Fire investigation: Historical perspective and recent developments.

As a forensic science, fire investigation involves a wide variety of disciplines and thus attracts an equally wide variety of practitioners. These range from fire protection engineers who may only occasionally engage in forensic work to law enforcement officers, laboratory chemists, metallurgists, and materials engineers. This breadth of practice has resulted in a checkered history, which only relatively recently has given science a full-throated embrace. Because of the stakes involved, fires provide a rich source of material for litigation, both civil and criminal. This conceptual review provides a brief history from the standpoint of a practitioner who has witnessed and sometimes precipitated the changes that have taken place since 1974. Highlights include the debunking of many misconceptions about fire behavior and a general (though not always uninterrupted) movement toward making fire investigation more scientifically accurate through the development of best practices.

Persistence of floor coating solvents.

Using passive headspace concentration as described in ASTM E 1412 and gas chromatographic/mass spectrometric (GC/MS) analysis as described in ASTM E 1618, the author has studied the persistence of solvents in floor coating materials. Both oak and pine flooring boards were tested using stain, stain with polyurethane varnish, and oil finish after a period of ten months and 24 months. The solvents from all three floor-coating substances were easily detectable after 24 months, and showed no signs of diminution when compared with the samples tested earlier. These results point out the need for the submission of comparison samples whenever wood flooring samples are submitted for fire debris analysis in suspected arson cases.