Stuff You Should Know - The Dubious Science of Arson Investigation

Episode Date: April 16, 2024

Arson investigation has changed a lot over the years. There is actual science available now, but the word still hasn't totally gotten out. Listen in today, and don't play with matches!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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This is Vico Ortiz, host of Date My Abuelita First each week. Myself, alongside our resident abuelita, Liliana Montenegro, esa soy yo. Play matchmaker for a group of hopeful romantics in this fun, flirty, and hilarious game show. That's me! Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too, and this is Stuff You Should Know. And before we start, Chuck, I want to take a moment to take the opportunity to take the

chance of wishing you a happy birthday. Oh, thank you. I did March, same day Caesar was stabbed. Can't get over that. Ah, anyone famous get stabbed on your birthday? I don't think so. No, definitely not. All right, well, we'll have to change that.

By stabbing you. That was sinister. I even wished you happy birthday and look what I get. I get a stabbing threat. I know. What has become of us, Chuck? Thanks man. Fig the big five three, such a notable birthday.

Yeah. I feel like also, does it feel any different than the five O? No. Um, I feel like also we need to give a retroactive happy birthday to Jerry too from last month. Yeah, that's true. Happy birthday, Jerry. You know, I did the ultimate 53-year-old guy thing for my birthday. I went to Athens, Georgia for two Bob Dylan shows.

Wowee. That were exactly alike. Were they really? He played the same show? Yeah. Bob Dylan doesn't say like, oh, let me mix it up for if anyone wants to come the second night.

Oh, I'm actually surprised. I could totally see him playing different shows depending on his mood or whatever he felt like that night. No, well, I mean, there is something to that, but he's 83, he's got his set locked in right now. Is he really? He's 30 years older than you. I know, and he's still playing live music.

That's awesome. Could you understand a word he said? Uh, yeah, it was very vocal forward set, actually, like some real quiet music and his voice was out front in the mix. Uh, I've seen Dylan a lot. It's always, you never know what you're going to get. So it's always, that's part of the fun being a Dylan fan is like, Ooh, I wonder, wonder what he's going to be like this time. Is he in a bad mood tonight? No, he was Dylan fan is like, ooh, I wonder what he's gonna be like this time. Is he in a bad mood tonight? No, he was great, he's old though, man.

Well yeah, 83 is very old to be getting on stage and playing, how long of a set? Like an hour and a half, 17, 18 songs. He plays piano full time now, which is sort of the new change. Okay. But he stands, I've never seen anyone do this. I've seen people stand at a keyboard,

but I've never seen anyone stand behind a grand piano the entire time, basically. That is unusual. He would sit a little bit, but he'd sit for like six or seven seconds and he popped right back up. Wow. That's really interesting.

I don't know what's going on with him. That's very, that's interesting. Anyway, we're here to talk about Arson Investigation and a big thanks to Livia for her help with this because, you know, I was just kind of keen on like, hey, Livia, put together an article on like how that works and how they figure out if someone burned something down. And she came back pretty quickly and she was like, oh, Chuck, guess what? It turns out like we can talk a little bit about that, but the real story here is the fact that arson investigation for most of its time as a thing

has been a lot of sort of witchcrafty BS. Yeah, folklore. And that's the real story, yeah. Mysticism made up. Intuition is probably about the kindest way you can describe how it was for decades. Like, did you see a backdraft? No, I didn't actually.

Isn't that like a Ron Howard jam? Yeah, back in the day. But De Niro plays a arson investigator who is very much fits, and he apparently hung out with like three or four arson investigators and kind of got his performance from them sure which makes total sense now that I've read this because there was a lot of like Not mysticism, but really like you know

Smelling something and like sniffing something he chipped off of a wall putting your fingers on the railroad tracks Yeah, like really corny lines. Like one of his corny lines is, you know, the only way to kill it is to love it a little bit. So it's very much in line with what we found out here, which was that arson investigation has long been just not scientific. No, and there's like, we're not just here to poke fun at arson investigators

because they used unscientific methods. The big problem with this is those unscientific, intuitive methods have been proven time and time again to be just utterly wrong, but they're used still to this day in some jurisdictions to put people away sometimes for life, sometimes to death. Some people have been put to death under the junk science that arson investigation is and has been for decades. And has only recently started to really kind of come in line and become a scientific endeavor.

Yeah, for sure. So big thanks, Livia said, to a couple of gentlemen, Douglas Starr and David Gran. They wrote some pretty great pieces, Douglas Starr for Discover and David Gran for The New Yorker. Can I just say David Gran's New Yorker article, it's called Trial by Fire, about Cameron Todd Willingham and his wrongful execution. I think basically everybody should read that article at some point in time in their life. It's just gut wrenching. Yeah, great investigation, great journalism. So let's get going here.

I guess the first thing we should say is that the first people to get involved in arson investigation were not scientists. It was developed as a thing by firefighters, by cops, by law enforcement generally, and not people who understood the scientific method. The first book about fire investigation was called Fire Investigations. Very appropriate. No colon. It was published in 1945 by Harry Rethoret of the Fire Underwriters Investigation Bureau of Canada.

And it was very much written for an audience of law enforcement to be like, all right, here's your handbook if you want to prove arson. Right. That's the big problem with it is in addition to it basically being like old wives tales and folklore, it came from the position like if you're investigating this, if you're using this book, you're trying to prove arson, not you're trying to figure out what

started a fire and it may or may not have been arson. It's here's what to look for for arson. And the problem is, is a lot of really common features that are found after a fire were attributed wrongly to arson. And the problem is, is a lot of really common features that are found after a fire were attributed wrongly to arson and this is where it started to spread all the way back in 1945.

You know what a better title would have been? What? What to expect when you're expecting arson. That was an all time great, Chuck. Oh, thank you. I just thought of that. So that book was sort was the standard until 1969, about 25 years later or so. I got a Paul Kirk biochemist this time and

forensic scientists at the University of Cal Berkeley, published a different book called Fire Investigation. Well, it didn't have the S, so it must have been the prequel. Yeah. This one should have been called Fire Investigation Colon. You won't believe how much has changed. So, yeah, so Paul Kirk being a scientist, he's like, no, you really want to track down what started the fire and then start making your assumptions after you've collected evidence and analyzed it. Don't start from the premise that this is arson and then look for signs that support your premise. That's wrong.

That's not how science works. Um, the problem is, is like, Paul Kirk was like, use, use the scientific method. And the fire investigators said to Paul, Paul, there's not a lot of science for us to, to compare our findings against someone. Help, help Nanny State. And then Nanny State swooped in and improved everything forever.

Yeah, about eight years later or so after that book in 1977, there was a government report that agreed, hey, there's not a lot of stuff going on. And so there were a couple of guides put out, Arson and Arson Investigation in 77, which was based on surveys from leading investigators, and then Fire and the Fire Investigation Handbook from 1980. And we should just kind of read through like this quick list because this is, this was the general thinking of like

how you can tell if it's ARSEN if these things are there in the burned house. Right. I'll do the first one. Everyone knows this. The most severely burned area of the house is where it started. Yeah, it just makes sense.

It had the opportunity to burn the longest, so it burned the hardest, right? Makes sense. Totally. All these make sense. Also, heat rises, which means fire rises and smoke rises So the ceiling is always the most burned part of any given room which they call compartments in fire investigation lingo and that if you find burned floors that

Automatically says an accelerant was used because you dump accelerant on the floor and light it and that's how the floor gets charred Telltale sign if you find a charred floor an accelerant was used Also, if you see a puddle shaped char on that floor, that's another telltale sign for liquid Because moke spreads out if you see a V shaped soot mark on the wall That is going to literally point to the origin of the fire. Right, and another one that kind of was an umbrella category for some subcategories is that an accelerant fueled fire burns hotter than any other kind of fire.

It also burns faster as a result. So that means that all sorts of weird stuff happens in a hotter, faster fire. For example, something that they call crazed glass, which is glass that has this weird webbing of cracks through it, which they're like, is again, an indicator of a very hot, fast fire, which indicates an accelerant was used. So you find glass with webs in it, that is a surefire indicator that somebody started this fire using some sort of accelerant or fuel. Yeah, they said, that's just, it's craze.

And they went, don't you mean glazed? I said, no, let's just call it craze, since it's so close to another glass term. Right, he goes, I hadn't thought about that. It makes it even better. So Nixon, believe it or not, kind of got things going in 1973 when there was a report from that administration that

fires caused more than $11 billion in damage, killed 12,000 people in 1973. It's crazy. A lot of this was found out to be exaggerated, but it didn't matter because that kind of lit a match, no pun intended, under the government's butt to get into this. And they created the and funded the Center for Fire Research, which is when they basically said, all right, let's get a hundred engineers to really look at this from an objective point of view and come back to us with some good stuff. Yeah, one of the early things that came out of this

that was really groundbreaking was called the Cone Calorimeter. And it was invented by a guy with the wonderful name of Vitenis Bobarouskis, who is a fire safety expert to this day. And the Cone Calorimeter is essentially like a vent hood, a giant vent hood that has a ton of sensors attached to it. And you set something on fire,

say like a specific kind of couch, and it records all sorts of different things. The chemical composition of the gases that are released, the opacity of the smoke, how hot it burns, how long it burns, it even has a scale, so you can measure, you can compare the weight of the smoke, how hot it burns, how long it burns. It even has a scale so you can measure, you can compare the weight of the soot compared to the weight of like what the furniture was like before it caught fire. And you can take all this and put it in a database. Like what you're doing now is carrying out repeatable experiments

to produce data that people can use to, um, to compare their findings to, which was again, the problem that fire investigators were having that the nanny state swooped in and helped. And this is how they helped. Yeah. And just to create an image in the viewer's mind's eye, if you're picturing that thing as some humongous thing, where you set a couch on it, uh, that's not the deal.

It's very small actually. Uh, and it's, it looks like a little camp stove sort of with all these things hooked to it. So you cut a piece of the couch off is what happens. Actually they have larger ones too that, that you can set essentially a house on fire underneath one. Oh, well, okay. But I'm talking about just the general lab version. Okay.

Okay. Okay. They have them, they have them bigger than a house? Yes, I saw that in some labs that they have like house simulations in, they like the roof will be the calorimeter. Oh, okay. So it's like all sorts of different sizes.

We're both right, I think is the happy outcome of it. Okay. There's also another experiment that, or another finding that these experiments yielded, which is flash over, right? Yeah. I mean, I could have sworn in the movie backdraft, they called that backdraft.

Maybe that's a similar term or maybe it's the same thing. It's different. Oh, it is? Okay. Backdraft seems to be a component of a flash over. Oh, okay. Well, I guess that makes sense. So a flash over is when you've got a fire going in a house,

you've got a big layer of smoke that's got all kinds of like combustible gases, all sorts of little particles that are super flammable up in that smoke. It's at the ceiling collecting and collecting and then just getting more dense and going down, down, down as the room heats up. And then as it hits a certain point, basically a high enough temperature to ignite it, it's like an explosion basically. It can hit a thousand degrees.

And when that flash over happens, you can see char marks and burn marks that previously people were like the only way to get that is if you like dump gas all over the room. Right. And that's a thousand degrees Celsius, like 1800 degrees Fahrenheit, right? Previously, people were like, the only way to get that is if you like dump gas all over a room. Right. And that's a thousand degrees Celsius, like 1800 degrees Fahrenheit, right? That is really hot. And it happens, there's a really steep incline where that temperature just increases like that.

And everything, stuff just spontaneously catches fire because it's so hot. It's reached the ignition point for that couch or that TV or whatever. The whole room catches fire. so hot, it's reached the ignition point for that couch or that TV or whatever, the whole room catches fire. And like you said, it does all sorts of, it leaves all sorts of telltale marks that had long been attributed to arson. For example, the idea that the floor is charred or another one is kind of related to the idea that if the floor is charred and accelerant was used, if the underneath or if the bottom

of a couch, what's that called? The underside of a couch, the undercarriage of a couch. That's where the socks are. The fanny of the couch. If that's burned. It depends on what country you're in. That's true. If that's burned, then they were like, well, an

accelerant was used, it spilled over under the couch and caught the couch on fire. No, when the whole room becomes what's called fully involved, the whole room's on fire, the bottom of the couch on fire. No, when the whole room becomes what's called fully involved, the whole room's on fire, the bottom of the couch can very easily get burned. Same with the underside of the bed and any furniture and the floor. So that was a big finding too.

And then the other thing about the flash over is it can basically stop and stay in suspended animation until oxygen comes in and it catches fire again. But wherever that oxygen's coming from, the fire follows in like a line. And it can go around the corner, up the stairs, through a bedroom door, and out a bathroom window. If that's where the oxygen's coming from, the fire will follow it. That is what a backdraft is in my understanding. Okay. I think that's that, I haven't seen that movie in a while,

but that sounds about right. Okay. Even though it was a movieified version, you know? Right. I think the science in it was supposed to be pretty good. Oh, was it? Yeah, I mean, it was Ron Howard, you know? So what was the, I mean,

this is like the early nineties, wasn't it? Yeah, it seems about right. I mean, this would like the early 90s, wasn't it? Uh, yeah, it seems about right. I mean, this would have been, so one thing that, that you'll find when you start looking into, um, fire investigation is, you know, Paul Kirk wrote that book in 1969 and over time, like more and more scientists got involved in fire investigation, but it's still like, um, percolating throughout the field. Like, so in the early nineties, there was still a lot of Hocum involved. And I'm sure Backdraft repeated a lot of that too.

Oh yeah. That the whole character was sort of, you know, that mystical guy who understood fire, you know, more than anyone. Yeah. Um, another big thing happened in the early 90s, besides the movie Backdraft in 1991, was the Oakland Black Hole, a big fire in Oakland, California that destroyed about close to 3,000 homes. But it was a really good chance to go in there as a fire investigator and kind of see what

happened. They looked at 50 different houses and they found, you know, sort of the normal things that you might find when you're thinking arson. But one of the big things they found was that crazing on the glass, they did some experimentation with that glass and they found, they basically said that this whole notion that crazing is because of arson isn't true at all. It's when they spray the windows with that water and it's at a really high heat that it cools super fast. That's where you're going to get it. And this is one of those that seemed really like they should have known this earlier.

Just because people have been blowing glass and working with glass for so long. I'm surprised someone didn't know that before that. No, that was a finding from the Oakland Black Hole. Yeah, like it wasn't one glass maker that was like, oh, by the way, if you get it wet, that happens. These, like this industry or field doesn't even listen to Supreme Court or other court rulings. They're not gonna listen to some glass blower.

Yeah, that's true. Those are as hippie-dippie as it comes. The other thing about that Oakland black hole, um, opportunity, cause you like, they knew what caused the fire. They knew for a fact, it wasn't arson in these houses. They were originally planning on examining a hundred houses, but the, um, features and characteristics that they found were so uniform that they stopped at 50. The group agreed like, we're not going to learn anything from another 50 of them.

We totally got this. Like it's that repeatable. Like this is what happens when a flash over occurs. All these telltale signs of arson are totally made up. Yeah. I say we take a break Chuck and we'll come back and we'll talk a little more about Arson Investigation. Bring a little optimism into your life with The Bright Side, a new kind of daily podcast

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romance of a meal and feels like you're seated next to a different guest at that dinner. Hear these podcasts and more on your free iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. So there were a couple more like huge landmarks I guess in the late 80s or mid 80s, early 90s, as far that really pushed arson and fire investigation forward. One was a terrible hotel fire from New Year's Eve 1986, in I think San Juan, Puerto Rico at the DuPont Plaza Hotel, which I think was a Sheridan at the time. The hotel was in a dispute with its workers over a union contract and some disgruntled workers Set a bunch of furniture on fire in one of the ballrooms and ended up killing like 98 people the fire spread really quick The reason why this is such a landmark is because some people armed with all this data

That things like the calorimeter had produced all this data that things like the calorimeter had produced came in and added, it created computer models. And essentially what they found was their computer could show that this fire happened exactly as the witnesses said it did, and ultimately led back to the origin, which was those three disgruntled dudes in the ballroom setting the furniture on fire.

Yeah, so the problem though, as you mentioned, is that you're not going to get these two scientists from the Center for Fire Research on every case of every burned house in the United States. So it's, you know, that was one of the biggest problems. I guess one big milestone was the Lyme Street Fire in 1990.

This is another case where it's really sad. There was a guy named Gerald Lewis in Jacksonville, Florida. He was charged with arson and murder for setting his house on fire, killing his wife, her pregnant sister, and four kids, and got out with his son. No one else was able to get out. He said, hey, my son started this fire. He's playing with matches on the couch in the living room.

And arson investigators came in and said, you know, in the traditional way, and were like, no, there's no way. There was an accelerant here. There's that puddle char on the floor. That V pattern that we talked about, which should, you know, literally point to the source of the fire is not pointing at that couch And this is a big case Prosecutors called on it's called in a guy named John Lynn Titi

From Georgia. He was a fire investigator and John DeHaan who wrote or co-wrote at least a manual on fire investigation to basically come in and say hey can you come in here and confirm that this guy's lying so we can put him away? And Lentiti walked away from that investigation and said, well, at first, he looks like he's guilty to me. So, I can confirm that. You should go ahead and prosecute. But then they got a chance,

and it seems like these opportunities are a real big thing in fire where like, hey, we actually have a little bit of money to run an experiment here. And that is when they recreated this house right down to the kind of couch it was and everything that was in the house basically, and set that couch on fire to see if it would burn like that, and it did. Yeah, the prosecution spent $20,000 to recreate that fire in a house like two or one or two houses down. That was exactly identical in structure to the one that Gerald Lewis had been accused of burning down. And I mean, they went all out to recreate it. So much so that they brought some family members in and said, does this look like what the house looked like in the night of the fire? And they said, yes, this is it. Like, it's like, it's eerie.

So they, they started by setting the couch on fire, like basically trying out Lewis's account of events and everybody involved in this experiment just expected the fire to kind of like Maybe start to slowly catch and then sputter and go out like the sofa was not just gonna catch So they were all really surprised when the fire caught and then caught the other the other Cushion on fire and then all of a sudden cut though like a big portion of the room on fire That was the first thing and then after the fire really burned and they evaluated everything, they were like, all of these things

that are supposedly arson related, they're here. Like this is, the couch setting, the couch being set on fire produced all of those things that is being used as evidence against this guy. Yeah, and this was a huge change for Lynn T.D. personally as an investigator. He was basically like, he said I had an epiphany, you know, almost sent a guy to die

based on these theories that were a load of crap, was his quote. So that not only sort of changed his way of thinking, it started a change in the industry, but like you mentioned earlier, one of the problems is is that getting that stuff to trickle down to the local level is really, really hard, especially in a

profession where they seemed really, really kind of stuck in these old methods of the, like, I'll just call it the DeNiro way. That's a great, great name. And it was really hard to get that information even if they got the information a lot of them were still like, no you know it's not a science it is a lot of intuition. So much so that in 1997 the International Association of Arts Investigators argued against the

Supreme Court. There was something called the Daubert standard which basically said in 1993 that, like, hey, the scientific method has to be used if you're an expert testifying at a trial. And they said, no, no, no, that's great, but not for us, because this isn't a science and we should be exempted from that. Yeah.

That was 1997. Paul Kirk wrote the book in 1969, everybody remember. And so you think, OK, surely, shortly after that, the industry would have come around. And that's absolutely not true. In 2011, the National Fire Protection Association, which now puts out what's considered

like the gold standard manual on arson or fire investigation. Back in 2011, their manual said that, um, if you use the process of elimination and couldn't determine what started a fire, you should probably go ahead and assume it was arson. So if you didn't know what the cause was, go ahead into court and testify that it was probably arson. And that guy should get the death penalty for

murder because of the people who died in the house. Yeah. 2011, Chuck. Yeah. It's probably a good time to talk about that case you mentioned, the Cameron Willingham case. This is in 1991, it was in December of 91 in Corsicana, Texas.

Cameron Willingham and Stacy Willingham lived in this house, burned down, killed their three children. Stacy was gone at the time, it was just before Christmas, so getting Christmas presents for her kids. Cameron said that there was so much heat and smoke that he tried to get his kids, but couldn't, had to get out of the house and call for help

was what he thought was the best method. And this was one of those case where the fire, local fire, assistant fire chief, I guess, Douglas Fogg and a guy named Manuel Vasquez, who had a lot of experiences, an investigator, came in and identified these charring spots, what they called pour patterns, like you poured gasoline or something. The V patterns that they saw, which is where the fires are supposedly started, they found

in the hallway where the kid's bedroom was and at the front door, like this was clearly someone trying to trap people inside, and this guy did it. Yeah, essentially he started by pouring accelerant in the kids' bedroom, walked backwards out of the hall while still pouring accelerant, and then all the way to the front door, and then lit a match. And this Vasquez guy, if he wasn't one of the people that De Niro hung out with, I will be really surprised because from what you are describing him, from what I've read, he's exactly that kind of guy.

His work. I mean, it was not a huge 91. He probably was. His work was later criticized. Like when we said that it's been described as mysticism, they were talking about this guy's report on the Willingham case. He, and he had tons of experience. So he was very widely respected in the field of fire investigation. Something like 1,200 or 1,400 fires under his belt as an investigator.

The thing that sends a red flag up about him is he said most of them were arson. There's nowhere on the planet where some high percentage of fires like that is actually arson. Maybe Detroit in the 90s, maybe Detroit, but certainly not just in Texas in general, right, where this guy was working. So he was apparently one of those people, he died in 1994, but he was apparently one of those investigators who started backwards from, this was arson, or I see that telltale sign of arson,

so now I have to figure out what else supports that theory and he did and his report was very damning it was very convincing and it helped put Cameron Willingham away there were some other things that the prosecution used about Cameron Willingham that is super early 90s late 80s Texas he had an Iron Maiden poster in the utility room, the Can I Play with Madness poster. You know where like somebody's punching through Eddie's head? I don't know the poster, if that's what you're asking.

It's worth looking up. It's a work of art. Okay. The fact that he had an Iron Maiden poster up meant that he was interested in death and probably involved in Satanism. Like he had a tattoo with a skull with a snake around it. So obviously he was a killer of children.

Um, and their whole, their whole premise, their whole theory was that he had killed, murdered his two twin, one year old daughters and one two year old daughter by fire because they were getting in the way of his lifestyle of like hanging out and drinking and going out. And he was prosecuted and ended up in 2004 receiving the death penalty. And most people who are familiar with the case point to it and say, this is a clear example of an innocent person being executed.

That's right. In 2004, this is many years later, obviously, he was scheduled for execution. And a guy named Gerald Hurst, who was an investigator who had gotten some previous charges dropped against someone else in a similar case, some people got together who were, you know, supporting Willingham and said, hey, you know, you're the best at getting someone off. You don't think he did this. Can you help? He went in and said well, first of all The report from Vasquez the first line says in order to kill fire You have to love it a little bit and that's just that's just weird

It's a red flag. No, he looked in and saw a lot of issues with their work flag. No, he looked in and saw a lot of issues with their work. First of all, the assumption that only, and this is one of the big ones, that like only an accelerant could have caused the fire this hot. That's one that you see or used to see at least a lot in arson investigations. Like it had to be gasoline or something because it was so hot. The crazed glass again, that's another one.

We've already been over that. And then he started just looking at the account, the more he looked at it, he was like, you know what, this seems like it real, or the evidence. He said, the more I look at this, this looks like it really matches up with his account of what happened. The other thing we didn't mention too is that they found mineral spirits at the house. And when Hearst looked into it, he was like, this mineral spirits they found was on the front porch by the grill, and that's what he used it for.

So like that's not a piece of evidence. No, so this guy, this investigator, Gerald Hearst, just completely demolished the evidence that was used to convict and eventually execute Cameron Willingham, but the Board of Parole and Pardons is like they got the report and they apparently didn't open it and voted to uphold the conviction and execution. And so like this is a this is I think when the Innocence Project was just starting. I

don't even know if they come around by this time. The problem the problem with arson cases because other people have gotten off, thanks to people like Gerald Hurst who've come back and been like, hey, hey, hey, hey, criminal courts aren't super savvy and you're still listening to arson investigators who are using folklore on the stand to convict people. Here's an actual scientific analysis of what the evidence shows. It can get people off, but it's so not a smoking gun like DNA evidence is. Instead it's there's a different interpretation and it's quite possible it wasn't arson and is

that enough to reverse a conviction and set somebody free from prison? Not necessarily. So it's still kind of like there's still plenty of people probably who were convicted of arson on junk science that are still in prison is I guess what I'm trying to say. All right. Should we, we need to take another break, right? I think so. All right. Let's take another break. We'll talk about where we are today with arson investigation. Like truly things have changed, right? Surely. Hopefully. and me, Simone Boyce. Every weekday, we're bringing you conversations about culture, the latest trends, inspiration,

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and feels like you're seated next to a different guest at that dinner. Hear these podcasts and more on your free iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. All right. So if you follow the news there, you can see a lot of, I guess, ground being gained as far as overturning convictions on arson. But it's a tough one. Like you were talking about before the break, it's hard to get overturned. A lot of the evidence is just gone, obviously, because it was a fire,

or maybe the investigation to begin with wasn't done well and stuff wasn't saved. So it's just, it's a hard thing to get overturned, even with the new science that we have these days. It's not like a lot of other cases. There's the NFPA 921 colon, for fire and explosive investigations, which this was published in 1992 to begin with. And this is the gold standard you're talking about, right?

Yeah, it's the gold standard now. It's also, I think, the same manual that said just assume it's arson if you can't figure out what started it. Well, they've been updating it, obviously, every year, which is what they do with guides like this. They just, I guess guess ripped a lot of pages out and this is sort of it's a book though that's not as much it's aimed more toward like insurance companies and law firms because a lot of this stuff is like a lot of times when you see something really investigated or reversed, it's because

of a big civil case against like a drapery manufacturer or something that's getting sued because their curtains went up too fast or something. And so they had the kind of money to pour into a defense that wouldn't happen in a criminal trial. Yeah. So over time, civil courts have become way more savvy as far as fire investigation goes on the whole, compared to criminal courts.

In criminal courts, it's still very possible that kind of pretty poor evidence can be admitted and used against somebody. And that's not just the courts who are at fault. Like it's the investigators themselves who are at this point, resistant to change. If you're, if you're not getting on board with the idea that science is showing, like, yes, there's a lot of stuff that's wrong with traditional arson investigation or fire investigation, you're just, you're, you're, you're resisting now.

There's just, it's been disseminated too widely for too long. And I mean, I guess I can understand where that resistance comes from because all of this, this, what your training was handed down from people who had decades of experience and knew what they were talking about and you venerated them because they were an old veteran of the

fire department or something like that. Um, your beliefs are now being challenged. Your intuition is being derided as superstition in folklore and you're probably being treated like a bumpkin. Um, and then, uh, you also probably believe that these eggheads are freeing convicted arsonists from prison or trying to at least.

So what the hell's going on? The world is topsy-turvy upside down. I don't, like I'm not De Niro, I haven't hung out with any arson investigators, but I would suspect based on everything I've read that that would account for any resistance or pockets of resistance that are still left. Yeah, I would say so probably.

And you know what? It's probably one of those things that as people age out and retire, the new generation of better understanding will probably be the one in the forefront, I would hope. So we'll talk a little bit about how you can actually find the origin point of a fire in a more scientific way. It's a tough thing, obviously, to find where a fire started once a fire has,

like, fully burned down a house. There have been studies even, there was one cited by Beattie and Oliva. Oliva? Oliva, sure. You don't need me at all. That if a fire started to burn for just three minutes after the flash over happened, the investigators basically couldn't tell what quadrant of a room, not even like the very spot,

but even what quadrant that the fire originated in, any better than chance. Three minutes after the flash over. So all this to say it's really, really hard to do. Oh, for sure. Because the flash over, again, but. So all this to say it's really, really hard to do. Oh, for sure. Because the flash over, again, it's full involvement. The entire room's on fire. They did say that within, if the fire's put out within 30 seconds of flash over, they're

right about 84% of the time. Big difference. That is a big difference. But they have found that there are some reliable ways of tracing the origin of fires or tracing the source of fires, right? So if the V-shape, I don't think we ever said that V-shaped char that used to like be considered to literally point to the source of the fire, those form were opposite where an oxygen source enters in a flash over room,

a room that's in flash over. It just forms that, right? Or they also found that like puddling, those puddle marks, pour marks that clearly show accelerant, those curtains on fire from that drape manufacturer, when they fall and hit the ground and burn, they can leave the same kind of marks, right? So if you have have all these confusing signs

that just don't make sense anymore, how do you find the source of the fire? And as I was saying, they have established, there are some that are just genuinely telltale, and they might not say this is arson, but they can kind of lead you to where the origin of the fire was, and hopefully you can figure it out from there.

Yeah, for sure. One way is to look at the origin of fire was, and hopefully you can figure it out from there. Yeah, for sure. One way is to look at the bodies of victims. It's obviously a very sad way to investigate something, but you have to do it. And they have found that people, if you're really, really close to the fire, I think most people think like, oh no, you don't die from the fire,

you die from carbon monoxide poisoning. That is true if you are further away from the fire. If you are very close to that fire, you usually die from edema in which the airways of your body swell up from the heat and your organs shut down from the heat, which is, I've got to imagine, a terrible, terrible way to go. Right. So depending on the arrangement of the bodies throughout like a house, you can kind of trace who was closer to the origin of

the fire, the source of the fire, right? Or at least where it was, you know, hottest. Right. Okay. Which isn't always where it started as we know. That's true. There's another one called arcing. That's pretty interesting.

As a fire melts, the insulation on wires in the house, like the electrical wiring, the electricity can jump from one exposed wire to another and it causes an arc. You can tell that just by looking at two electrical wires where an arc happened. That can only happen while the power is on. So you can actually kind of say, okay, this arc happened at this point in the fire because the power went out at this point or we turned the power off at this point. So this arc couldn't have happened after that. Which helps walk you backward toward the origin point of the fire or the direction of it, timing-wise. They also have just a great database now.

It's called the Ignitable Liquids Reference Collection Database, or the ILRCD. Not bad, doesn't spell anything, but that's fine. And that's basically, if you find just any flammable liquid at the fire site, then you can just send it to the lab and they can at least tell you what it is. Right. There's also guidelines now for people who aren't fire investigators but are likely going to be the first people on the scene, like firefighters or EMS, that kind of thing. And it's just stuff to

be on the lookout for so that you can tell fire investigators later what you saw. Really- Iron Maiden shirts. Yeah, did they have an Iron Maiden poster, that's one? You had to move a refrigerator to open a door to vent the fire or something like that. Was the refrigerator plugged in? Was the appliance turned on? This space heater that we think might have been the cause.

Was it in the on or off position? When you show up to a scene, are you seeing somebody who you've seen at other scenes? Yeah, that's a big one. Firefighters are like, yes, I have, the paramedic did it. They're like, no, no, no, like in the crowd, like not working the fire, like somebody who's in the crowd. And they're like, oh no, I haven't seen anybody.

Yeah, that's a good one. If there were any like electrical line issues that you could see or weather, or like if you see big winds cause a tree to fall nearby or something, those are kind of obvious things. But again, these are for non-investigators.

What's another one? Another one, keeping track of what people who are witnesses or who were in the house or the structure when it caught fire are saying and telling you. Right. Especially if they say something like the paramedic did it. Yeah, totally. I got interviewed one time by a fire investigator.

What? Yeah, I kind of forgot about this. My brother and I, we used to love exploring sort of abandoned homes and things. And setting them on fire? No, no, no. Although I did have a little fire thing for a little while. I think a lot of people go through that phase. Nothing big, just like, you know,

ooh, I'm gonna set this stick on fire in the woods. Very dangerous though, even though nothing happened, by the way. Just wanna make it clear. Yeah. There was a abandoned shed across the street from us. There was a house, the people moved out, new people moved in and built a really big house,

but left this old shed. And we had been in it exploring and it was just full of junk. And we as a young child, I was probably like 10 years old, was quizzed by the, I guess the cops. A couple of weeks later, my brother and I, because it turns out that the people said that there were

a lot of really expensive things in there and it was big insurance claim. And I think he burned it down and said there was a bunch of expensive stuff. And he was, I believe looking back, he was thwarted by those darn kids. Wow. And they're, and they're my brother. No, we didn't take our dog in there, but I remember just that it was like, no, man, those are mannequin and a bunch of files and just some frame pictures. It was junk.

It was junk. You're like, I remember the mannequin because Scott pretended to kiss it and I think he actually did kiss it. I don't know. I don't remember. We never had to like go into court or anything. So I'll have to ask my mom kind of what happened with that.

But just remember that. Yeah. What a great anecdote to end this with. Well, I appreciate that. So I made it all up. That's fine. We'll edit that out. Um, I guess, I guess the upshot of this is if you, uh, know a fire investigator

and arson investigator, give them a hug and say, let's stick to the science. I, if you want to know more about that kind of thing, go out and research. There's a lot of really interesting stuff to read about arson investigation, and you could definitely do worse than reading David Grand's Trial by Fire in the New Yorker and Douglas Starr's article in Discover Magazine. Think Spark of Science, maybe? Something like that. Check it out.

Oh, that means it's time for Listener Mail. Sorry, I fell down on my duties. That's right Brutalism Follow-Up here. Hey guys while listening to that episode I was delighted at the mention of Habitat 67. As a McGill student Habitat 67 has been touched on in a number of my classes especially because this architectural staple in Montreal was designed by McGill alumni Moshe Safdie. I wanted to share a fun fact about the development of Habitat that I learned in art history a few years ago.

During the design process Safdie used Lego blocks to help him model the building design. In fact, he used so many Lego blocks that he bought out all of the Legos at a number of Montreal toy stores. Pretty fun. Anyway, thanks for all you do, you guys. Stuff You Should Know is always my first podcast recommendation to others and has helped me become a more inquisitive person over the last few years. So keep up the good work.

And that is from Kestrel Musselman. Great name. Great name, for sure. Thanks for that story. We appreciate it. The great LEGO shortage of 60-something in Montreal. Yeah. If you want to get in touch with us like Kestrel did, man, that is a great name. You can email us. Send us an email to stuffpodcast at iHeartRadio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.com. Stuff you should know is a production of I Heart Radio.

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