REDUCED FIRE LOSSES

Hawera Star, Volume LIV, 27 February 1935, Page 12

REDUCED FIRE LOSSES

BRIGADES JN CONFERENCE. PRESIDENT RE-ELECTED. (By TcU'graph—Press Association.) BLENHEIM, Feb. 26. At the annual meeting of the Fire Brigades Officers and Members Institute to-dav, Messrs L. C. Gibbons, Wellington, General Secretary of the Underwriters Council, and F. F. Gilmore, Wellington, the council’s chief electrical inspector, were cordially welcomed.

Addressing the meeting, Mr Gibbons remarked that it was a far cry from the days when early insurance companies fitted out their firemen in livery and equipped them with buckets, to the now London machine, a streamlined ear and a fire station on wheels. To illustrate the reduction in fire losses all over the world, he stated that in the United Kingdom fire losses totalled £11,000.000 in 1920 and £B,300,000 in 3934, a reduction of 26.22 per cent. In the United States the losses for 11 months of 1932 were -103,090,000 dollars and for a. similar period of 1934 232,000.000 dollars. In New Zealand in 1929 losses and expenses incidental thereto were £374,00, compared with £441,000 in 1933, a 39 per cent, decrease. Of course, fire losses, like everything else, fluctuate, but w.hen taken over a series of recent years, losses were below the average. Superintendent O. C. Warner, Christchurch, was re-elected president of the institute.