Fire Investigation 06
Fire Investigation 06 : (2) A More Cautious Approach: Nationwide, from 1999 to 2011, the National Fire Protection Association reports a drop from around 15% to around 8% in the percentage of fires determined to be arson. At least some of the downward trend can be accounted for by fire investigators taking a more cautious approach, and being more cognizant of the consequences of their determinations. This caution is probably not the result of old-school fire investigators changing their ways. NFPA 921 has now been a fact of life for 20 years, a time period over which many poorly trained investigators have had the opportunity to retire, and new fire investigators have always been aware of the need for more caution. As the great scientist Max Planck put it, "Science advances one funeral at a time". New ideas tend to spend a fair amount of time in the "heresy box," and new ideas in fire investigation are no exception. When it was first posited in the mid-1980s that full room involvement could be responsible for irregular patterns on a floor, many fire investigators derided that idea as "the flashover defense". Flashover is a transition point in a structure fire from having "a fire in a room" to "a room on fire". Post-flashover burning can create damage on a floor that looks very much like an ignitable liquid had burned there. It was only when fire investigators themselves began allowing their weekend seminar training fires to continue for a few minutes after flashover that they began to realize what the fire protection engineers were saying was correct. The rules for interpreting fire damage change once the fire becomes fully involved. There is still a small but significant cadre of fire investigators fighting a rear guard action who refuse to accept this fact, but acceptance is coming. The best training that fire investigators receive no longer focuses on teaching them to "recognize arson," but on teaching them how to understand fire patterns, particularly those caused by the effects of ventilation on fully involved compartment fires
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