OCR Text |
Show WE COULD BE LESS CARELESS A heartrending- story came from across the Pacific the other clay. A bomber crashed and a member of the crew was hopelessly trapped in the flaming- wreckage. After a number num-ber of futile attempts to rescue, an officer among the horrified horri-fied spectators, unable to stand the victim's screams longer, stepped up and ended the doomed man's life painlessly with his service .'15. The officer was later exonerated at a military mili-tary trial. The foregoing incident was a tragedy of war. Yet it differs dif-fers from similar incidents that happen regularly in peacetime peace-time only in respect to the method by which the person dying in the flames was put out of his misery. The 10,000-odd souls who die by fire in this country every year do it the hard way. They simply scream until they are cooked. . If this sounds unnecessarily morbid and merciless, take a look at the nation's fire bill upwards of half a billion dollars. dol-lars. When it comes to fire, America is grossly careless. We are careless in our homes. We are careless in our factories and around places of amusement. We are careless in our forests. The result is fire destruction on a scale of almost unbelievable proportions. We could do something about fire if we wanted to. We could be less careless. We could heed the lessons of experience experi-ence and fire prevention authorities, which tell us over and over that real fire prevention is a highly individual business a question of detail, of putting out matches and cigarettes properly, cleaining up the basements and attics, keeping heating facilities in good order. |