America’s Enormous Fire Waste
A NEW YORK journal affirms that the fire waste in this country during only six years past, has amounted to more than eight hundred million dollars. This enormous loss has been due, for the most part, not to great conflagrations, like the recent ones at Waterbury and Paterson, but to fires of a comparatively small magnitude. The same journal quotes an insurance expert as saying: “A good blaze, given ten minutes’ headway in the dry-goods district of the city of New York, could do more damage in a forty-mile-an-hour gale than the combined losses sustained at Paterson, Waterbury, and Norfolk amounted to.” “Broadway between Canal and Fourteenth Streets,” this expert said, “is lined by tinder-box structures, and within that area something like eight hundred million dollars of insurance values are sheltered.”