The IAAI and CFITrainer.Net present these podcasts with a focus on issues relating to fire investigation. With expertise from around the world, the International Association of Arson Investigators produces these podcasts to bring more information and electronic media to fire investigators looking for training, education and general information about fire investigation. Topics include recent technologies, issues in the news, training opportunities, changes in laws and standards and any other topic that might be of interest to a fire investigator or industry professional affected by fire. Information is presented using a combination of original stories and interviews with scientists, leaders in fire investigation from the fire service and the law enforcement community.
<p>Welcome to IAAI’s August 2009 CFITrainer.Net Podcast. This month, we’ll take a closer look at the dangerous combination of summer heat and oily rags, we’ll examine another side of the rise in vacant home fires, and preview research underway on Australia’s devastating "Black Saturday" brush fires. We’ll also cover the latest in IAAI news.</p> <p>A recent fire in the UK has drawn attention to oily rags as a fire cause. A garage was destroyed by a fire traced to spontaneous combustion of towels soaked with teak oil that the property owner had used to treat their wood floor. He stored the used towels in the garage and, about 8 hours later, they spontaneously combusted.</p> <p>This topic is very timely. In the Northern Hemisphere, the dog days of summer are upon us. In many places, summer means more people outside, working on the yard, the house, their cars, and outdoor furniture and structures. The nice weather provides an opportunity to tackle outdoor maintenance and renovation chores that often use oil applied with rags, including linseed oil, teak oil, stains, and paint thinners. These used oily rags, if improperly stored or disposed of, can self-heat and spontaneously combust. Self-heating can be exacerbated by high summer temperatures that heat up non-air conditioned garages and sheds, as well as by high summer humidity that prevents rags from drying quickly. </p> <p>To learn more about the process of spontaneous combustion of oily rags, we’re joined by David Howitt, Professor of Materials Science at UC Davis College of Engineering. Thanks for joining us David.</p> <p>DAVID HOWITT: Oh, you’re very welcome.</p> <p>INTERVIEWER: Under what conditions can this type of spontaneous combustion take place?</p> <p>DAVID HOWITT: Well typically you need vegetable oils or actually fish oils, although people don’t use fish oil very much. But essentially linseed oil or tung oil, which are the two most common vegetable oils. Both actually do this quite readily at ambient temperatures. I think when they’re talking about teak oil, they’re really just talking about an oil that’s appropriate for teak wood. Teak wood is typically fairly hard, and it’s not a very porous wood, and so it relies essentially on something like a linseed oil based stain to give you some surface color and also to actually form a polymerizing film on the surface. Linseed oil is essentially a natural type of varnish. And these generic paints are becoming more and more popular now. They were very popular years and years ago, but they’re becoming more popular because the mineral spirits and the thinners that you need to use for these paints actually are less dangerous to the environment in terms of creating smog and so on. And so what has happened is a lot of paint manufacturers in recent years have started replacing some of the more synthetic type varnishes with this type of finish, and so we’re seeing them more and more appearing in wood stains and deck stains and even some kinds of paint.</p> <p>The problem is a fairly simple one and that is that natural vegetable materials have a tendency to decompose, and they do so, and usually it’s quite a harmless process. I mean, it’s just composting vegetation, this sort of thing, the way that things naturally break up, but under some circumstances, and it’s especially visible in these kinds of spontaneous ignition fires, what you have is these vegetable oils, instead of just slowly releasing the heat in the normal way, when you add them to a cotton rag, what they can do is they can react a great deal faster, and so the process is accelerated. The other factor that comes into play is that the rags themselves are very good thermal insulators, and so if you wipe these stains with these rags and then you simply bundle the rags up after use and put them in something like a cardboard box, what will happen is the heat will build up inside the rags and actually cause them to catch fire from the inside. It’s indeed a smoldering combustion typically, rather than a flaming combustion, and so it builds up a great deal of heat, and that heat is capable of simply setting the material on fire on its own. So, of course, you don’t need a match or something else to set alight, and in this way these materials can be a very serious hazard because they’re a very strong ignition source in the sense that they get very hot for quite a long time. So they can set fire to your surrounding combustibles and set them aflame, and of course, that’s when you have these house fires that you were talking, in fact, you were saying earlier about one that had been reported in England recently and had been attributed to this sort of thing.</p> <p>INTERVIEWER: What evidence can be left behind that a fire investigator should recognize?</p> <p>DAVID HOWITT: There’s a couple of little things that the first investigator should be aware of, and it’s an odd effect, and I studied it a little bit myself just with some laboratory experiments, and that is that the process that gives rise to the heating, the chemical reactions actually tend to occur right around room temperature. It’s somewhere about 20 degrees centigrade is the cutoff value. So we’re talking about something close to about 70 degrees, 72 degrees Fahrenheit. When the temperature is fairly low and you mix these rags or you do the staining at these kind of temperatures, you often don’t have a problem. It’s when the temperature gets just a few degrees higher than that and that’s when the reaction can start and it essentially is a bit like a snowball reaction. And so the temperatures are quite important in determining certainly for the first investigator whether or not it’s a likely occurrence.</p> <p>The other thing, of course, that’s important is determining exactly what kind of oils were in the paint because it’s only vegetable oils that do this thing. The petroleum base and the synthetic oils don’t actually do this. So, for example, you couldn’t get this effect with soaking, for example, motor oil in rags, it wouldn’t heat up at all. It’s just the vegetable oils. But it’s very much a hit and miss process. If the temperature is 23, 24 degrees centigrade, then it becomes much, much more likely that you’re going to get a reaction than if you were at 21 or 20 degrees. Just those few degrees difference, and that’s what made the determination of this effect a little bit of a mystery for people because when you do the experiments, if you’re not very careful with the temperatures, you can have it not happen or you can have it happen. The big thing is that the ignition source is very strong, and so you’re often, if, for example, a cardboard box was left on a wooden floor, you might expect actually the wooden floor to be burned through locally. You would expect to find deep burn marks where the reaction occurred. That will be the first thing.</p> <p>Unfortunately for the fire investigator the spontaneous ignition process is so thorough that it rarely leaves any evidence behind, but it does need something known as rigid char to form, and if in fact the ignition source hasn’t been disturbed in the process of the first investigation, you can often detect this rigid char simply because you’ll find, as I said, a bundle of rags that if it’s undisturbed will simply fall apart when you touch it. This rigid char is necessary because it’s the thing that controls the flow of air to the interior of the rags, and in doing so it enables the reaction to occur. If you lay these rags out flat or if you hang them on a washing line, for example, they won’t heat up simply because the heat is able to escape into the air, and if you have a rapid air flow through the rag pile the same sort of thing will happen. So the rigid char itself, when it forms, allows the air to get slowly into the interior of the pile and that’s what essentially stimulates the reaction, and you can often see that in the remnants simply because obviously you’ve had a burning on an interior and not the exterior and the remnants left can sometimes clue you in.</p> <p>There are also chemical tests you can do on the residues that you find because most of these paints and stains contain, they’re actually methyl soaps. Soaps typically of zirconium and manganese and those elements are fairly readily detectable by simply doing an ICP type analysis. And so if you have some of the residues from what you think is a spontaneous condition, you can actually do chemical tests to determine the presence of, they’re actually referred to as metallic dryers because they’re not indigenous, typically you won’t find them elsewhere, and so if you find things like cobalt or manganese or zirconium present, then that’s a clue that you may have had this sort of activity going on. People sometimes try and do tests for the oils themselves, but those are typically not very successful because the oils invariable decompose and they’re also very difficult to spot. </p> <p>INTERVIEWER: What questions should a fire investigator ask witnesses to determine if spontaneous combustion of this type might have been the cause of the fire?</p> <p>DAVID HOWITT: What you typically see with these kinds of ignitions is that it takes typically four to six hours for the ignition source itself to heat up to a sufficient temperature. And then it can often take an hour or so after that before it actually bursts into flame, and so this period of six to eight hours is usually the time that you can expect from the moment essentially that the rags are bundled up into a pile, to the time that the fire is actually reported. So if the first investigator can get, certainly from whoever was doing painting or staining, a fairly good description of what they did, when they finished their work, the circumstances and so on, even whether it felt warm, whether it was cool, whether they were doing it inside or outside, this sort of thing, and then follow through that scenario and see if they can pinpoint the time at which they think the rags would have begun to self-heat. And then as I said, typically you can predict that six to eight hours after that you should have had the fire reported.</p> <p>It’s also, of course, important to know what the people were doing in terms of how they were applying the stain because another thing that’s actually a common misconception with these sorts of fires is that it’s not actually a rag that’s sodden in stain that is the danger, it’s the one that only has a small amount of stain in it. In fact, the optimum mixture is about the same weight of rag as it is to stain, and when you have that situation, the rags actually feel fairly dry. And so, there’s, of course, the temptation to keep those rags because you could, you know, feasibly use them again if they dried out a little bit, and those are the rags that are the most dangerous and the most likely to spontaneously ignite. So, yes, a detailed description of what exactly went on, what happened and the timing can be very useful in predicting whether actually such an ignition was likely. </p> <p>INTERVIEWER: Thanks again David. We appreciate your expertise. Now, let’s turn our attention to two current news stories.</p> <p>A recent AP article examined another side of the rise in vacant home fires. In previous podcasts, we’ve talked about the incentive for property owners affected by the recession to set fire to their buildings for insurance settlements and how this has contributed to the rise in arson for profit. However, there is another side to the rise in vacant building fires: accidental fires resulting from the actions of squatters living in vacant, abandoned, or foreclosed and bank-owned homes.</p> <p>According to the Census Bureau, a staggering 19 million homes now stand vacant, many as a result of the foreclosure crisis and economic downturn. People who have lost their own homes are seeking refuge in vacant houses, which usually have no electricity or cooking and heating fuel. Therefore, the squatters engage in unsafe cooking, heating, and electricity procurement practices. These unsafe practices raise the risk of accidental fire.</p> <p>The Associated Press profiled one community, in Flint, MI, where this reality turned into tragedy. In Flint, more than 1,000 homes sit abandoned, awaiting demolition. One of those homes was 1430 Jane Avenue. The home was abandoned by the owner and in tax foreclosure. But, it wasn’t unoccupied. Gordon Yoesting, a well-known and well-liked local who had grown up on Jane Avenue, returned to his old neighborhood having survived a vicious criminal beating. But he was never the same. He got by on itinerant jobs and disability, living in cheap apartments. Until he got an idea about 1430 Jane Avenue. Yoesting asked the owner, who had given up on the property as it went through the tax foreclosure process, if he could take care of the place. The owner gave him a set of keys. Yoesting set about tidying the mess and rigging up a way to get water and electricity. Yoesting told neighbors that he was going to buy the place; the local Land Bank who controlled the property told him he was being evicted. Shortly thereafter, tipped off by someone, the electric company shut off the illegal service. A few days later, Yoesting had lit some candles for light as he worked on a lawn mower in the living room. How the fire actually started isn’t clear, but by the next morning, the house was ablaze and Gordon Yoesting was dead inside. All fire investigators should be aware to possibilities like squatters when investigating abandoned building fires and alert for evidence of human habitation.</p> <p>Illegal occupants aren’t the only victims of these vacant building fires. Firefighters, who are taught to attack fire vigorously, are also in increased danger. After a Detroit firefighter was killed when fighting an intentional fire in an abandoned home, the city began to look differently at these abandoned building fires. More municipalities followed suit, implementing new policies to safeguard firefighters — if the building is vacant and no one appears to be inside, fire companies are instructed to attack the fire only from the exterior. This new approach has ramifications for evidence survival, and thus investigative outcomes. In addition, the new policies decrease the chance of finding victims that no one knew were inside.</p> <p>Our second news item is an alert about research underway in Australia to examine what happened in the "Black Saturday" brushfires that ravaged the state of Victoria in February 2009. As reported by ABCNews in Australia, one aspect of this research looks at human behavior during the fires. Preliminary, anecdotal findings in Marysville indicate that half of the people who died in their homes were found sheltering in a bathroom, even though bathrooms are not advised as sheltering places because they typically have no windows. The full report is due in mid-August.</p> <p>Finally, we close with news from IAAI. Following up on our previous vacant buildings story, IAAI offers an Abandoned Building Project Tool Box that assists public officials in dealing with vacant and abandoned buildings, ensuring the safety of fire suppression personnel who respond to vacant and abandoned building fires, and reducing the incidence of incendiary fires involving these properties. The package can be purchased by contacting the IAAI office at 1-800-468-4224.</p> <p>That concludes this IAAI CFITrainer.Net podcast. We’ll see you again next month.</p> <p></p>
This program provides a primer on accreditation, certification, and certificates for fire investigation training.
A fire occurred on the night of Feb. 20, 2003, in The Station nightclub at 211 Cowesett Avenue, West Warwick, Rhode Island.
Arc Mapping, or Arc Fault Circuit Analysis, uses the electrical system to help reconstruct a scene, providing investigators with a means of determining the area of a fire’s origin.
This module introduces basic electrical concepts, including: terminology, atomic theory and electricity, Ohm’s Law, Joule’s Law, AC and DC power.
A fire occurred on the evening of June 18, 2007, in the Sofa Super Store in Charleston, SC that resulted in the deaths of nine fire fighters.
This module looks at the many ways fire investigators enter and grow in the profession through academia, the fire service, law enforcement, insurance, and engineering.
This module will present a description of the IAAI organization.
This module takes a closer look at four of the most commonly-reported accidental fire causes according to "NFPA Fact Sheet.
This program brings three highly experienced fire investigators and an attorney with experience as a prosecutor and civil litigator together for a round table discussion.
One of the legal proceedings that may require the fire investigator to testify is a deposition. Depositions are often related to civil proceedings, but more and more jurisdictions are using them in criminal cases.
Deposing attorneys employ a variety of tactics to learn about the expert witness giving testimony, to try to unsettle that witness to see how he/she handles such pressure, and to probe for weaknesses to exploit.
The program discusses the basics of digital photography for fire investigators as well as software and editing procedures for digital images intended as evidence.
This self-paced program is an introduction to discovery in civil proceedings such as fire loss claims and product defect lawsuits.
This self-paced program is an introduction to discovery in criminal proceedings.
This module covers the foundation of DNA evidence: defining, recognizing, collecting, and testing.
This program provides a practical overview of how to perform the baseline documentation tasks that occur at every scene.
This module will discuss the techniques and strategies for conducting a proper science-based fire scene investigation and effectively presenting an investigator’s findings in court as an expert witness.
This program explains the basic principles of how electric and hybrid vehicles are designed and work, including major systems and typical components.
This program presents critical safety information for how to interact with electric and hybrid vehicles.
This module presents critical electrical safety practices that every fire investigator should implement at every scene, every time.
In this program, we will look at emerging technologies that fire investigators are integrating into their daily investigative work with great success.
This self-paced program examines the fire investigator's ethical duties beyond the fire scene.
As social media has emerged as a powerful force in interpersonal communications, fire investigators are being confronted with new questions...
Should you work for a private lab as a consultant if you are on an Arson Task Force? How about accepting discounts from the local hardware store as a “thanks” for a job well done on a fire they had last year?
This module takes investigators into the forensic laboratory and shows them what happens to the different types of fire scene evidence that are typically submitted for testing.
This module teaches the foundational knowledge of explosion dynamics, which is a necessary precursor to investigating an explosion scene.
This module addresses the foundations of fire chemistry and places it within the context of fire scene investigations.
The program is designed to introduce a new Palm/Pocket PC application called CFI Calculator to users and provide examples of how it can be used by fire investigators in the field.
This module examines these concepts to help all professionals tasked with determining fire origin and cause better understand fire flow dynamics so they can apply that knowledge to both to fire investigation and to fire attack.
This module provides a road map for fire officers to integrate and navigate their fire investigation duty with all their other responsibilities and describes where to obtain specific training in fire investigation.
The evaluation of hazards and the assessment of the relative risks associated with the investigation of fires and explosions are critical factors in the management of any investigation.
This module will describe the most commonly encountered fire protection systems.
This module presents best practices in preparing for and conducting the informational interview with witnesses in the fire investigation case.
This module provides instruction on the fundamentals of residential building construction with an eye toward how building construction affects fire development.
This module provides introductory information on the Hazardous Waste Operations and Emergency Response (HAZWOPER) standard – 29 CFR 1910.120.
This module teaches first responders, including fire, police and EMS, how to make critical observations.
The program examines the importance of assessing the impact of ventilation on a fire.
This program discusses how to access insurance information, understand insurance documents, ask key questions of witnesses, and apply the information learned.
This module offers a basic introduction about how some selected major appliances operate.
This program introduces the fire investigator to the issues related to the collection, handling and use of evidence related to a fire investigation.
This program takes you inside the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) archives of some of the most interesting and instructive test burns and fire model simulations they have ever conducted.
The program provides foundational background on the scope of the youth-set fire problem, the importance of rigorous fire investigation in addressing this problem, and the role of key agencies in the response to a youth-set fire.
This module provides a thorough understanding of the ways an investigation changes when a fire-related death occurs.
This self-paced program will help you understand what to expect at a fire where an LODD has occurred, what your role is, how to interact with others, and how to handle special circumstances at the scene.
This program will introduce the fire investigator to the basic methodologies use to investigate vehicle fires.
This module presents the role natural gas can play in fire ignition, fuel load, and spread; the elements of investigating a fire in a residence where natural gas is present; and the potential role the gas utility or the municipality can play an investigation.
This self-paced program covers fundamental legal aspects of investigating youth-set fires, including the juvenile justice system, legalities of interviews and interrogations, arson statutes, search and seizure, and confidentiality.
This program explains what lithium-ion batteries are, how they are constructed, where they are used, safety concerns, and how they can cause fires and explosions.
This program discusses the latest developments in expert testimony under the Daubert standard, including the MagneTek case recently decided in the United States Circuit Court of Appeals.
This module focuses on how to manage investigations that have “complicating” factors.
This module uses the Motive, Means, and Opportunity case study to demonstrate how responsibility is determined in an arson case.
This program covers the general anatomy of a motor vehicle and a description of typical components of the engine, electrical, ignition, and fuel systems.
This self-paced program is the second part of a two-part basic introduction to motor vehicle systems. This program describes the function and major components of the transmission, exhaust, brake, and accessory systems.
This module educates the investigator about NFPA 1033’s importance, its requirements, and how those requirements impact the fire investigator’s professional development.
This module reviews the major changes included in the documents including the use of color photos in NFPA 921 and additional material that supports the expanded required knowledge list in NFPA 1033 Section 1.3.7.
The program illustrates for the fire investigator, how non-traditional fire scene evidence can be helpful during an investigation.
This module introduces the postflashover topic, describes ventilation-controlled fire flow, illustrates how the damage left by a postflashover can be significantly different than if that fire was extinguished preflashover.
This module demonstrates the investigative potential of information stored on electronic devices.
This module explains the relationship between NFPA 1033 and NFPA 921
This module lays the groundwork for understanding marine fires by covering four basic concepts that the investigator must understand before investigating a marine fire.
In this module, you will learn more about how cancer develops, what occupational exposure risks to carcinogens exist at fire scenes, and how to better protect yourself against those exposures.
The use of the process of elimination in the determination of a fire cause is a topic that has generated significant discussion and controversy in the fire investigation profession.
This module teaches the basics of the electrical power generation, distribution, and transmission system.
This module presents the basics of natural gas and its uses and system components in a residence.
The basics of the scientific method are deceptively simple: observe, hypothesize, test, and conclude.
This module explains the principles of search and seizure under the Fourth Amendment, as contained in the amendment and according to subsequent case law, and applies them to typical fire scene scenarios.
This module addresses the foundations of thermometry, including the definition of temperature, the scales used to measure temperature and much more.
This program presents the results of flame experiments conducted with a candle.
This self-paced program explains to non-investigators the role of the fire investigator, what the fire investigator does, how the fire investigator is trained, what qualifications the fire investigator must meet.
This module will untangle the meanings of "undetermined," straighten out how to use the term correctly, talk about how not to use it, and describe how to properly report fires where "undetermined" is the cause or classification.
This module will advise fire investigators on how to approach the fact-finding procedures necessary and validate a hypothesis.
This module provides an overview on how structures can become vacant and eventually abandoned.
This self-paced program provides a basic framework for structuring the management of fire cases and fire investigators.
This module illustrates how wildland fires spread, explains how to interpret burn patterns unique to these types of fires.
This module presents the key elements of the initial origin and cause report and methods of clearly presenting findings in a professional manner.