Cy wrote:

"Schick’s philosophy on investigations was that when you had gathered all of the available facts about the origin and cause of the fire you noted them down on paper. Once you were comfortable with what you had done and the conclusions you came up with he had you take a fifteen minute break. Nowdays it would be coffee, but that was not the case back then. After you had taken your break he had you go back over each and every fact that you noted with the purpose of disproving them or your conclusions based on them and looking for other explanations of the facts you obtained. Once you did this and you could not disprove or mitigate the facts you gathered and the conclusions you came up with, then you had a viable origin and cause, but not until then. If you could not validate them he had you had to go back and re-investigate those items to determine what was valid or what was not and why. If you did not account for all discrepancies then he had you start all over again.

This was 1953; sound familiar?"


Mr. Schick was certainly one of the pioneers in the application of the scientific method to fire investigation. The scientific method has been around a lot longer than any of us, it just seems to be relatively new to the majority of the fire investigation community. Are there any remaining copies of this text still available?

Cy wrote:

"Another thing, as long as I am in the mood to write, let’s discuss the use of “Old wives tales”.
There is nothing wrong with an old wives tale as most were as accurate in their day as many of the new techniques are that we use today. It is how they were applied that causes the problem."

With all due respect, there certainly are problems with these types of "rules of thumb". They may be right some of the time, but not all of the time. The problem is that these "rules of thumb" were developed without the benefit of understanding the fundamentals of the phenomenon that would allow broad application. They still present the same problem today that they presented in thier day. So what has changed? What has changed is that the community now tends to understand better what consititues "bad science" and rejects the use of such. These "rules of thumb" were not accurate at any point in time nor were they even precise given thier generality. Yes, they are simple to use, but we need to move far away from this type of tool. Fire is much more of a complex pehenomenon. It needs to be treated as such if we are to advance the profession in any meaningful way.

Cy wrote:

"Some examples I see is the one of spalling in concrete. Most of us understand how this comes about, but concrete poured in a warehouse in 1930 had a composition that was much different than that poured in 1950, 1980, 2000 and 2006. The development of concrete has come a long way in composition, strength, moisture content, curing times, expansion and contraction, etc. consequently, if we take an old wives tale that might have been true in spalling occurring in 1950 to concrete poured in 1930 and try to apply it to concrete poured in 2004 we are not talking about the same product. By its very nature it is going to react differently to an identical heat source."

I believe the old wives tale that you refer to was that the finding of concrete spalling was an indication of the use of ignitable liquids such as gasoline. Again, with all due respect, while I agree that concrete technology has changed in the last century, are you saying that concrete poured in the 30's will spall when exposed to a flammable liquid poured and ignited on its surface and concrete poured in the 50's and later will not? If this is true, can you point me to the references that support such?

Douglas J. Carpenter, MScFPE, CFEI, PE, FSFPE
Vice President & Principal Engineer
Combustion Science & Engineering, Inc.
8940 Old Annapolis Road, Suite L
Columbia, MD 21045
(410) 884-3266
(410) 884-3267 (fax)
www.csefire.com