Excerpt from Fire Control Notes, Vol. 21: A Periodical Devoted to the Technique of Forest Fire Control; October, 1960

Director, Division of Fire Control, U. S. Forest Service, Washington, D. C.

I welcome the opportunity to meet with you to consider the very important subject of railroad fire prevention. Fire preven tion, like the frequency of man-caused fires, has its ups and downs. Apparently we are in an up period nationally. All protection agencies taken collectively have had an upsurge in man-caused fires during the past 2 years. Many explanations are given for this but it would be difficult to be certain of the true cause. Apparently, there is no one cause but several. This up swing in man-caused fires has focused renewed attention on fire prevention.

We are beginning some fire prevention research aimed at trying to determine the exact cause for fires, the reason behind the cause, and at trying to evaluate the various prevention efforts now used with all man-causes. We look forward to the time when application of increased knowledge and improved methods will greatly reduce fires within the forests. We hope railroad fires will follow this path. Recent experience on the national forests has been encouraging.

Railroad fires have been of concern to the Forest Service since we were given the job of protecting the national forests nearly 60 years ago. Fires from railroad causes were very common in western national forests in the early days. Not much attention was paid to either suppression or prevention in those times. As we were able to greatly reduce the acreage burned and resulting damages through better fire control, we began to give more attention to preventing all fires. We recognize that the best fire is the one that never happens. This emphasizes prevention.

In examining the fire record of the national forests for the past 10 years, I note that there has been a general reduction in railroad fires, but the pattern by regions and national forests is irregular. For example, for the 5-year period 1949-54 there were railroad fires on the national forests. For the next 5 years this had dropped to 604 or to nearly one-half.

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