The burning of dry grass, leaves, and rubbish in bonfires, in the spring or fall, is a common practice. Extreme care should be used that it is done at a safe distance from buildings and woods, and it should be constantly watched, as a breeze may fan the flames and cause the spread of the fire.
FOREST FIRES
The loss by forest fires in the United States for the month of October, 1910, was about $14,600,000.
Thousands of acres of valuable timber were destroyed, leaving in the place of beautiful green forests nothing but a dreary waste of black stumps and fallen trunks.
This was an unusually heavy loss for a single month; but in the spring and fall of every year, especially in times of drought, fires sometimes rage for days through our splendid forests.
These fires are more frequent and disastrous in Minnesota, Michigan, New York, and eastern Maine; but, in 1910, twenty-eight different states suffered heavy loss among their timber lands.
The causes of these fires are chiefly sparks from engines or sawmills, campfires, burning brush, careless smokers, and lightning. More than two-thirds of the fires are due to thoughtlessness and ignorance, and could be prevented. Even in the case of a fire set by lightning, which seems purely accidental, the fire would not occur if fallen trees and dead underbrush were cleared away, for lightning never ignites green wood.
In one year there were three hundred fires among the Adirondack Mountains of New York, one hundred and twenty-one of which were due to sparks from the engines of passing trains. Eighty-eight were traced to piles of leaves left burning, twenty-nine to camp fires, and six to cigar-stubs and burning tobacco from pipes.