Determination of the cause of the fire
The determination of the cause of the fire serves to uncover the causes and the course of fires .
Definition of terms
Determining the cause of the fire is a forensic activity that takes place at fire locations after a fire and consists of the sighting, documentation, securing and evaluation of the traces found there on a scientific basis. It is about the exact explanation of an event that has actually taken place from the traces that this event has left. The activity has a certain similarity to the activity of an archaeologist .
Definition of terms
The determination of the cause of the fire must be separated from the tasks of fire protection , fire fighting and fire damage determination .
Experts in fire prevention, fire fighting ( fire department ) or fire damage assessment are not automatically experts for fire cause investigation, nor an expert in fire cause investigation does not automatically fire protection plans, fire inspections may conduct fire safety inspections. A fire cause investigator is also not automatically qualified for the fire service. The fire damage assessment is assigned to the areas of appraisal and fire damage restoration. Although the various activities all deal with the phenomenon of fire , the respective focal points are so far apart that professional activity in one of the areas does not necessarily lead to sufficient knowledge of the other areas of activity.
Jurisdiction
The responsibility for determining the cause of the fire lies first with the locally responsible public prosecutor's office in order to determine whether a criminal offense , i.e. arson, has occurred or not. For this purpose, the public prosecutor's offices use the forces of the police , criminal police , forensic technology , the specialist departments of the state criminal police offices , the specialist department of the Federal Criminal Police Office or external experts. The determination of technical or natural causes of the fire only serves to exclude the possibility of arson and, if one of these causes that are not legally relevant, will not be pursued by the public prosecutor / police.
Only after approval by the public prosecutor's office can the causes of fire be determined for civil law purposes in order to regulate liability for damage incurred. This involves topics such as insurance, contractual penalties, recourse and / or product liability. The importance under civil law naturally far outweighs that under criminal law, since arson is only one (numerically small) area of possible causes of fire.
Furthermore, determining the cause of the fire, at least in the case of larger fire incidents, is important in order to support preventive fire protection. If the origin of a fire is known, this knowledge can be taken into account in future regulations and standards.
tasks
In order to be able to identify the different causes of fire, the various traces of a fire must be evaluated and secured. The most important task is to determine the source of the fire. The reconstruction of the original fire breakout area plays an important role here. Determining the source of the fire is not an easy task that requires a lot of experience, impartiality and careful, prudent work with background knowledge.
If errors occur at this early stage of the investigation (e.g. due to a lack of thoroughness or lack of knowledge on the part of the examiner), these ultimately lead to a wrong result.
If the source of the fire is known, it must be searched for possible ignition sources and the associated fuel . If the source of the fire could not or could not be determined with certainty, the entire primary fire source must be searched accordingly. If the primary fire breakout area is no longer available because it has burned away (example: wooden false ceiling), the entire area below must be searched accordingly. In principle, all devices and technical facilities found in the respective area must then be examined for possible defects and manipulations that could have led to a fire.
If a cause of the fire could not be positively proven, it was possible until February 2011 to use the elimination or exclusion procedure to prove this cause of fire by excluding all possible other causes of fire. However, the elimination procedure was the most abusive procedure, as it was often used even when the source of the fire could not be clearly identified. Here, however, the elimination process inevitably had to fail, since the fire object to be considered was then usually much too large to be able to really exclude all possible causes of fire. For example, after a house fire, all electrical lines should have been completely present in order to be able to safely rule out a technical defect in the electrical network alone .
In principle, all relevant traces and information must be recorded and documented without prejudice. Based on these traces, a hypothesis is developed, which is tested on the basis of the traces found and information obtained. If traces or information contradict the hypothesis, it follows that the hypothesis is false. A new hypothesis must then be sought. This is an iterative process, since the acquisition of traces and information as well as the setting up of hypotheses take place in parallel. Care must be taken here to ensure that traces or information are not suppressed because they do not match a hypothesis. It must also not come to the fact that only traces are searched for that match a hypothesis once established, which would be a classic investigation error.
Legal meaning
Since the penalty framework for arson in the various forms in the German penal code can range from impunity to life imprisonment and courts rely largely on the investigation results of the fire investigators, the work of the fire investigators can have very far-reaching consequences for the accused. Measured against this, the quality of work when determining the cause of the fire is extremely high.
In civil law, the work of fire investigators is often decisive in determining whether insurance benefits are paid out or not. In many cases, this involves amounts of money that can be decisive for the existence of those affected, so that here, too, very high demands must be made on the quality of work when determining the cause of the fire.
education
Regulated training does not yet exist in Germany . The specialist committee of the Darmstadt Chamber of Commerce is responsible for the examination of the public appointment and the swearing-in as an expert for the causes of fire.
Developments in the field of fire detection
With the publication of NFPA 921 on February 25, 2011, according to this regulation, the sole use of the elimination process to prove the cause of a fire is no longer appropriate. In accordance with the principle that fire causes must be determined according to scientific methods, only positive, scientifically based determinations of the causes of fire are now possible. However, since the elimination process delivers a hypothesis that is neither verifiable nor falsifiable and this contradicts the definition of scientific nature, the exclusive use of the elimination process to determine the cause of a fire is not appropriate. With the publication of the new NFPA 921 in February 2014, this was confirmed again and further detailed.
literature
- NFPA 921: Guide for Fire and Explosion Investigation . National Fire Protection Association, Quincy, MA, USA 2014, ISBN 978-1-4559-0850-9 .
- Jörg Cicha: The determination of the causes of fire. 3. Edition. Richard Boorberg Verlag, 2019, ISBN 978-3-415-06482-9 .
- John D. DeHaan, David J. Icove: Kirk's Fire Investigation. 7th edition. 2011, ISBN 978-0-13-508263-8 .
- Wolfgang Holzmann: Fire investigation. 2008, ISBN 978-3-8011-0597-6 .
- David J. Icove, John D. DeHaan: Forensic Fire Scene Reconstruction. 2009, ISBN 978-0-13-222857-2 .
- Dirk Schneider: Determining the cause of the fire . 1998, ISBN 3-17-014872-9 .
- Eric Stauffer, Julia A. Dolan, Reta Newman: Fire Debris Analysis. 2008, ISBN 978-0-12-663971-1 .
