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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From the little I have learned it’s that every material, burning at varying degress, creates a bit of a “signature” with accelerants (gas, kerosene, etc) being some of the most recognizable signatures. Couple this with patterning (let’s say a can of kerosene tipped over accidentally and hit a flame source – you have one big “glob” of kerosene accelerant signature – but, if someone *really* wanted to “make sure” the place burned down, you would be more likely to find a trail or unnatural spreading of the kerosene signature where they doused multiple parts of the structure.)
There’s an upper limit where everything gets hot enough to burn away many of these traces, but thankfully people underestimate just how much it takes to get to that point, fires are pretty noticeable, so typically most arson fires (or fires in general) don’t get to that point.
In an even less complete burn, there can be (relatively) minimal damage to a structure and you can determine that there was no faulty wiring, no smokers in the house with lit cigs falling onto furniture, no outdoor fire situations, stove isn’t on, etc and come to the conclusion that the usual natural fire suspects weren’t at play.
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