“THE CONFLAGRATION HAZARD.”
DURING the last six years this country's fire waste has amounted to more than $800,000,000. In this vast sum is represented a relatively small number of losses of $200,000 each, and upward. Two-thirds or more, including these larger losses, have been incurred in sums of $50,000 and upward. Investigation shows that if similar appliances and similar study of the causes of fire which have made textile factories, paper mills, and machine shops almost free from loss, could be applied to those forms of business which have accumulated so vast an amount of losses by fire, the risks would be greatly diminished. An insurance expert says, “We have forgotten Chicago, Boston, and other great fires in the belief that with the introduction of modern methods of steel construction we have eliminated the possibilities of such horrors;” but he thinks this is a mistake, and says, “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.” He states that Broadway, between Canal and Fourteenth Streets, is lined by tinder-box structures, and within that area something like $800,000,000 of insurance values are sheltered. We believe that many fires result from electric wires of various sorts, and also from leaking gas. The light way of building frame houses in suburban towns is another cause. The walls of chimneys are too thin. Also great carelessness exists in hotels. Lately we stayed in a first-class hotel in which, when a fearful wind was blowing down the chimneys, on several successive days the porter built a soft-coal fire, the grate having no fender or any other protection, and left the same for some hours without attention. “Conflagration hazard” is a term used by insurance men, but whatever it may mean to them it means vastly more to families all of whose treasures are burned, and to stores and offices which lose all their irreplaceable books and documents, as well as to those thrown out of business for several months.