On the Fires of the City of Bozen

Appendix

History.

On the Fires of the City of Botzen. – 2/2

(Conclusion.)

What the princely commission accomplished is not known to us. However, the most important and decisive precautionary measure was taken a few years later by the magistrate of Bozen himself. Falser says: "Because a noble and honorable city council, in dutiful deliberation, observed that the great fires that previously occurred... mostly arose because at that time all the houses of the city were covered with shingle roofs and boards (planks), the aforesaid city council resolved for these reasons in the year 1598 for the first time that from then on all wooden roofs and boards be removed and instead throughout the entire city and adjacent districts (rural communities) the houses be covered with tile roofs, and thus henceforth observed by everyone under heavy penalty without acting against it. Which order, as useful as it was necessary, was entirely repeated in the newer fire regulation established in the year 1655, and was also most graciously ratified by His Serene Highness Archduke Ferdinand Charles, so this beneficial statute has since received the strongest of all sanctions."

This beneficial statute has since received the strongest of all sanctions. What it prescribes has become local custom, not only in the city and its immediate surroundings, but also in the more distant places of the so-called districts, and in the municipalities of Gries and Leifers, where one also sees the farmhouses and their barns almost universally covered with fired tiles. From this custom the city and these municipalities will only deviate when they cease to be mindful of the permanence of their prosperity. They will always remember that since the introduction of this custom, that is, for more than 300 years, despite the dangerous nature of their location described above, they have been spared from any major, or even somewhat significant, conflagration.

In truth, it is this salutary statute that prompted us to impart these reports. Almost every German city chronicle has stories to tell of great conflagrations; but few can boast of so wise and beneficial a statute arising therefrom as Botzen, a statute which in effectiveness is to be preferred even to the best fire insurance institution.

Fires arise by chance, by negligence, sometimes even by arsonist wickedness everywhere more or less. However, as long as one only needs to help where the fire originated, one is sure to master it with even somewhat orderly fire-fighting measures. Usually, one is able to save the house in which the flame broke out, if not completely, then for the most part; in the worst case, the objective is certainly achieved by tearing down the timbering. The matter is quite different, however, as soon as several buildings and entire rows of houses are seized by the flames. But before this disaster could occur, the fire will have long been extinguished where it arose if the surface of the other houses does not consist of combustible material. If we conceive not of wooden huts, but of well-built houses, one can take it as a fixed rule that the fire spreads further only through the combustible surface of the roofs. Where this is of wood and a stronger wind joins in, once a roof has caught fire, it is very often beyond all human strength to put a stop to the further spread of the fire, and the best fire-extinguishing equipment can accomplish little against it. Experience teaches how, due to burning splinters carried away by the wind, fires soon start simultaneously in several, often widely separated places, how confusion very quickly sets in, and how paralyzed the fire-fighting forces find themselves at every single point where they still wish to be active. We have a very recent sad example of this in the great fire of Salzburg, which, had the houses there been covered with stone tiles like those in Botzen, would most certainly have remained a merely quickly suppressed fire alarm in which only the house where the fire arose would have suffered more or less. One can unhesitatingly assert that every city and every village whose roofs consist of a combustible surface has far less real value and deserves less credit than those settlements where this is not the case, and that very little thought is given to one's own advantage and prosperity where, if it is possible to remedy this deficiency, one does not remedy it. And the possibility cannot, as soon as the earnest will to remedy arises, be reasonably disputed in very many places.