Fires, as you know, are one of the most terrible scourges of the Russian people, including the Orenburg Cossacks. It is known from statistics that the villages and hamlets of Rosai burn to the ground every 25 years. This common fate of the Russian people, of course, does not escape the Cossack villages, built almost entirely from wooden material. The villages were subjected to especially terrible devastation in the past, when the troops did not take almost any preventive measures or defensive measures against fires. Only recently has the military leadership drawn special attention to this extremely important matter*). Currently, the fire department in the army is in the following form.
d) For every Cossack householder, it is mandatory to insure his home, so that the insured amount does not exceed two-thirds of the cost of the building and, moreover, does not exceed three hundred rubles. and below that RUB. For all buildings erected on one courtyard site, it makes no difference what material they were built from.
2) The annual payment of insurance premiums to the military fire capital, according to the provisions of the Military Council, held on December 8, 1873, is determined at 2'/2'/o of the amount for which the buildings are insured.
*") Order for the army of 1895, No. 616.
3) To combat fire, fireproof fire sheds were built in each village, old fire engines and convoys were repaired and newly installed, and detailed rules were drawn up for the guidance of officials and householders.
“All of the above-mentioned measures of the military authorities, although, without a doubt, are currently having a beneficial effect on the population in the sense of protecting them from the final fire devastation, but, for the complete achievement of the goal,
——whether they require some modifications and additions.
It seems that in order to better achieve the goal in this regard, it is necessary to adopt the following measures.
r) The amount insured should not be limited to any minimum norm, as long as it does not exceed the total cost of the insured.
2) The insurance premium of 212% should be reduced in general to the norm charged by other insurance companies. If private companies, having special expenses for maintaining agents, find it profitable to insure significantly below 21/a9/o, then there is no reason to assume that this would be a loss for the army. The excellent state of military insurance capital on the face of it (as of January 1900, 643,070 rubles) is enough to confirm this position.
3) The amount of the insurance premium should not be the same for buildings built from different materials! 4.10, but should depend on the degree of flammability of these materials. So, for stone buildings you need to take a lower percentage than for wooden ones; for wooden ones, fenced with stone fences with clay roofs, it is cheaper than for the same thing, but fenced with wooden fences, etc.
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4) It would be a great blessing for the population if stone buildings with thatched roofs soaked in evil were distributed among them. There is no shortage of materials of this kind in villages. Almost everywhere you can find a mass of wild building stone of excellent quality, but buildings from it develop relatively poorly. The main reason for this is the unaccustomed, and partly, inability of the population to use such rich gifts of nature as building stone. Therefore, it is necessary, one way or another, to come to his aid.
In order to attract the Cossacks to this extremely important DBlu in their economic life, it is necessary, first of all, to teach it. It goes without saying that you cannot do much with orders and regulations. This requires visibility and experience. In some villages and towns with this goal, the following technique was practiced quite successfully. Craftsmen were hired at public expense to build some kind of public building, like a fire shed, a barn, or even just a hut for some poor widow. During the entire construction period, interested community members kept an eye on the progress and methods of work, and then tried to build it themselves. In this way, in some villages of the Vozdvizhenskaya village, many stone buildings with thatched roofs impregnated with clay were built. Residents of the villages of this village are now positively convinced of the practicality, durability, cheapness and even beauty of this kind of buildings and began to practice them on a significant scale.