FIRE 



175 



great fires there, one of which burned a sizable portion of Berkeley, the site 

 of the State University, have served more than words or placards to make 

 the people fire conscious. There are now millions of westerners who would 

 not think of smoking in a car without an ash tray on which to smash out 

 the stubs or the pipe heel; and to throw a match away without first breaking 

 it, they say contemptuously, is a "tenderfoot trick." 



There is imminent need suddenly to establish just such habit patterns 

 along the track of the hurricane that swept across New England in Septem- 

 ber 1938. That blow smashed over some 14,000,000 acres. It left some 

 2){ billion board feet of timber in that part of the country in an indescribable 

 swirl and tangle of loss and confusion, as wind-thrown timber, drying, 

 rotting, on the ground. 



"The heavy loss of life and the widespread damage to improved prop- 

 erty," writes Dudley Harmon of the New England Council in American 

 Forests forest-fire symposion, "claimed first attention. Then came realiza- 

 tion that New England faced a greater danger from forest fire than at 

 any time in its past." 



It does, indeed; and the overwinter and spring effort to clear roadside 

 zones, at least, of inflammable slash and debris, wherever the hurricane 

 hit, has been heroic. Thirty-two CCC camps and WPA crews, aggre- 

 gating 15,000 men, cutting and piling the down timber and whacking out 

 safety strips or fire lines through larger areas of windfall. But the job is too 

 big; it cannot be completed before the fall of 1940, at the earliest, and by 

 then in only a few New England States. In many places New England's 

 fire hazard throughout the dry summer and until snow flies again in the late 

 fall, will be nothing less than terrifying. One live cigarette carelessly flicked 

 away in New England's wounded woods for several summers to come may 

 indeed, as Dudley Harmon says, take hold in tangled, dry debris and kindle 

 "fires of tremendous intensity, so hot in places that fire fighters could not 

 approach them; and if there happened to be several weeks of dry weather 

 followed by high winds, fires might blow from one area of down timber to 

 another, with imminent danger to all in their paths." 



Visitors and hunters have been barred entirely from certain forest areas 

 of the highest hazard in parts of New England. This will somewhat impede 



