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Waiting for Arson Data
NFPA members eager to access findings from ATF’s Fire Research Laboratory

NFPA Journal®, January/February 2005

by Stephen Barlas

Small hoods with unburned structure. The ATF Fire Research Laboratory is the first facility in the world dedicated to fire scene investigation. See larger image. Photos: Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms

Training burn under small hood. See larger image.

Small hood after training burns. See larger image.

Large hood. See larger image.

Last December, two days after fires destroyed 10 new homes and damaged 15 others in the worst case of arson in Maryland’s history, smoke poured out of the roof of a three-room brick house on a third of an acre in nearby Prince George’s County. But firefighters in turnout gear simply stood around watching the smoke billow and glass break in the windows. Wires from the house ran 30 feet (9 meters) to a makeshift table on which two laptop computers, a thermometer, and three video screens were perched. Men and women with matching blue tee shirts sat in chairs in front of the equipment, their eyes glued to the data flying past.

The fire had been set a few moments before in a waste paper basket in the house’s home office. Thermocouples dangled in the doorway between the office and the living room, which, this being three weeks before December 25, boasted a Christmas tree. Two wrapped presents rested against the base of the tree, a card on one proclaiming, “From Santa to Scott M.”

The fire was real. So was the house. But this was not the latest arson in Maryland. It was a test fire set in the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosive’s Fire Research Laboratory (FRL), which opened in June 2003, in Maryland, a few miles north of Washington, D.C.

The ATF lab is a one-of-a-kind facility, with two one-third-acre (0.13-hectare) burn rooms, the larger of which contains a 60- by 60-foot (18- by 18-meter) cone calorimeter hood, the largest in the world. Residential and commercial buildings are constructed and burned in both rooms as part of the 75 criminal arson investigations the laboratory handles each year.

Government spending money wisely
“You always hear stories of government waste,” says Daniel Churchward, chair of the NFPA Fire Investigations Technical Committee, which has jurisdiction over NFPA 921, Guide for Fire and Explosion Investigations. “But this is one of the best examples of the government spending its money wisely.” No other fire laboratory in the world is dedicated to criminal law enforcement investigations or re-creates fires with such authenticity. Convicting arsonists is the FRL’s raison d’être.

“The experiments that are being (or will be) done by the FRL are experiments that relate directly to real-world situations,” says Churchward, who owns Kodiak Enterprises, Inc., which does fire investigations. “These tests can save me valuable time and resources in doing my job, which is to offer opinions that relate to origin and cause aspects of fires.”

FRL data could be used to update NFPA standards and guides, too. “We are citing much more research in NFPA 921,” he explains. “We could direct users to FRL papers in the annex of NFPA 921 to back up the research we cite.”

Rick Tontarski, director of the laboratory, says he is building an automated system called FireTOSS (Testing and Operations Systems), which will be the data repository for the technical information flowing through the up to 2,000 data collection channels the fire lab can use during any test burn. Those channels gather data on temperature, atmospheric pressure, heat flux, and output from smoke detectors once a second, 24 hours a day.

Collecting the data is the easy part. Releasing it to Churchward and others is more difficult. Tontarski says there is no question the kind of fire safety data many NFPA members want will be made available, but he cannot supply a timeframe.

”We are not close to making that data available to the public,” he says. “Specific information can not be released until the case is adjudicated. In addition, we have information security concerns in this laboratory, and at ATF, whose arson and explosives repository will house our data. There are concerns about fire walls, care and feeding of the data, and the costs of providing what will be a very data- and video-rich service.”

Tontarski says he hopes to have some interim steps in place more quickly. In the meantime, the FRL will disseminate broader, generic information, such as a brochure and video on whether cigarettes can ignite gasoline, a question that fire investigators have to answer repeatedly and that befuddles many even highly trained certified fire investigators (CFIs), the ATF agents generally responsible for bringing criminal cases to the FRL.

Strangest phone call
CFIs are coming up with ever-more creative ways to develop data. Take the CFI stationed in Texas—who can’t be named because his case is ongoing—who made the strangest phone call Tontarski has ever received.

“I need two animal cadavers for a test in the burn room,” the CFI told the lab director.

The CFI was working on an arson investigation that involved a burned body. Even though the investigator was a senior CFI, he wasn’t sure whether the body had been set on fire, or whether it had been consumed by the flames from a house fire, which could have been set to cover up a homicide. When he got to the scene, the CFI discovered that the body had lost some of its weight.

“I just didn’t think the fuel load in the room was enough to explain that mass loss,” the Texas investigator remembers.
The first animal cadaver was burned by itself, and the weight loss was minimal. The human body had lost substantially more poundage in the fire, so the CFI dressed the second cadaver in a tee shirt, let it burn independently for a short period, then added some bedding and allowed the fire to burn longer. When the CFI finally pulled out the cadaver, it had lost almost as much weight as the person, which tracked with the subcutaneous fat calculations developed by outside expert John DeHaan, whose research is used frequently by the CFIs.

Goodness of their hearts
The FRL staff is composed of professionals with diverse backgrounds. Tontarski, who was trained as a chemist, started 30 years ago in the forensic science laboratory in the basement of the Internal Revenue Service building on Constitution Avenue in downtown D.C. A few years before Tontarski joined the ATF in 1975, Congress passed the Explosives Control Act, which gave the agency the authority to investigate fires, but only as precursors to explosions. Sen. John Glenn opened the door much wider when he sponsored the Anti-Arson Act of 1982, allowing the ATF to investigate arson. The CFI program began in 1986, just a year before the Dupont Plaza Hotel fire in Puerto Rico, which was a seminal event in the FRL’s development.

At that point, the ATF forensics lab was located in a leased building in Rockville, Maryland, where its fire research resources were minimal.

“Our agents, and later our CFIs, could go to NIST [National Institute of Standards and Technology] or the private fire laboratories, but they were helping us out of the goodness of their hearts,” Tontarski says. “We couldn’t pay them. And they didn’t want to have anything to do with going to court. So contacts were very limited.”

This changed after the Dupont Plaza fire, in which 97 people died. The dimensions of that disaster brought ATF agents into contact with NIST fire measurement and modeling experts in the field for the first time over a sustained period for a criminal investigation.

“That was the genesis of the Fire Research Laboratory,” says Chris Porreca, the program manager of the ATF’s four National Response Teams, whose 26 members each are assigned en masse to particularly heinous cases of arson that overwhelm local resources, such as the December 2004 fires in the Maryland subdivision.

“We realized we could complement one another,” he says.

Over the next decade, ATF fire investigators teamed up for training and other kinds of programs with NIST fire experts, one of whom, James Quintiere, departed for an endowed chair in fire engineering at the University of Maryland (UMD). Eventually, the ATF-UMD relationship gave birth to the concept of the Fire Research Lab, which Congress funded in the form of the National Laboratory Center in Prince George’s County, which also houses the larger ATF forensics laboratory.

Frequent burns
Money to build the ATF National Laboratory Center wasn’t a problem, but construction of the burn cells presented a few conundrums. Conventional ceiling sprinklers would have been incompatible with the design of the burn rooms because water would not have been able to penetrate the giant, hooded calorimeters under which houses and buildings are burned. That is why water deluge monitors are mounted on two opposite walls in each of the two burn rooms. And because of the calorimeters, the building designers could not put smoke detectors in the ceiling. To get around that problem, says Steve Hill, the FRL fire protection engineer who worked on the burn cell design, the lab went to a linear heat detection system in both rooms.

The frequent burns—there were 235 in a recent six-month period—draw crowds of blue-shirted staffers, firefighters who are part of the FRL’s own brigade, CFIs involved in the particular investigation, and sometimes fire-investigation research luminaries from around the world.

The fire professionals on Tontarski’s staff include fire protection engineers, electrical engineers, mechanical engineers, and even a physicist. They work with the CFIs who bring criminal cases to the lab, and they consult on particularly complicated cases around the country that call for their expertise.

Last year, the professionals at the FRL spent 170 days out of the office at crime scenes. For example, the ATF office in Chicago recently summoned John Allen, an electrical engineer, to consult on the December 6 fire in the LaSalle Bank building fire in downtown Chicago. Thirty-seven people and 22 firefighters were injured in that blaze, which started on the building’s 29th floor. Allen is the only forensic electric engineer supporting fire investigations in the federal government.

It is a toss-up as to which is more impressive, the credentials of the fire professionals at the FRL or the facility they call home.

“The first time I walked into the lab, the wow factor was way up here,” says CFI Marshall Littleton, raising his flattened right palm above his head.

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