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Page 24
The extension of one-story buildings over too large an area will not be
commended, and certainly, as regards the question of fire, it has a
tendency to place too large a property in direct exposure to a very wide
hazard.
Some textile mills have been built in the form of the block letter U,
this form having been decided upon as giving the conditions of lowest
resultant cost. One wing, two stories in height, contains weaving; the
other wing, three stories in height, contains carding and spinning,
while the engine is placed in the connecting building. The pickers and
the boilers are in outside buildings, so placed that they will not
interfere with future extensions of the building into the form of the
block letter H.
FIRE APPARATUS.
All methods for the prevention of fires fall so far short of the ideal
of immunity that there is a necessity for fire-apparatus. The principle
of the defence of a manufactory against fire is that of self-protection,
by making the installation and management of the fire-apparatus equal to
the progress of any fire which can possibly occur.
Fire-apparatus should be kept in service as well as in order. It is no
exception to any other machinery, in that practice is essential to
obtain any efficient results.
The practical results of private fire-organizations, where fire has
occurred, have been very marked; and systematic and skilful work has
been the rule, in place of the needless confusion and liability to
breakage of the apparatus, which almost inevitably occurs in the lack of
such organization.
The details differ with the arrangements and administration of every
mill; but the general policy of definitely assigning persons to the
positions for which they are best adapted, and where it is presumed they
could be most useful, and to practice them in such work, is a rule which
is common to all.
A great deal of fire-apparatus is destroyed by freezing water during the
winter months, and therefore a special inspection of all such apparatus
should be made late in the autumn, when the water should be drained from
all portions of the system where there is liability of freezing, and all
hydrants and valves should be well oiled, preferably with mineral oil.
The hazard from a hydrant or other portion of the apparatus broken by
frost, does not lie so much in the probability that disadvantage may
result from the disuse of one element of the plant, as in the liability
that such a breakage may interfere with the whole system and render it
inoperative.
Buckets of water are the most effective fire-apparatus. They should be
kept full, and distributed in liberal profusion in the various rooms of
a mill, being placed on shelves or hung on hooks, as circumstances may
require. In order to assist in keeping them for fire purposes only, they
should be unlike other pails used about the premises, and in some
instances each pail and the wall or column behind its position bears the
same number.
Automatic-sprinklers have proved to be a most valuable form of
fire-apparatus in operating with great efficiency at fires where their
action was unaided by other fire-apparatus, particularly at night. In
mill fires the average loss for an experience of twelve years shows that
in those fires where automatic-sprinklers formed a part of the apparatus
operating upon the fire, the average loss amounted to only
one-nineteenth of the average of all other losses. If the difference
between these two averages represents the amount saved by the operation
of automatic-sprinklers, then the total damage from the number of fires
to which automatic-sprinklers are accredited, as forming a portion of
the apparatus, has been reduced six and a quarter million dollars by the
operation of this valuable device.
Although there have been numerous patents granted to inventors of
automatic-sprinklers since the early part of the present century, yet
their practical use and introduction has been subsequent to the
invention of the sealed automatic-sprinkler by Henry S. Parmelee of New
Haven, Ct., about twelve years ago. This device being the first, and for
many years the only automatic-sprinkler manufactured and sold, and
actually performing service over accidental fires, to him belongs the
distinction of being the pioneer, and practically the originator, of the
vast work done by automatic-sprinklers in reducing destruction of
property by fire.
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