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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Not always. First of all, fires need lots of oxygen and as they spread they suck more and more, which typically means the place a fire *starts* gets quickly surrounded by new fire which suffocates and puts out the original fire. Meaning if you go to a room that that’s all burned up and you see a random spot in the corner that looks surprisingly *less burned* that’s probably where the first started.
Similarly you can often see how fire’s spread, how hot they burned, but looking at the char and burn patterns. If you see areas that are overly burned, meaning they burned hotter than they should have, or paths of fire travel that don’t appear to be the most obvious, that’s probably due to an accelerant. For example, someone poured a stream of gasoline down a hallway to spread the fire, you’d be able to see that gasoline path in the char.
But yeah, if you’re talking about complete burning down to ash and dust, you can’t tell super much. It’s the middle ground fires that can tell you a story.
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