WASTAGE BY FIRE.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIV, Issue 19721, 22 August 1927, Page 8

WASTAGE BY FIRE.

Attention has again been directed, this time by the Fire Boards Conference, to the very high annual loss by fire suffered by New Zealand. The round figure, over £1,000,000, quoted can be given more accurately, for the last available official report on the fire brigades of the Dominion estimates it for the year reviewed as £1,050,900, or roughly 15s 3d per head of the population. It is a heavy drain on national resources. In one of the many warnings officially uttered about this continual wastage, it was said with perfect accuracy that fire loss was a dead loss, that the comfortable conviction that insurance compensated for it was a fallacy, and • that in the end the whole community must pay for it. There it is, then, a charge of 15s 3d per head for one year. An investigator recently estimated that the average annual cost of direct material fire loss in Great Britain was £12,000,000, described by him as "a high figure." So it is, but since the population there is over 40,00(3,000 the per capita loss works out at little if any more than onethird of that suffered in New Zealand. In other words, if the rate in New Zealand could be reduced to that of Great Britain, the average annual loss should be somewhere in the neighbourhood of £300,000. The British investigator said, moreover, that the figure he quoted could not be considered complete without proper provision for the cost of fire brigade maintenance and fire insurance administration. The addition

of these two items, he said, had been held to bring the figure up to £25,000,000. It doubles the actual material fire loss with something over. With New Zealand wastage so high, the doubling process would certainly not be accurate, but the two items must substantially increase the toll taken of the national wealth. Comparison must be qualified by admission that the Dominion, with its high proportion of wooden buildings, is peculiarly susceptible to fire loss; against that is the insistence of competent authorities that a large number of New Zealand fires can be traced to preventable causes, or, in plainer terms, gross carelessness. Circumstances combine to support the suggestion, made at the Fire Boards Conference, that the high rate of loss constitutes a problem deserving serious national consideration.