Fire Investigation 07
Fire Investigation 07 : (3) The New Science of Post-Flashover Burning: 2005 marked another major turning point in our understanding of fire behavior, as well as our understanding of the accuracy of fire origin determinations. A group of certified fire investigators from the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) designed an experiment that mirrored similar experiments that had been conducted (but not documented) at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Glynnco, GA. These investigators set up two rooms, simple 12 by 14 foot bedrooms, set each of them on fire, and allowed them to burn for about two minutes after they flashed over. They then asked 53 participants in a Las Vegas IAAI-sponsored fire investigation seminar to walk through the burned compartments and to write down the quadrant in which they believed the fire had originated. In the first compartment, three participants identified the correct quadrant. When the exercise was repeated on the second compartment, three different participants identified the correct quadrant. These results caused much consternation, particularly as ATF agents began presenting the results to groups of investigators. The bottom line was "The "old-days" of locating the point of origin of a post-flashover fire by relying on the "lowest burn and deepest char" are OVER! When word of the ATF experiments reached the fire investigation community, people began to examine the data more closely, because an error rate over 90% was simply unimaginable! In fact, the poor results should have surprised nobody. Carman reports that in the undocumented tests at Glynnco, the success rate was 8 to 10%
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