“How do you mean? Is there anything they can do to protect themselves—before a fire starts, I mean?”
“That’s the time to protect themselves. When people wait until the fire has actually begun to burn, it’s almost impossible for them to check it. It would have been this time, if the wind had blown for a few hours longer the way it was doing when the fire started.”
“But what can they do?”
“They can have a cleared space between the town and the forest, for one thing, with a lot of brush growing there, if they want to keep that. Then, if a fire starts, they can set the brush afire, and make a back fire, so that the big fire will be checked by the little one. The fire has to have something to feed on, you see, and if it comes to a cleared space that’s fairly wide, it can’t get any further.
“Oh, a cleared space like that doesn’t mean that the village could go to sleep and feel safe! But it’s a lot easier to fight the fire then. All the men in town could line up, with beaters and plenty of water, and as soon as sparks started a fire on their side of the clearing, they could put it out before it could get beyond control.”
“Oh, I see! And being able to see the fire as soon as it started, they wouldn’t have half so much trouble fighting it as if they had to be after the really big blaze.”
“Yes. The fire problem in places like this seems very dreadful, but when the conditions are as good as they are here, with plenty of water, all that’s needed is a little forethought. It’s different in some of the lumber towns out west, because there the fires get such a terrific start that they would jump any sort of a clearing, and the only thing to do when a fire gets within a certain distance of a town is for the people who live in the town to run.”
Soon the road began to pass between desolate stretches of woods, where the fire had raged at its hottest. Here the ground on each side of the road was covered with smoking ashes, and blackened stumps stood up from the barren, burnt ground.
“It looks like a big graveyard, with those stumps for headstones,” said Dolly, with a shudder.
“It is a little like that,” said Eleanor, with a sigh. “But if you came here next year you wouldn’t know the place. All that ash will fertilize the ground, and it will all be green. The stumps will still be there, but a great new growth will be beginning to push out. Of course it will be years and years before it’s real forest again, but nature isn’t dead, though it looks so. There’s life underneath all that waste and desolation, and it will soon spring up again.”