Jim, as a fellow Louisianan this is very disturbing. As you well know, I am heavily involved in the La IAAI and believe strongly in education. The La IAAI is the vehicle I use to promote education in this state. I understand your desire to deal with the who dunnits privately, but I want to publicly say that it was NOT the La IAAI. At least, not in the 8 years that I have been a member.

By the way, we missed you at the training last week. Did a program called Ashes to Angola (Angola is a gated community here in Louisiana). We built a burn cell and furnished it in the configuration of a child’s bedroom. Burned the room ahead of time and made the attendee's determine the area of origin of the fire (split the room into four equal zones and told them to pick the zone the fire originated in). We intentionally let the cell go to flashover for several minutes before putting it out. The point of the training was to show how patterns change when flashover occurs. We had collapsed springs in both beds and were very careful to advise the attendee’s what this means (and doesn’t mean). I even played the Naked Science video that some on this site contributed to.

Anyway, about half of the class picked the right zone which means half got it wrong. This does not concern me since this was the first fire several of them had ever worked and the first formal training for many others. At least they are getting the education now. Hopefully the days of collapsed springs and "spalding" being indicators of accelerants will soon be a thing of the past in Louisiana.

An interesting side, I put together a presentation called “Secrets in the Firehouse” which addressed fire setting firemen. Mazerat knows this, but for the benefit of others reading this thread, I have arrested numerous arsonists in my career that happened to belong to fire departments (I still have difficulty referring to them as firemen). My counterpart with the Louisiana State Fire Marshal’s Office and I once arrested 10 firemen at one time from a small rural volunteer department a few years back. I actually was able to talk one of the arsonists I arrested into participating in this block of training for a live Q&A with a convicted fireman/arsonist. Although it got quite heated at times, everyone seemed to learn a great deal regarding the type of atmosphere that contributed to this behavior.

Like Mr. Lentini and Mr. Kennedy said, I would be interested in knowing who in our area is teaching this BS (and I ain’t talking about Bad Science).

Dan Hebert