve- 

 hicle at hand, to pull light plows and 

 haul water tanks and pumps. With 



