WHY BLAME WOOD?

Lake Wakatip Mail, Issue 4326, 10 August 1937, Page 7

WHY BLAME WOOD?

ACCIDENTS. COLLISIONS. AND FIRES HUMAN ELEMENT MUST COUNT Why blame wood? is the question asked in the monthly news letter of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research Division of Forest Products in discussing the question of the measure of responsibility wood must take for outbreaks of fire and for serious accidents. Whenever a large fire occurs in a building largely constructed of wood, whenever a bad train accident happens and wooden carriages are splintered and catch fire, whenever a series of motor car accidents occur with loss of life, it is a common practice to place part of the blame on the wooden construction members, continues the letter, which is commented on by the Melbourne 1 Leader.’ In December last a terrible catastrophe occurred on the Chicago elevated railways, and a newspaper headline read: “Death Rides in Wooden Cars,” One could multiply instances like this indefinitely, and an accumulation of such incidents has led to a serious decline in the use of timber in trains, motor cars, etc. One of the large motor body companies in the United States, writing to the editor of a timber journal, recently showed how such publicity had driven them to use all-steel bodies, in spite of the fact that they believed that the composite wood and steel body is the best and safest. Several large motor body companies in Australia have followed the lead thus set, though they had large sums of money invested in timber. Is wood to blame for these catastrophes? Even a little time given to the consideration of all the circumstances will prove that it is not; but some scapegoat has to be found, and the timber cannot defend itself. Moreover, the timber suppliers have been very slack in coining to the defence.

HUMANS TO BLAME. In this connection a note in the edi- x torial columns of ‘ Wood Products ’ is of interest, and contains the germ of the real reply to the question asked above. The note reads as follows: “ What value are so-called ‘ fireproof ’ walls when human carelessness sets afire the furnishings of a house or the gasoline or kerosene in a stove? What prptection great beams, whether steel or wood, when a man with the heavy responsibility of many human lives relaxes his vigilance for just a few fatal seconds and plunges a train into the stress of a crash it was not built to withstand? What satisfaction an allsteel auto body or even the stronger and better steel-and-wood body when the careless motorist takes just one chance too many and drapes his ‘ safe ’ conveyance around an unyielding hydrant or post or wall—or another car—. or crashes a careless pedestrian. Let not the admirable urge for safer equipment quiet the voice demanding safer operators. Nobodv would consider the horse-drawn buggy of another day with its ‘ frail all-wood body, like a matchbox ’ a safe conveyance on our highways to-day. But 36,000 persons were not killed each year in buggies in America. Why should they be now ? In the Chicago train accident, for example, we find that a three-car highspeed train with steel carriages travelling at 40 miles per hour crashed into the rear of a stationary train with wooden carriages 38 years old and really out of date. Is it the fault of wood that when some 15,000,000 footpounds of energy were suddenly hurled against it the rear carriages crumpled and several people were killed One cannot experiment to find out what might have happened had these cars been of steel, but it needs little imagination to believe that the results may have been worse, since the steel carriages would have buckled and probably fallen into the street below, with even greater loss of life. Still, we are told that “ Death Rides in Wooden Cars,” and that story is believed by most people who read it. What is wanted for public safety is not a search for a scapegoat in the form of an inert material that cannot answer charges of murder, but some organisation or control of the human elements so as to prevent the accidents that result ill leath and loss of property.