USFA Fire Patterns - FIREFAQS

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FIRE PATTERNS

Would you want to visit a physician who didn't know how to read an X-ray? What if you thought you had a broken arm, and the physician apologized because he didn't know how to read the X-ray of your arm?

The same applies to fire investigators. Can you imagine the outcome of an investigation conducted by a fire investigator who couldn't evaluate fire burn patterns?

Fire investigators have many opportunities to learn about fire burn patterns. Many publications exist to provide explanations and insight regarding fire burn patterns. Any fire investigation course worth attending should concentrate on fire burn patterns as part of the course curriculum. There are many ways to learn about fire burn patterns and how to identify and understand them.

Since 1992, the National Fire Protection Association has produced and distributed NFPA 921, Guide for Fire and Explosion Investigations. Every edition of NFPA 921 contains very useful and valuable information about recognizing and understanding fire burn patterns.

The 2017 Edition of NFPA 921 has an expanded chapter devoted to fire burn patterns. The chapter is very informative, and many of the photographs pertaining to fire burn patterns are in vivid color. The explanations are very descriptive and will be helpful to any fire investigator who studies them and looks for them during fire investigations.

In July 1997, the U.S. Fire Administration published "USFA Fire Burn Pattern Tests" to help fire investigators better understand some of the many fire patterns that exist and to be able to recognize situations when fire burn patterns don't reflect relevant factors in a fire's cause. This USFA publication has been out of print for many years. I kept my copy, disassembled it and put it in a three-ring binder so I could read it while the pages were flat.

In order to share it here, I scanned the document and converted it into a PDF file. It is a large file - 30 megabytes - and can't be read by the Google File Viewer (25 MB max file size).
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