Whenever there are forest/building/house fires and authorities come in to inspect (after the firefighters are done controlling it, of course) I always wonder how they trace and find the true cause behind it. How can they gather proof if everything is burnt? How do they know where it started exactly? Does the area around the source look even more scorched than the rest?
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Thank you in advance 🙂
In: Chemistry
Arson investigation is as much of as an art as it is a science.
It is very rare for anything to be burned so completely there’s no trace of anything left. You can follow burn patterns back to the source area. You can look at how deep things are burned to see how hot a fire got and that tells you what burned. You can chemically analyze things to check for traces of accelerants.
Then it’s experience. Fire started in the garage? Check to see if someone stored gasoline next to the hot water heater. Started in the bedroom? Check for overloaded outlets or someone falling asleep with a smoke. An abandoned warehouse with no power or utilities burned? Check for homeless stoves, meth labs, or even insurance scams.
There are also private companies which go out to scenes and determine the cause of a fire. My mom works for one and if it is an appliance or electric thing they take it to their laboratories and figure out why it caught on fire!
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