Word: arsons
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...firemen used every available piece of equipment, including the city's sole fire boat. Charlestown's Engine 50 spent one Saturday night rushing to multiple-alarmers, first two miles to South Boston, then four miles from there to Jamaica Plain, then finally back to Charles town. As for the arson investigators. "We're getting there after the fact." McCarthy admits. "Two or three alarms have gone off by the time the arson squad gets there." In such cases most of any evidence of arson is burned, and very few arrests can be made--only 10 all this summer...
Since early June, usually on Friday mornings or Friday or Saturday nights, about 200 "suspicious" fires have occurred in Boston. McCarthy has the luck to heard the arson squad in a city where a third of all fires are arson-related, and where the fire department is by far the most overworked in the country. One firemen's union official found that to overworked in the country. One firemen's union official found that to bring the force up to the national average of total runs and multiple alarms per engine, the city would have to reopen the 21 stations...
...shocked as Bostonians may be at the epidemic of torching, they should final its caused even more troubling. If it were just the word of a few firebugs or linked to a general increase in crime, one would expect the arson to have centered on the city's most crime-ridden area, Roxbury--especially on hearing that vacant buildings, a common commodity there, were the targets of 70 percent of the fires. (The figures is the main reason the arson took no lives...
...when a neighborhood's real estate potential skyrockets, landlords look for a way to get the current residents out and the wealthier residents--who can pay higher rents or higher condominium prices--in. And there's no doubt that many landlords are unscrupulous enough to use arson to chase residents out. An extreme instance of such tactics was the 1979-80 string of condo conversions in already-high-rent areas, which was apparently responsible for a fourfold increase in Back Bay's arson rate, scaring off many renters who had resisted conversion...
...that several other neighborhoods around the city are on the verge of their own little real estate booms, arson is again pushing the old residents out. Either landlord are engaging in blatant arson-for profit or they're cutting maintenance to their buildings, which pressures tenants to abandon the apartments. After that, vandals may torch the building, or scavengers, called "junkies" in the arson business, strip the building for pipes or scrap metal and burn what's left to cover up the robbery. There are between 1200 and 1400 vacant buildings in Boston; once they are disposed of--as about...