FIRE LOSSES

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 623, 27 March 1929, Page 8

FIRE LOSSES

IN his latest denunciation of New Zealand’s mounting fire-loss, Inspector T. Hugo, that vigorous crusader against the spirit of complacency, makes the startling disclosure that the gross loss for 1928 exceeded £1,500,000, a sum far in advance of the previous worst in this fire-ridden Dominion’s history. In 1918 the loss totalled £472,247. In 1919 it fell to £390,598, but since then the figure has been steadily climbing. It passed the £1,000,000 mark for the first time in 1924, and went beyond it again in 1926.

There is undoubtedly an analogy between the rising trend of fire-losses and the increased use of benzine, electric irons, and cigarettes. Of additional interest, however, is the fact that the year of super-prosperity, 1919, presents the lowest fire-loss of any year in the past ten. While there are people who peer into the benzine tanks of motor-cars with an acetylene lamp—a method followed by a deluded youth who caused a fire in Gisborne last evening—and while there are others who east cigarette-ends about with a gay abandon, or neglect to switch off the electric iron until it scorches into the table-top and starts a lively blaze, it will be impossible to check the increasing economic loss that is the price we pay for carelessness. Work is created for builders and other tradesmen whenever a dwelling or city block is burned, but the money thus expended has had to be diverted from more productive channels, so that the direct fundamental loss remains unaltered.

The destruction wrought by the big city fire in Wellington was a factor in making the 1928 fire-loss so heavy. The freedom of business and industrial areas in Auckland from serious fires—since the oil fire last April—is satisfactory. But the plantation fire on Corporation property at Waikumete yesterday raises the serious issue of the danger from these tracts of growing trees. The Waikumete plantation was relatively small, and no emergency fire-fighting organisation was in existence. The failure of the hastily-raised corps in its efforts to arrest the flames emphasises the need for systematic precautions on the part of all proprietors of investments in growing forest.