Abstract The author here describes an attack on a very timely and important problem. If a fire administrator wants to obtain maximum protection from fire on a forest unit at the least annual cost, what should he do: build more lookouts? construct more roads and trails? or put more fire guards or fire fighters in the area? The author assumes, as has often been suspected, that no one set formula will apply everywhere. Accordingly, for a particular ranger district in Oregon he tries in turn to determine what the effect would be of concentrating only on one formula and measuring the result in terms of both the cost of the facilities and the average number of fire fighters it would probably take per fire; he then concentrates on another; then on combinations of both, etc. He uses the results as a measure of the relative desirability of the different combinations.
William G. Morris (Wed,) studied this question.
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