FIRE INVESTIGATION: GREAT READ; VETERAN ARSON INVESTIGATOR HAS A MESSAGE FOR HIS PROFESSION: "FIRE INVESTIGATION IS STILL ART AND NOT SCIENCE."

"This presentation will address the lack of progress in technical and scientific development within the fire investigation community, the acceptance by some in the community of practices that are not scientific, the lack of impartiality, the portrayal to the legal system [and their acceptance of such portrayal] that every fire investigator is an expert and qualified to render opinions on fire cause, the exploitation of unqualified fire investigators by associated organizations, and finally the refusal by the fire investigation community to raise the professional standards for fire investigators. Until the fire investigation community can raise its own standards from its current amateur level to a professional level, we will remain a profession that is as much an art as a science......

Further, inaccurate cause determinations can adversely impact on people’s lives, especially those people who are already suffering the terrible effects of having a fire. This adverse impact can be something as simple as ruining someone’s reputation, to denial of insurance proceeds, to criminal incarceration. Mr. Willingham’s fate may seem farfetched; but, don’t you believe it. There are many people sitting on deathrow today for the crime of arson. Are they all as guilty as Mr. Willingham?"......

In the Willis and Willingham cases, the fire investigators suffered no adverse consequence from their incorrect determinations, even when it became clearly apparent that an innocent man had served seventeen years in prison and another had been executed. No one suggested that any type of sanction be levied against these investigators, and certainly no one suggested that they no longer be allowed to investigate fires.

The practice of letting anyone serve as a fire investigator, unfortunately, is with us today. As a practical matter, anyone can render expert opinions on fire causes. There may be no consequence to a fire investigator for his incorrect determinations unless those determinations land in a legal arena where a judge may choose to disqualify the expert. Not all do......

FROM "FIRE INVESTIGATION IS STILL ART AND NOT SCIENCE"; BY DANIEL CHURCHWARD. A KEYNOTE ADDRESS TO THE 2010 INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM ON FIRE INVESTIGATION SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY CONFERENCE. (In 2006 the Innocence Project hired arson expert Churchward along with John Lentini, Douglas Carpenter, and David Smith—to look at the case. They concluded that “the evidence used to convict [Willingham] was invalid.” Willingham’s conviction and execution were, the report concluded, “a serious miscarriage of justice.”)


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PUBLISHER'S NOTE: Daniel Churchward's keynote address to the 2010 International Symposium on Fire Investigation Science and Technology conference is a breath of fresh air - particularly in light of the Texas Fire Marshall's recent pathetic defence of arson investigation techniques which led to the wrongful execution of Cameron Todd Willingham. We should all be grateful to Mr. Churchward for his outspoken efforts to raise the professional standards of fire investigators and to ensure that criminal charges will only be laid where they are warranted. Bravo!

HAROLD LEVY. PUBLISHER; THE CHARLES SMITH BLOG;

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I. Introduction

"Good morning. My name is Dan Churchward. For those of you who don’t know me, I have been a fire investigator for 36 years," Daniel Churchward's keynote address to International Symposium on Fire Investigation and Science Technology 2010 begins, under the heading, "Fire Investigation Is Still Art and Not Science."

"I served as a deputy sheriff, volunteer firefighter, career firefighter, fire investigator for both public and private organizations, SIU investigator for an insurance carrier, and I presently own and manage my own company, Kodiak Enterprises, Inc.," the keynote address continues.

"During my tenure as a fire investigator, I received several hundred hours of training in fire investigation, generally from people who were themselves fire investigators.

During that same time, I obtained my Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering Technology from Purdue University. I consider my greatest accomplishment to be that I am a charter member of the NFPA Technical Committee on Fire Investigations and served as its chair for twelve years.

Pat Kennedy asked me if I believed in “Free Speech.”

When I said I did, he said, “Good because I want you to give one.” ISFI has asked that I offer a Keynote Speech to start off this great symposium. A keynote speech is defined as “an address designed to present the issues of primary interest to an assembly and is often used to arouse.” So, I began to wonder what sort of issue should I speak to that would not only relate to the primary interest of this assembly, but would also arouse you. I decided to speak to the matter of fire investigation as it is an art form and not a science.

You may wonder why I would give such a topic when I have long argued that fire
investigation is and should be a science and should never be referred to as an art. We have come a long way in making our craft scientifically based. And, we have come a long way in developing methodologies that give us a technique that can is acceptable to the scientific world. However, our scientific ship has leaks in it and they are ignorance and apathy. If we do not make a fundamental change in our community, I believe we will never be able to reach an acceptable standard of a science. Instead,we collectively will be perceived by other scientists as charlatans and snake oil peddlers.

A. Ernest Willis and Todd Willingham cases

In 1987, Ernest Willis was convicted in Texas of deliberately setting his house on fire and killing his children. For that crime, he was sentenced to die. In 1992, Cameron Todd Willingham was convicted in Texas of deliberately setting his house on fire and killing his children. For that crime, he, too, was sentenced to die.

In both of these cases, the investigators determined that the fires were set by using an ignitable liquid to rapidly spread the fire in the residences and trapping their children. All chemical laboratory tests were negative for the presence of ignitable liquids. However, the investigators in both cases opined included the intensity of the fire at floor level, the manner in which the fire spread to other rooms, the high temperatures indicated by a melted aluminum threshold and downward moving fire. In both instances, the defendants were home at the time of the fire and escaped the fire relatively unscathed.

In 2004, Ernest Willis was released from prison and his conviction overturned. The reason was that a fire expert looked at the facts used by the Texas investigators and opined that there was no evidence to support a determination that the Willis residence burned due to Mr. Willis spreading an ignitable liquid in the home and deliberately igniting it. This opposing opinion was read by the prosecuting attorney in the Willis case, who knew and respected the expert, and Mr. Willis was freed. Ultimately, he was compensated by the Texas Legislature for his time in prison.

Eight months prior to Mr. Willis’ release, Cameron Todd Willingham was injected with a lethal dose of chemicals and formally executed by the State of Texas for his crime. The same fire expert that intervened in the Willis case had looked at the facts used by the investigators for the State [different experts from those in the Willis case] and opined that there was no evidence to support the determination that the Willingham residence burned due to Mr. Willingham spreading an ignitable liquid in the home and deliberately igniting it. In essence, Mr. Willingham was innocent. This opposing opinion was ignored by the prosecuting attorney for Mr. Willingham’s case and no last minute reprieve happened. Mr. Willingham’s last words were that he was an innocent man and that he was being executed for a crime that did not occur.

B. Statistics

In 2004, there were 43000 fires determined to have been arsons. As of 2002, there are 5400 people in prison in the United States for arson crimes, 12% in Texas. Some of these inmates are serving their time on death row while awaiting their executions.

C. Purpose

This presentation will address the lack of progress in technical and scientific
development within the fire investigation community, the acceptance by some in the community of practices that are not scientific, the lack of impartiality, the portrayal to the legal system [and their acceptance of such portrayal] that every fire investigator is an expert and qualified to render opinions on fire cause, the exploitation of unqualified fire investigators by associated organizations, and finally the refusal by the fire investigation community to raise the professional standards for fire investigators. Until the fire investigation community can raise its own standards from its current amateur level to a professional level, we will remain a profession that is as much an art as a science.

II. Purpose of fire Investigation

A. Fire prevention via accurate cause determinations

Fire investigation is a function of a much broader perspective for fire prevention. The United States has a high number of property losses and human injury due to fire. The National Fire Protection Association was formed, in part, to reduce the number of fires and the number of lives lost due to fire. To gain a measurable reduction requires the accurate determination of a fire’s cause. These accurate determinations help identify products, actions or the lack of actions that result in fires. In turn, accurate determinations aid in changing society in an attempt to make it safer. It is readily apparent that inaccurate determinations of a fire’s cause defeats the primary purpose for having a fire investigation.

B. Not causing additional harm to victims

Further, inaccurate cause determinations can adversely impact on people’s lives, especially those people who are already suffering the terrible effects of having a fire. This adverse impact can be something as simple as ruining someone’s reputation, to denial of insurance proceeds, to criminal incarceration. Mr. Willingham’s fate may seem farfetched; but, don’t you believe it. There are many people sitting on deathrow today for the crime of arson. Are they all as guilty as Mr. Willingham?

III. Standards to practice fire investigation

At the present, fire investigators have to meet no standards, nor do they need to show any level of competency before they practice their craft. There are two organizations that certify fire investigators. Neither is mandatory. Both are private and have no oversight by a state professional licensing agency.

Many states license fire investigators under their Private Detective or Private Investigator laws. Many of these states also require that any applicant for a PI License pass a test to demonstrate proficiency. However, these PI License exams are a travesty. They do not test an applicant’s basic knowledge of fire investigation, or his knowledge of proper methodologies to follow when conducting a fireinvestigation.

Instead, these exams ask specific questions that relate to the private detective or private investigator occupation. These questions can vary from: In what year was the Volstead Act repealed? [1933]; to: If a parking lot is x-dimension by y- dimension, how many parking lot lights are required? [No frigging idea].

Professions with purviews that overlap into fire investigation include Fire Protection Engineering [there are many others, but I use FPE as an example]. FPE’s have a Professional Engineering license in many states which is regulated by both the engineering profession and by state professional licensing agencies. However, there are no criteria for a FPE that speaks directly to fire investigation. There are many FPE’s that do excellent fire investigations. But, they obtained their proficiency in fire investigation more from an On-The-Job experience than from a formal course of study. Even the best FPE fire investigators will admit that they had relatively little course work that relates specifically to fire investigation.

What all this means is that anyone can call themselves a “fire investigator” and begin to serve those entities that choose to use his “skills."

A. Fire science knowledge is improving

The fire science community has made substantial gains in their knowledge of fire and its effect on materials. Fire science has moved from a level where there was relatively little interest in such study, and little money devoted to it, to a level where there is recognition that knowing more about fire dynamics will clearly help to reduce the impact fire has on our culture. Research funding related to the study of fire and its impact on materials has increased and the results of that research allow government, academia and private organizations to apply that knowledge to reduce the impact of fire. A collateral benefit of the fire science communities’ work is that the fire investigation community has additional knowledge available to them. We had so little technical knowledge available to us when I started investigating fires.

B. Fire investigators not utilizing fire science

This technical knowledge allows fire investigators to learn how fire begins, how materials react to fire, how fire develops in a compartment, how fire spreads from compartment to compartment and how fire is best extinguished. Many of the fire investigators have studied the technical knowledge produced by the scientific community and have raised their level of understanding significantly. This increased understanding of fire science and the physics and chemistry associated with fire’s impact on materials has allowed investigators to improve the accuracy of their investigations and thereby helped reduce the impact fire has on us.

Unfortunately, there remains a too-large segment of the fire investigation community who either have not learned of the fire science knowledge that has become available in the last 30 years, or they refuse to accept the validity of the knowledge because it is contrary to what they have been told in the past. A simple example illustrates this phenomenon:

Flashover, as many of you already know, is a term which describes transitional fire development in a compartment. It has long been a recognized event in the fire science and fire prevention communities. However, it was not known to, or understood by, many within the fire investigation community until the publication of NFPA 921, Guide for Fire and Explosion Investigation in 1992. For many of us, that discussion was the first time we heard of the concept. Many of the fire investigators embraced the concept because it made clear to us not only what was happening in compartment fires, but it also explained many of the things we saw in burned compartments. Other fire investigators, however, still refuse to learn what flashover is or to acknowledge that flashover occurs, the frequency in which it occurs, and the impact it has on a compartment.

1. Human nature – Sagan quote

Why do investigators refuse to accept the knowledge gained from the fire science community, thereby improving their level of understanding of their craft? First, the human element involved in this equation applies. Dr. Carl Sagan, the noted astronomer and scientist, described in his book, A Demon- Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, a reaction by people getting information that is contrary to what they already believe. He wrote:

“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken.”


2. Learned wrong and does not believe new data

Another reason that some fire investigators refuse to accept the knowledge that would make them a better investigator is that they have been taught their incorrect knowledge by people they respect and admire. If the materials given to them in seminars were wrong, then they refuse to accept the correct knowledge because they must then accept that they were misinformed by their contemporaries, and that they have been doing it wrong for some time. When these same persons are forced to accept that flashover is a real event and that it occurs frequently, they fall back on the defense that they were “trained” that way. The logical assumption then is that training must be lacking for the fire investigation community. It is!

B. No consequence for bad investigators

In the Willis and Willingham cases, the fire investigators suffered no adverse consequence from their incorrect determinations, even when it became clearly apparent that an innocent man had served seventeen years in prison and another had been executed. No one suggested that any type of sanction be levied against these investigators, and certainly no one suggested that they no longer be allowed to investigate fires.

The practice of letting anyone serve as a fire investigator, unfortunately, is with us today. As a practical matter, anyone can render expert opinions on fire causes. There may be no consequence to a fire investigator for his incorrect determinations unless those determinations land in a legal arena where a judge may choose to disqualify the expert. Not all do. And, quite frankly, disqualification in a courtroom does not present a significant burden to any fire investigator. There can be civil action taken against a fire investigator for malfeasance. However, when is the last time you heard of a fire investigator being sued for doing a poor job?

While the fire investigation community continues to accept untested and, in far too many situations, unqualified fire investigators, we have failed to discuss or develop any standards for practicing our craft.

IV. Basic education level for fire investigators

Should there be a basic educational level for fire investigators? I say “yes!” I am sure that Mr. Willis and Mr. Willingham would too. I don’t propose here today to identify what that basic level of knowledge must be. That is best saved for another day. My goal today is to spur a discussion on the need for a basic level of knowledge. I feel, however, there are a couple of benchmarks that must be met by every fire investigator. These benchmarks are a strong scientific foundation and mandatory performance achievements.

A. Lack of scientific foundation

Educational requirements for fire investigators are non-existent. Some experts do not have a high-school education. Many of the fire investigators lack an educational background that would allow them the ability to understand the physical and chemical relationships associated with fire investigation. NFPA 921 specifically states that the determination of origin requires the application of physics and chemistry to fire initiation and growth. Without a rudimentary knowledge of such relationships, the fire investigator can only apply his acquired logic to what he sees. Logic is a terrible means to scientific thinking. It is what got us a flat earth, witchcraft and crop circles. This lack of a scientific educational baseline creates the probability of considerable error in any hypotheses formed by this analysis.

For instance, a fire investigator may have seen at a fire school that igniting a pool of ignitable liquid in a room, caused a rapid development of the fire, produced concentrated destruction along the path of the poured liquid, and left fire patterns that relate to where the liquid was placed. What the fire investigator may not know, and consequently not appreciate, is that the fire development may not have been much different absent the ignitable liquid, and that the patterns that resulted from the fire may not have differed absent the presence of the ignitable liquid. Such thought processes, and the fundamental inability to relate such observations to chemical and physical phenomena, result in the investigator believing that only the presence of an ignitable liquid can produce a rapidly developing fire, concentration of fire damage and distinct fire patterns. In other words, they think that the patterns created by an incendiary fire are unique and cannot be made by any other fire scenario.

The lack of an extensive level of scientific knowledge prevents the fire investigator from having a fundamental level of skepticism. Skepticism is defined as: “The philosophical doctrine that absolute knowledge is impossible and that inquiry must be a process of doubting in order to acquire approximate or relative certainty.” Again, I go to Dr. Sagan. He wrote in his book, A Demon- Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark:

“The tenets of skepticism do not require an advanced degree to master, as most successful used car buyers demonstrate. The whole idea of a democratic application of skepticism is that everyone should have the essential tools to effectively and constructively evaluate claims to knowledge. All science asks is to employ the same levels of skepticism we use in buying a used car…”

I, too, don’t believe that fire investigators need advanced degrees in the sciences. However, I fear that fire investigators lack sufficient scientific knowledge to be able to “kick the tires” of some proposed theory they have just heard at a fire seminar.

The lack of knowledge of physical and chemical phenomena allows for the development of incorrect beliefs by fire investigators. It tolerates the creation of myths and rules of thumb. Further, it allows for the perpetuation of the process by letting that same investigator, as he gains experience, to “educate” his younger associates on the same misconceptions. It gives that poorly educated investigator the perception that he is knowledgeable and therefore correct in his determinations.

This lack of knowledge has gotten us the following examples of myths and rules of thumb:

1. Color of smoke and flame means the presence of ignitable liquid
2. Rapidly developing fire means the presence of ignitable liquid
3. Melted copper wiring means the presence of ignitable liquids
4. Concentration of damage means the presence of ignitable liquids
5. Fire pattern morphology can be used to determine the presence of
ignitable liquids in the absence of laboratory confirmation
6. Negative corpus [possibly the single most insidious form of ignorance we have ever seen in the fire science community].

Negative Corpus, a term of art, is the methodology whereby one determines the cause for a fire by the elimination of all identified or perceived ignition sources within an area of fire origin. If a fire investigator determines that there are no “accidental” fire causes in their area of origin, then the fire MUST be arson. If the fire investigator determines that there is only one item within their area of origin, then that item MUST be the cause. I don’t feel the need to delve into all aspects of negative corpus and how it is wrong, but the primary reason for it being wrong is in the question: What if you have the wrong area of origin?

If you cannot understand and appreciate the chemistry and physics of fire development, then how can you reliably determine where the fire began? Clearly, the basic education level of fire investigators is lacking.

B. Lack of proper training

We have in the fire investigation community today a misconception that our training has helped us become the professionals we always hoped we would be. But, our training is a farce. Aside from the “training” that got us the previously-mentioned myths and rules of thumb, we have a fundamental flaw to our training that is rarely addressed. That flaw is that our training does not test us to determine if we learned the concepts we just received.

We have in many training seminars live burns that are used to illustrate that a particular scenario will create a set of facts that will help us later to recognize that same scenario. Generally, these scenarios involve setting a compartment on fire and using the burnt remains as illustrations of what happened. Of course, we usually tell the attendees what we did. Rarely do we let the attendees process the test cell and explain what they think happened. Further, we never set up an identical compartment and use a different scenario to burn it for comparison with the tested cell.

One attempt tried by Dennis Smith and myself in a fire seminar where we actually asked the students to determine what happened to create the fire damage produced a 75% failure rate in their determinations. The one group who got it right had an engineer in it that realized that the fire origin appeared to be around an electric coffeemaker. The other three groups opined that the fire was incendiary because they could not explain why one specific fire pattern existed in the compartment [cannot explain – must have been ignitable liquid].

The fallacies of these teaching techniques create significant problems with what the students are learning. One is the students don’t have the opportunity to show if they can accurately analyze a fire scene and reach accurate determinations as to where and how the fire began. The other is that the students don’t learn that facts from fire scenes can be created by more than one scenario. These problems arise when instructors are the previous generation of poorly-educated fire investigators and the attendees do not have sufficient scientific knowledge to recognize what they are being taught is fundamentally flawed.

V. Training for fire investigators

Fire investigation in the U.S. has evolved from a cottage industry with a few individuals or small companies offering simple services to big business involving large multinational companies offering a full range of services from origin and cause investigations to computer fire modeling and complex recreations of fire events. With such a demand for fire investigators, someone could just declare himself a fire investigator and begin offering such services. At that point, much of that persons training becomes OJT. These persons, in many instances, came from the police and fire occupations and made the transition when they left or retired from public service. This, by the way, is the route that I took when I got into the business. Other persons came from academia and felt that their level of education would qualify them as experts in whatever they do. There was never a means or a desire to insure that these investigators were adequately trained to perform fire investigations, and there was never an adverse consequence on persons who were not qualified.

Although I have no numbers to justify my opinion, I believe that the largest labor pool that the fire investigation community routinely draws from is the public sector, consisting of ex-police and ex-firemen. These candidates can be knowledgeable, have a scientific foundation to build from, and become excellent fire investigators. However, some believe that their knowledge from just being police officers or firefighters is sufficient to make them competent fire investigators.

The emphasis on police and fire experience causes an inherent bias. This bias shows up when the investigator encounters a set of circumstances that he interprets as being unusual, unexpected, or suspicious. These circumstances may have no bearing on the fire’s inception. They can include:

1. The fire victim was not financially secure,
2. The home was either for sale or is in need of repair,
3. The fire victim had been in the structure just prior to the development of the fire,
4. The fire victim was either unsavory or had previous experiences such as another fire or prior arrests,
5. The physical evidence from the fire cannot be explained by the investigator.

These types of circumstances may have no bearing on the fire. However, please note: if you have a fire today and you have one or more of these circumstances associated with you or your family, you will find yourself undergoing experiences that you won’t enjoy.

A. Voluntary and not mandatory

Beside the inability to find qualified fire investigators, another significant obstacle for improving the quality of fire investigations is that training is simply inadequate. Most training is not mandatory. Some public agencies have mandatory training criteria, and some universities have programs for specific study of fire investigation. But, none of these are mandatory to become a fire investigator. If a person wishes to become a fire investigator and cannot pass the training academy’s or university’s course of study, then that person can simply bypass those opportunities and begin to do the job on his own. From that point, the untrained fire investigator must simply attend training seminars and practice his craft until he achieves sufficient status in the community that he becomes the instructor instead of the student. At that point, he can really begin to do damage.

An argument against my position is that there are training seminars around the country that provide good training for fire investigators. I believe this is true but not common. Aside from the fact that these seminars are voluntary, they are only a few of hundreds of training seminars that are held each year throughout the U.S. Many of these training seminars pass on incorrect or misleading information. Once learned, any further attempt to educate the attendees must first get them through the realization that the first stuff was wrong. I attended a seminar at an unnamed organization in which one speaker spent most of his allotted time speaking on the phenomena “Spontaneous Human Combustion.” When I confronted the training organizer, he said that spontaneous human combustion was recognized in the UK! This says something about either the training coordinator’s perception of the knowledge level of the UK fire investigator, or something about the quality of training in the UK. In that instance, there was never a notice to the audience of several hundred attendees that the views of the speaker were full of do-do.

So, if you agree so far with me that too many “fire investigators” do not have a sufficient level of scientific knowledge, are poorly trained and lack any standards to become fire investigators, then so what? The problem is the legal system acceptance of these incompetent fire investigators as experts in this business.


VI. Legal system’s acceptance of incompetent fire investigators

Pre-Daubert and Khumo, there was little limitation on anyone declaring themselves expert witnesses and portraying themselves to juries as competent. When I testified the first time as an expert witness, I was scared to death that I would not qualify. Needless worry on my part! Although the opposing attorney objected, the judge knew me as a sheriff’s deputy and immediately granted me expert status without question. Once done, I used that achievement the next time I testified. Now fire investigators may have a greater chance for challenge to their capabilities. But, don’t count on it.

You must get to a court of law before you will get any legal challenge to your capabilities as a fire expert. Even then, you have a good chance that any challenge will not be successful due to a lazy judge or an incompetent opposing attorney. Some judges are simply unwilling to declare an expert incompetent to offer opinion testimony. Some judges have no concept on how to measure competence in a fire investigator. They believe that having 30 years of experience or a blue uniform with brass buttons is all that is necessary to competency.

VII. Exploitation of unqualified fire investigators

A more insidious problem is the exploitation of unqualified fire investigators.
Insurance companies routinely use incompetent fire investigators to deny insurance claims. They hire incompetent fire investigators, who give them the opinions they want, which gets the incompetent fire investigators hired on additional fires. One trial where an insured sued his insurance company for denial of insurance proceeds produced the following testimony from the insurance company’s expert:

Q: How many fires have you investigated for this insurance company since the date of this loss?
A: 20 [in a 2-year period]
Q: How many of those 20 fires did you determine to be arson?
A: 20

Incompetent fire investigators may be poorly educated, but they are not stupid! They know which side their bread is buttered on. I have been referred by fire investigators who found themselves in a dilemma that they might be forced to testify against their favorite insurance clients. One referral was: “Hire Churchward. He makes those kinds of determinations.”

Telling a client that you don’t know what caused a fire will get you much less work than telling a client what they want to hear. The argument is: Churchward is incompetent because he can never determine what caused a fire. My investigator has determined the cause of 97% of my investigations.

These incompetent fire investigators stay busy by billing themselves out at a low rate. If word starts to get out that they are incompetent, they simply lower their rate or not increase it over time. Lower rates will get them hired a lot. Another way they stay in business is they have the remarkable ability to investigate a fire in record time. They can do two or three scenes in one day! I know of a fire investigator who has testified that he did 17,000 fire scenes in 11 years. You do the math.

I understand that insurance companies need to make money to survive. I understand that claims adjusters’ jobs are to minimize claims. I understand that insurance company’s lawyers are advocates for their clients. Do they in turn understand the harm they do when they use incompetent fire investigators?

VIII. Fire investigation community’s refusal to raise our standards

Enough haranguing on this subject, what are we going to do about it? We need to raise our standards for those persons who practice our craft.

A. Mandatory Certification

We need fire investigators who have a minimum level of scientific knowledge so they can understand the chemistry and physics of fire initiation, development and spread. We need fire investigators who are properly trained, unbiased, and current in the latest scientific developments. We need training that is mandatory and rigorously tested. And I don’t mean a test at the end that is a summation of the course work. We need proof of competency by the measurement of the fire investigator’s practical ability to do this work and reach the proper conclusions. We need to develop a certification program that properly measures the just mentioned needs and we need to make that certification mandatory. Once achieved, we need mandatory in-service training to maintain this certification.

A good start would be to strive to have those states which test fire investigators before granting a Private Investigator’s License actually measure our fire investigation abilities. Better yet, why not work toward getting all states to offer a specific license for fire investigators instead of grouping us with those persons working at Wal-Mart and rock concerts?

B. Consequences for our actions

If you have ever studied behavior modification, you know that consequences of one’s behavior are the means to alter unwanted behavior. The fire investigation community desperately needs consequences for our behavior as well. In other words, we need to develop both good and bad consequences for ourselves. Doctors have done it. So have lawyers and engineers and other professional organizations. Why haven’t we? Positive consequences re-enforce people to repeat the behavior that got them the positive consequence and make them want to continue to do the behavior. Negative consequences deter poor behavior and make people want to improve their behavior.

I am not recommending canonization of those investigators who do properinvestigations, nor am I recommending a NCAA-type death penalty for those that do poorinvestigations. I am advocating we develop measurements for what constitutes good behavior for fire investigators and what constitutes poor behavior for fire investigators and then set up consequences for such behavior.

A bad behavior consequence could be: If we have someone who has had a successful Daubert-type challenge against them [and eventually we can all fall into that group], then the behavior that got that person disqualified needs to be reviewed by the fire investigation community. If the disqualification was because of poor investigative performance, then maybe there should be a note =made somewhere in that persons record that indicates that the fire investigation community disapproves of that behavior. Likewise, if the Daubert challenge was successful because of a lazy attorney, and not because of a poor investigative performance, then that should be noted as well.

A good behavior consequence could be having that investigator sit on review boards to measure other investigators, help develop standards of practice for the community, and serve as Special Masters for the judiciary.

We need to develop performance requirements for our craft. We need to develop a professional review board and give them the authority to measure and place consequences on the performance of fire investigators. Lastly, we need to tell the judicial world that we have done these things and ask that they use our performance standards to measure fire investigators. We should not rely on the judicial and legal worlds to develop our standards. There is simply too great a risk that they won’t get them right.

IX. Conclusion

There is a new generation of fire investigators coming forward. I have used three student interns at Kodiak and everyone was better educated than most of our generation when we started. These new investigators are most anxious to begin their careers in fire investigation. They believe that they are entering into a career field that is both honorable and professional. Are they wrong? Maybe if we do some or all of the concepts that I’ve discussed, we can at least tell them that fire investigation is a science and not a form of art.

As you attend this Symposium, please recognize the hard work that went into the development of each paper and the positive movement forward to increase the proficiency of our profession. Attendance at this Symposium offers you the opportunity to keep an open mind, to embrace new concepts, and to be part of the solution and not the problem. So, I challenge you as your keynote speaker to get as much as you can from this Symposium, embrace learning, have open discussions on what you learn here, keep an open mind but as Dr. Sagan said, “not so open that your brain falls out,” to have a healthy level of skepticism, and an acceptance of change when change is appropriate. And then, go forth and do good.

Thank you."

PUBLISHER'S NOTE: The Toronto Star, my previous employer for more than twenty incredible years, has put considerable effort into exposing the harm caused by Dr. Charles Smith and his protectors - and into pushing for reform of Ontario's forensic pediatric pathology system. The Star has a "topic" section which focuses on recent stories related to Dr. Charles Smith. It can be accessed at:

http://www.thestar.com/topic/charlessmith

For a breakdown of some of the cases, issues and controversies this Blog is currently following, please turn to:

http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=120008354894645705&postID=8369513443994476774

Harold Levy: Publisher; The Charles Smith Blog; hlevy15@gmail.com;