I was surprised by this. Googling turned up this article from 1998: http://www.tcforensic.com.au/docs/article9.html, and of course Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_investigation#The_New_Scie...
. Wikipedia makes it sounds like science is making it's way into fire investigation, starting with the 2005 and 2007 experiments by the ATF, but it's not clear how many fire investigators have paid attention to the results. Thanks for pointing this out. I learned something new today.
That article is interesting, but extremely violates Wikipedia's editorial policy. The wording is inflammatory and opinionated, not encycopedic:
"The bottom line was “The “old-days” of locating the point of origin of a post-flashover fire by relying on the “lowest burn and deepest char” are OVER![12]
When word of the ATF experiments reached the fire investigation community, people began to examine the data more closely, because an error rate over 90% was simply unimaginable! In fact, the poor results should have surprised nobody. "
It appears the page has already been tagged as "It is written like a personal reflection or essay rather than an encyclopedic description of the subject." in 2011, but so far nobody has decided to tidy it up.
Same here. I've always wondered at the certainty of the proclamations of fire investigations. I assumed that the disconnect between what I thought could be determined after everything was burned to a crisp -- and what they claimed to know about how a fire started and progressed was a result of my ignorance... go figure.