During the 20/20 piece the one discredited investigator said to the effect" you need to be out in the fire scene to know what really goes on not in the lab"

Well here's my 2 cents worth on what I have observed in 30+ years as a electrical/electronics trouble shooter working in the field.

We often see and observe things which when we contact the manufacturers engineer/designer and they tell us this is just not possible.
But yes we have the evidence .

Example in 80's there was a Burglar alarm manufacturer who have since been bought up and product is no longer produced but there panels which worked well on the west coast where they where manufactured produced all kinds of strange results including arming and disarming them selves etc. when they where
sold and installed in east coast city's .
The engineers kept insisting this just could not happen yet we saw it happening in the field and it was well documented.
They could not produce the problem in the lab but when they finally came out to the east coast hooked up there equipment and started testing they where surprised at how dirty the power was on the east coast and microprocessors they where using
could not handle the situation.
End result they stopped selling product on east coast.

Now come forward to this year and horrific snow storms of 36"-48" some of us had
I have several mini storage facility's as clients and one area we have had continuing problems is the automated gates which again came from west coast.
again strange and unusual problems. one problem so far has been the IR beam which lifts gates going bad. Here we discover the beams are not meant for use down under 32f so gate would malfunction again
west coast telling us this should not happen gates are designed for cold climates . but again it is.
You could take this gate put it in a cold room and it would run great but factor in all the other elements and the condition shows.
So my question to the group is when some one says this is what happened and we go to the lab and try to replicate it and can not.
how do we rule out scientifically it can or can not happen unless in the lab we can create the exact conditions as told by the witness.
I worry that we may be doing disservice to all when we do not consider all possible angles. and just say it is impossible.