II. FIRE FIGHTERS
Do you have fire drills in your school? If you do, the fire signal is struck on the gong at the most unexpected times. That is the way a fire happens, you know. When the gong strikes, every child jumps into line. Coats and hats and books are left behind. Children start from three floors at once in a big city school, going four abreast down wide, shallow stairways. By the time those on the second floor are down to the first, the little tots are out of doors. A big building of twenty-four rooms, and nearly twelve hundred pupils, on three floors, can be emptied in one minute and a half. It would take a racing fire to beat that, wouldn’t it?
If you don’t have a fire drill, you should have. Some day there really might be a FIRE, and then the children wouldn’t know how to get out quickly and safely. Frightened children, and even grown people, run and scream and stumble. They knock other people down and fall over them. There was one such school fire, in which hundreds of children died. We never want another one. There was a dreadful theater fire, and one on an excursion boat. In all these fires, laws had been disobeyed. By these terrible fires we learned a great many things that we should never forget.
New buildings for schools and for public use should be made fireproof, but old buildings can be made much safer than they are. Every father and mother should know if a child goes to school in a safe building. The doors should open outward with a push, and should never be locked in school hours. The stairs should be wide, and shallow, and the treads laid on iron or cement. If a school house is two stories high there should be iron fire escapes from halls, marked in big letters, and with a red light that can be seen through smoke. The basement floor should be of cement, and there should be no rubbish closets for the janitor, under stairways. Hot ashes should never be near wood. Chimneys should be examined and cleaned every year. The furnace should be in a separate building, if possible, And there should be frequent fire drills.
The United States has the best fire fighters in the world. We have the best trained and most daring firemen. We have the best engines and horses, hose and ladders and the best water supply. Foreign countries send men to our cities to see our fire companies
