Fire and emergency management/Fire investigator/Scene examination

Terminal objective:Given marking devices, sufficient personnel, and special tools and equipment, secure the fire ground and reconstruct the area of origin.

Enabling objectives:

The student should be able to:

Establish recognizable perimeters of the investigation scene.
Protect all evidence or potential evidence from damage or destruction.
Identify and correlate all protected areas and burn patterns to contents of structural remains.
Determine location of items to establish their pre-fire location.
Discover the point(s) of origin.

Terminal objective:Given standard equipment and tools conduct and exterior survey an interior survey and examine and remove debris, inspect the perforamnce of building systems, including detection, suppression, HVAC, utilities and building compartmentation and discriminate the effects of explosions from other types of damage.

Enabling objectives:

The student should be able to:

Preserve evidence
Interpret fire damage.
Identify hazards.
Determine access to the property.
Discover all potential means of ingress and egress.
Identify and preserve potential evidentiary value.
Determine evidentiary value.
Identify hazards.
Check debris for fire cause evidence.
Identify ignition source(s).
Determine fire cause.
Preserve evidence without investigator-inflicted damage or contamination.
Determine the need for expert resources.
Consider operating systems impact on fire growth and spread in identified origin areas.
Identify defeated systems.
Identify explosion(s).
Preserve evidence.

Terminal objective: Given standard equipment and tools and some structural or contents remains, interpret burn patterns and correlate burn patterns.

Enabling objectives:

The student should be able to:

Evaluate individual patterns with respect to the burning characteristics of the material(s) involved.
Determine fire development.
Evaluate methods and effects of suppression.
Recognize false origin area patterns.
Identify all areas of origin.