Cause and Origin: Preserving the fire scene
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Fire Damage claims play a big part in the insurance industry. Rick Euper, a fire fighter and fire inspector, explains the importance of preserving the scene to determine the cause and origin of a devastating fire.
Rick Euper: My title here is Fire Inspector, but we do everything. I could be out doing an inspection and a fire call comes in and that means I get on the truck and go do the call.
Everyone in the department is trained to an awareness level of preserving the scene. We don’t want to go in there and destroy the place so we want to find the cause and origin of the fire; where it started and why it started, that’s the big key.
We’re trained what to look for while fighting the fire. That’s the nice thing about us, we don’t just investigate the fires, we’re there fighting it, so it actually helps us in the long run.
And the fact we can usually tell where the heat of the fire was, where it was really hot, where it moved to. And when we do go back, we can investigate the fire.
We normally go to the most burnt area. It’s the area of origin we are looking for. If it’s a fuel fire there will be a trailer coming down where they ran the fuel across the floor, and we can see that. The area origin, you are breaking it right down to bare to whatever-it-may-be. Whether it be cement, or bare wood, or whatever, we’re gonna dig all that ash and everything out of there. It gets quite involved sometimes, takes quite a long time.
As for electrical fires, if we suspect it’s electrical we bring in the electrical inspector from the Safety Authority. And they come in and they’ve been really good. They’ve seen a lot of what happens and they’ve been able to say, “This is what caused it. We can tell that this breaker was faulty or this wire had arced before it was burnt.” We go in and a lot of times those wires are barren; there’s no insulation left on them. But they have the expertise. They can say, “This was actually arcing before it burnt up.”
