TIMBER GROWING AND LOGGING PRACTICE IN CALIFORNIA 23 
ment. These costs per thousand board feet of the cut, not including 
overhead, may be summarized as follows: 
Clearings and disposal of slash on lines $0.10 to $0.12 
Clearing around donkey settings .02 to .03 
Falling snags on special risk areas .02 to .03 
Special patrol during and after logging for average period of 10 
years, at 6 to 7 cents per acre per year .03 to .05 
General protection measures .02 to .03 
Total .19 to .26 
The actual expense for the first and second items combined for one 
company in 1921 was 9 cents per thousand. 
Now whether the actual cost is 19 or 26 or 30 cents, the assump- 
tion is likely to be made that it is an extra cost, one which simply 
represents money spent with no return. But a more careful ex- 
amination indicates that there is another side to the story. 
As a matter of general experience and of record, large areas of 
cut-over lands are burned each year. Practically every slash fire 
must be fought sooner or later, and usually by the operator. Log- 
ging engines in the woods are threatened, standing private timber 
must be protected, or the fire is likely to reach national forest land, 
with consequent liability of the company for the damage caused. 
Unfortunately, operators generally have not kept track of the cost 
of fighting fires due to their own operations, but there is no ques- 
tion that every large company is compelled by force of circumstances 
to expend considerable sums in fire suppression. Almost invari- 
ably this means shutting down a donkey or an entire camp, and in 
some cases mill crews must be put on the fire line as well. Aside 
from the actual wage cost, and the occasional loss of expensive 
equipment, the interruption of logging operations is a real loss. 
In 1919 and 1920 one company spent an average of nearly $10,000 
a year on its cut-over lands for suppression of fires resulting from 
its own operations. In 1921 it started clearing along rights of way, 
with patrol following all trains, and its suppression bill dropped to 
less than $1,000 and total fire cost, including prevention, to $3,600. 
To estimate the entire expense of the partial slash disposal plan, 
which must be far less than the former losses, it remains only to be 
seen how frequently the strips must be recleared in order to make 
protection certain. 
So, against the estimated 19 to 26 cents per thousand that it is 
proposed to spend for prevention, there must be balanced the cost of 
fighting serious fires plus loss of equipment and merchantable stump- 
age. What these items amount to on the average is not known. The 
large company above-mentioned found that its expenditure for fire 
suppression alone for the years 1919 and 1920 was 21 cents per 
thousand. 
Kegardless of the effect of fire protection on cut-over lands, sj^s- 
tematic protection along the lines advocated here will pay surely in 
the saving in suppression costs on large fires. Progressive com- 
panies have proved this to their own satisfaction. 
The experience of the Forest Service demonstrates that intensive 
protection, with a force of men sufficient to catch fires while small, 
is more economical than a scattered pi;otection force plus frequent ex- 
pense on large fires. 
