How do firefighters (or investigators idk) find the cause of a fire? Isn’t that super hard if everything is just ash and dust?
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You are probably more interested in structure fires, but for wildland fires, it can be relatively easy to find the origin. For example, grass will bend and fall pointing at where the fire came from. Trees will often get limb freeze when a fire is really raging, where needles and limbs will point away from the origin. You can take a few sample points where the vegetation is intact enough to leave these clues and start working back to the fire origin. When well practiced, you can get to the origin pretty fast and because the origin of a wildfire is usually the coolest part of the burn, any evidence of the ignition source is usually intact.
We also usually know within a relatively small area where the fire started, so it’s not like we have to trace it back for miles. Even massive conflagrations that get to kicking ass from the get go, we can get to within a 1/4 mile of the origin to start tracing things out.
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