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Show Vacation Season Brings Forest Fires RECENT forest fires In Maryland, Mary-land, Virginia. Pennsylvania and New Jersey several of them near Washington, and some of them close to other large centers 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 10 square miles within an alarmingly alarming-ly short distance of the nation's capital capi-tal city, and caused n 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 3-1.000 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 caret" asks Col. W. 11. Greeley, Gree-ley, chief of the forest service, "or will hasty automoblllsts 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 regard re-gard to common sense rules of safety? Will hunters anil fishermen forget that unless they exercise reason In preventing pre-venting tires 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 underbrush under-brush and slash fall to use care? "And there are some who will deliberately delib-erately set tire to the woods because of a fallacious belief that by so doing Insert pests can be destroyed, or that better grazing lands ran be obtained. These are the principal classes of offenders of-fenders who are doing their bit to reduce re-duce the fast-dlmlnlslting timber supply sup-ply of the United States. These are the classes of people to whom the United States government wants to teach fire-prevention lessons." Timber-growing la 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 ex-" ports say, nature would take care largely of the reforestratlon problem. |