When you enter a room or a building burnt up by an arsonist's fire, it is like walking into a giant, hollowed out charcoal briquette. If the firefighters arrived in time to fight it -- or the sprinklers went off -- much of the scene will be soaking wet.
What walls and ceilings haven't already been destroyed probably have been ripped apart by firefighters searching for hidden pockets of flame. As one firefighter told me, "When you enter a burning building, you're entering a building under demolition."
Fire can be as destructive as war: Arson at the Happy Land social club in the Bronx killed 87 people in 1990, leaving a scene of devastation and clues scattered in the ashes.
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The peculiar challenge presented by arson is that the very act of committing the crime obliterates much of the evidence. Even a careful arsonist thinks the clues he leaves behind go up in smoke, but the ashes bear records. Still, those traces are enigmatic, which is why the job facing the investigators at work on last week's arson in Charles County is so demanding. Having studied arson extensively, I know that the investigators will have to look into an enormous range of motives as they try to find out who would want to set fire to nearly 30 houses under construction in the new Hunters Brooke development near Indian Head.
The job of a fire investigator requires strength, endurance, an eye for detail and a knowledge of chemicals. Catching an arsonist, such as the one suspected of setting 45 fires in the metropolitan area during the past 21 months, involves long hours of painstaking and time-consuming work.
Unlike the detectives in TV dramas such as "CSI: New York," where one team collects the evidence and also tracks the criminals, most large municipalities have specialists who work only the scene, leaving the squad detectives to do the follow up. When it comes to arson, however, the fire investigator usually does it all, collecting evidence for laboratory testing and tracking down the suspect.
Contemporary fire investigators have to work like archeologists. They will often have to "dig the fire out" in order to find its origin. The investigators will start their excavation where the heaviest charring is. Then they will remove each layer of debris in an attempt to reconstruct the immediate past. If they suspect an accelerant -- the investigator's lingo for a highly flammable liquid that helps spread a fire -- was used, they will look for "pour patterns," how the arsonist applied the accelerant. They will examine the electric outlets, ruling out short circuits.
The investigators will also establish a time-line from the exact moment the fire is reported to the time the firefighters arrived so they can determine the progression of the fire. A fast-burning fire often means that an accelerant was involved. The fire alarm dispatcher usually records the report and response time.
The investigators will want to know what the color of the smoke was like upon arrival, as it may indicate a particular accelerant was used. With this information they can usually "read the fire" and determine its cause. It takes a lot of skill and practice to get it right.
However, there is far more to investigating a suspicious fire than determining cause and origin. As William Manahan, a New York fire marshal, told me a few years ago, "When you arrive at a job, the closer you come to the actual fire, the more it's a mess, especially if it's a job that's going to go someplace, like a homicide, or where you have multiple fatalities, or where people are burned, or where you have a newsworthy story. In order to grab all the information you need, you have to do a balancing act to get information from all the people on the scene before they are gone. In between all that, you have to do the physical exam of the fire to prove that this fire is either accidental or incendiary. It is chaotic, to say the least."
The scene can be enormous, as it is in Charles County, were 10 houses were destroyed and 16 damaged in the Hunters Brooke subdivision. And investigations can cross jurisdictional lines, as with the serial arsonist operating in the metropolitan area and suspected of setting his 45th fire Friday, this time in the District.
The list of possible motives can be as long as the list of fires. As arson investigators say, more damage can be inflicted with a match than with a gun. Perhaps that is why arson has been called humanity's costliest act of violence, next to war.
Fires are started for revenge, for profit, for kicks, for recognition, out of fear, or to cover other crimes. Arson has long been used to induce terror. Arsonists range from kids to old ladies, from jilted lovers to Mafia wiseguys, from teenage crack dealers to lawyers and businessmen. Arson is committed by individuals and by groups. To apprehend these arsonists, fire investigators do everything from gathering physical evidence to mounting undercover and sting operations.
The first official fire investigator was actually a newspaperman. In the spring of 1854, Alfred E. Baker, then a reporter for the New York Herald, was struck by the number of peculiar fires of doubtful origin occurring in the city and by the lack of any effort by the authorities to find their cause.
He took his concerns to the chief engineer of the New York fire department, who authorized him to investigate the suspicious fires and bring the arsonists to justice. Insurance companies raised a fund to remunerate him. It didn't take Baker long to arrest a man named Charles A. Peverilly for attempting to set fire to a warehouse in Lower Manhattan.
