Conservation Commission 153 



great use in protecting the forest from fire, or where small bodies 

 of valuable timber, or forest plantations render it practicable, fire 

 lines may be constructed. A fire line consists of a strip of ground 

 from which all inflammable material — usually including the 

 standing timber — is removed to a width of several feet. For the 

 ordinary forest in this State it is seldom practicable to make the 

 line over twenty feet wide. A number of narrow lines is better 

 than one very wide one. 



Trails, roads and fire lines will not invariably stop bad forest 

 fires ; they cannot be made wide enough to stop crown fires. How- 

 ever, they furnish vantage points from which to set " back fires," 

 and they will check and occasionally stop surface fires and light 

 ground fires. 



Education 



About ninety per cent, of the total number of forest fires which 

 occur every year are due to carelessness or negligence. The only 

 fires which do not start from these sources are those which are pur- 

 posely set or those which are caused by lightning. Thousands of 

 campers and sportsmen visit the woods every year. Many of these 

 people see the forest only during their few days of annual vaca- 

 tion. They are not woodsmen ; they are not conversant with the 

 conditions existing in the forest, especially as regards the danger 

 of fire. Most of them would be perfectly willing to see that their 

 camp fires were built in safe places, and that they were extin- 

 guished when there was no more use for them, if they realized the 

 fire danger. 



Probably the most important of the true preventive measures to 

 adopt in protecting forests from fire, is the education of this class 

 of people to a proper realization of the ease with which fires may 

 be started, and the care necessary to prevent them. In nine out 

 of ten cases of forest fires caused by campers and sportsmen, the 

 carelessness which permits the fire to escape is the result of igno- 

 rance. The only way to combat this ignorance is by education. 

 Propaganda should be distributed calling attention to the fire dan- 

 ger and the care necessary to avoid that danger. Many ingenious 

 methods of bringing the fire situation home to the public have been 

 devised.* The insertion of fire warnings in the time table folders 



t *Mr. E. T. Allen, of Portland, Ore., Forester for the Northwestern Forest Fire Protective Asso- 

 ciation, has written a most interesting and instructive article on this subject in "American For- 

 estry " for October, 1912. 



