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Show Vacation Season Brings Forest Fires RECEJvT forest fires in Maryland, Mary-land, Virginia, Pennsylvania and New Jersey several of them near Washington, and some of them close to other large cen-ters cen-ters have taught the people of this section the lesson which the forest service has long been endeavoring to impress upon the people of the country coun-try as a whole. One of these fires raged over an area of 16 square miles within an alarmingly alarming-ly short distance of the nation's capital capi-tal city, and caused a large loss of property in houses, barns, etc., in addition ad-dition to the loss In timber. During the coming summer there will be approximately 34,000 of these forest fires, if the annual average of the last six years Is maintained. Last year 38,400 such fires were reported to the federal authorities. The lesson to be learned is not alone of the great loss which they cause, but that almost all of them could be prevented. pre-vented. Fully 80 per cent are the result re-sult of carelessness or Ignorance, or both. Natural causes are responsible for only about one-tenth. "Will we this year have learned our lesson of care?" asks Col. W. B. Gree ley, chief of the forest service, "or will hasty automobllists travel through the forest this summer, leaving oil-soaked rags, cigar and cigarette stubs and burning matches In their wake? Will campers again build fires without r-gard r-gard to common sense rules of safety? Will hunters and fishermen forget that unless they exercise reason In preventing pre-venting fires they will no longer have game to hunt and streams to whip? Will farmers who desire to clean up a wood lot or field by burning the under brush and slash fall to use care? "And there are some who will deliberately delib-erately set fire to the woods because of a fallacious belief that by so doing insect pests can be destroyed, or that better grazing lands can be obtained. These are the principal classes of offenders of-fenders who are doing their bit to reduce re-duce the fast-diminishing timber supply sup-ply of the United States. These are the classes of people to whom tha United States government wants to teach fire-prevention lessons." Timber-growing is recognized as one of the really great questions that confront con-front the American people. If fires could be kept out of much of the country's coun-try's forest lands, the government experts ex-perts say, nature would take care largely of the reforestratlon problem. |