FOREIGN FIRE-BRIGADES
BY CHARLES T. HILL
One summer, while in Switzerland, I asked a prominent merchant of Lausanne, when his town had had its last serious fire. "Not in three years," he replied. I was moved to ask this question because I had found the fire apparatus in padlocked barns, or stations, with the keys in the hands of the police, who attended to the fire-fighting; and this seemed, as compared to the remarkably quick methods employed in America, a somewhat dangerous form of fire protection. Lausanne is a town of about fifty thousand population, and I wondered how many American cities of a like size could boast of only one serious fire in three years. Not many, I imagine.
In Lucerne, a smaller city of Switzerland, of about forty thousand population, the conditions were practically the same, with the exception that each stable containing the fire apparatus had a notice posted on the door stating that the keys could be found in the neighboring hotels and drug-shops, and the citizens were expected to take out the engines in the event of a fire, while the firemen (volunteers) came on "call," the alarm being sounded on all the church bells. Lucerne is a well-known tourist center, heavily populated during the summer months, and has many large shops filled with very inflammable material, and a great many very old buildings; and yet this place had had only two fires of any size within two years!
While I was attending the morning drill of the Central Fire Station at Dresden, in Saxony, the captain in command told me that the city had, on an average, about six alarms of fire a week. I casually remarked that we had twenty-five a day in New York. He looked at me with wonderment and doubt, and when I repeated that we actually had between twenty and thirty alarms of fire a day in the Borough of Manhattan alone, he threw up his hands and exclaimed, "Thank heaven, it is not as bad as that here, or our beautiful city would be destroyed!"
And so we find, thanks to superior building construction, less hurry and rush in business methods, and a wholesome regard on the part of the citizens for certain rigid laws covering the use of explosives and materials of all kinds which usually cause fire, the lot of the foreign firefighter is not as strenuous as that of his brother fireman on this side of the water. Because of the excellent character of the buildings abroad fires burn slowly, and rarely extend beyond the room or floor in which they start. Here, on the other hand, the conditions are entirely different. Our fires are larger, more destructive, and more frequent, compelling us to support not only the most effective, but most expensive, fire-departments in the world; and yet, in spite of all this, our annual fire losses are from ten to twenty times more than those of any country in Europe.
Better building laws and the universal adoption of fire-prevention ordinances, are going to change all this for us, in time, but as yet our annual fire loss stuns the average European by its enormous total.
In London, the fire-department comes under the supervision of the city authorities, the London County Council looking after the administration of the "Metropolitan Fire-Brigade," as it is called; and this brigade, in management and routine work, is not unlike many large American fire-departments, though the apparatus used is radically different. A naval officer has always been chief of the London fire-brigade, and the firemen are usually recruited from the marine service, a time-honored custom giving preference to men who have been at least five years at sea. It is argued that the work of a fireman is of a nature more readily performed by a sailor, who is not only accustomed to danger and exposure of all kinds, but is trained to climbing and working in perilous positions. These new men, after passing a severe physical examination before a medical board, are put through three months' careful schooling at fire headquarters, where they are not only taught how to handle every tool and implement used in the brigade, but become skilled in life-saving work.
The fire stations in London are much larger than the engine-houses found in American cities, and some of the newer buildings in appearance are not unlike some of our better-class apartment-houses. Indeed, this is practically what they are—a kind of apartment-house or barracks for the men and their families, as well as a station for the apparatus and the horses; and here the firemen live, occupying little apartments of from three to five rooms, according to their rank and position. They are, therefore, in the houses and on duty at all times, with the exception of one day's leave of absence in every fifteen. Enough firemen are found in each London fire station to make up three of our fire-companies, but only one third of these men are in service or on "call-duty" at a time, the rest being held in reserve to answer any other alarms which might come in, or to reinforce the first detachment leaving the house should their "call" prove to be a bad fire. And the men of each squad or detachment on "call-duty" are supposed to be fully dressed when an alarm comes in, and have only to adjust their helmets, which hang in long rows on the walls of the apparatus floor, before jumping on the engines; and no exception is made to this rule, even with the men on the last or "night tour"—from 9 P.M. until 7 A.M. This accounts for the pictures we sometimes see, showing the English firemen seated along the sides of their engines, in military fashion, fully uniformed.
In some of the stations, the London fire-brigade still clings to the rather old-fashioned custom of keeping the horses standing in harness, in stables at the rear, to be led out to the apparatus by hand in event of a "call"; and this makes their "turnout" in answer to an alarm appear to us to be a peculiarly slow one, accustomed as we are to the remarkably quick methods employed in our fire-departments. But several of the newer houses, built within the last few years, are supplied with many ingenious American time-saving devices—sliding-poles, swinging-harness, etc.,—while the horses are kept in box-stalls on the apparatus floor, in convenient running distance of the engines, all of which has considerably reduced the time consumed in turning out to an alarm.