Fire Prevention Efforts
In the late nineteenth century, the American public regarded fire in a less cautionary light. As people began to venture into forests for recreational activities like hiking, fishing, and camping, lighting fires became commonplace. In Stephen J. Pyne’s 1982 book, Fire in America: A Cultural History of Wildland and Rural Fire, he explains that campers would frequently light fires without caution and depend on forest rangers to extinguish them. This negligence became a major cause of forest fires.
Pyne uses Mark Twain’s first-hand account in his book, Roughing It, to illustrate how inattention to small campfires could easily result in full-scale forest burns. In his account, Twain lights a small campfire and leaves it unattended for just a few seconds. Due to a thick coverage of dry pine needles on the forest floor, fire erupted. Twain recounts the experience in prolific detail, writing, “Within a half an hour all before us was a tossing, blinding tempest of flame! … as far as the eye could reach…”.[1]
Twain’s experience was not unique. Foresters became frustrated with the general carelessness of recreationists, and pushed for policies to prevent forest fires caused by negligence. One of the first fire prevention programs was initiated by the Western Forestry and Conservation Association (WFCA). The WFCA devised an educational campaign that distributed essays, pamphlets, and advertisements to popular magazines and newspapers, schools, and clubs, with the goal of preventing forest fire ignitions. In 1914, National Fire Prevention Day was created, but its initiative was mainly to prevent urban fires rather than wildfires.2
President Calvin Coolidge issued a proclamation stating that the week of October 4, 1925 would be observed as the first National Fire Prevention Week, which still exist today. According to a September 1925 issue of The Wall Street Journal, “The President says he is informed that during 1924 fires caused the loss of approximately 15,000 lives and of property exceeding $348,000,000 in value.”3 Coolidge used these losses to fuel the fire prevention campaign. In 1945, Smokey Bear was introduced as the mascot of the wildfire suppression campaign. A 1949 issue of The Christian Science Monitor noted that Smokey was “appearing on thousands of posters, bookmarks, buttons, stamps, asking people to be careful for a change and to quit burning down his living quarters.”4 Smokey was eventually replaced by the “let it burn” policy that gained traction in the 1960s and 70s, which advocated that wildfires were a natural part of forest ecosystems and crucial to forest regrowth and preventing fuel accumulation caused by old growth.5 Smokey’s legacy lives on today. When the United States Forest Service created the National Fire Danger Rating System (NFDRS) in 1972, Smokey was displayed on signs alongside the danger level. The purpose of these signs was to indicate the risk of wildfire on a given day so that the public could regulate their activities and make informed decisions about fire use. The levels (Low, Moderate, High, Very High, and Extreme) are color coded with green representing the “Low” level and red representing “Extreme.”[2] These signs can be found today in National Parks and forested areas including wilderburbs.
2
Stephen J. Pyne, Fire in America: A Cultural History of Wildland and Rural Fire (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 1982), 161-170.
3
“National Fire Prevention Week,” The Wall Street Journal (September 21, 1925), 9. 4
“U.S. Turns Spade for Arbor Day,” The Christian Science Monitor (April 23, 1949), 18. 5
“Today’s Forest Service Finding Virtue in Fire: Smokey Bear’s Dogma Falls Out of Vogue,” The Washington Post (December 19, 1988), A3.
Related photographs:
- “Fire Prevention Week” by Allison Huang / https://scalar.usc.edu/works/california-burning/fire-prevention-week-demonstration-of-los-angele s-county-fire-department-laurel-grade-school-925-
[1] Mark Twain, Roughing It (Hartford, CT, American Publishing Company, 1972), 32.
[2] USDA, “National Fire Danger Rating System,” U.S. Forest Service, USDA, https://www.fs.usda.gov/detail/inyo/home/?cid=stelprdb5173311, (accessed 11 November 2022).