August 7, 2024 • 49 mins
Have you ever wondered how a failed attempt at medical school could lead to a thrilling career in fire investigation and becoming one of the most well know FI in the UK?
Join us on CSI on Fire as we sit down with Steve Andrews, whose unexpected journey took him from studying zoology and psychology to earning a master's degree in bioaeronautics.
Steve's passion for high-risk outdoor activities and a pivotal project on aircraft fire safety steered him into the fascinating world of fire research and investigation.
In this episode, Steve shares his remarkable experiences, from working with the European Space Agency on fire experiments in microgravity to conducting large-scale fire and explosion tests that police budgets couldn't cover.
He also recounts his time with the Forensic Science Service, exploring the intricate science behind fire and collision investigations. Steve's narrative is packed with hands-on experiences, including petrol bomb experiments and room fires, revealing the critical role of practical, on-the-ground work in shaping a robust body of knowledge in fire investigation.
You'll also hear about the evolution of fire investigation education and research, particularly following the closure of the Forensic Science Service.
Steve discusses his involvement in establishing a master's degree in fire investigation at UCLan and the importance of publishing research to advance the field. From the cultural hesitance in the UK to share detailed forensic findings publicly to the powerful impact of visual evidence in court, this episode underscores the ongoing challenges and advancements in the ever-evolving landscape of fire investigation.
Don't miss this captivating conversation with a true expert in the field.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
Hi, welcome to CSI on Fire, the podcast that takes
you behind the scenes of thefire investigation community.
I'm your host, mike Moulden,and episode after episode, we'll
attempt to excavate the oftendifficult but always fascinating
world of the fire investigator.
Okay, welcome to CSI on Fire,your fire investigation podcast.
(00:27):
I've got a fantastic guest ontoday.
He's very, very busy at thistime of year, so I really
appreciate him coming on.
Steve Andrews, welcome to thepodcast.
Thanks very much for coming on.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
Thank you very much, Mike.
I'm glad to be here.
Speaker 1 (00:39):
Great.
Thanks very much.
I really do.
I know you're busy this time ofyear with MSc graduates and
bits and pieces and marking, butI really appreciate you coming
on Tell us how you've ended upon the podcast.
Give us some details about your30 plus years in fire
investigation.
Speaker 2 (00:53):
I think, like a lot of people, I fell into it by
complete accident.
I had never intended to do itI'm only in fire investigation
because I never got to do what Ireally wanted to do since I was
a kid which was become a doctor.
So I flunked my a-levels,didn't get into med school.
A bizarre chain of eventshappened.
So I've been doing a bit of umvoluntary nursing work up until
(01:16):
then to get ready med school,and so I thought I'll try nurse,
like the hospital environmentand I'd missed a recruitment
round for training for becominga student nurse.
So they said oh yeah, well,have you, there's always a place
for someone in nursing.
And I got put straight into alocked forensic ward in a
psychiatric hospital.
(01:37):
Some very dangerous men yeah,we had people that either hadn't
quite made it to the BroadmoorSpecial Hospital or had come
from it to a less securehospital.
So that was a bit of a rudeawakening.
There were quite a fewbiosetters in that lot.
I can tell you I really enjoyedit actually.
(01:58):
But the clinical psychologistsaid you know what?
Don't be a nurse, you'll alwaysbe bitter about not being a
doctor.
Go to university and dosomething and maybe try and get
in as a graduate.
So I went off and did a jointhonors zoology and psychology
degree because very interestedin human behavior and so on, and
really enjoyed that.
(02:19):
Never got into medical schoolsecond time around, tried for a
sort of neuroscience PhD anddidn't make that.
And then a mate of mine saidthere's an amazing master's
degree course at Cranfield atthe minute where you get six
hours of flying lessons as partof the course and what it was a
strange master's calledbioaeronautics, which in
(02:42):
layman's term, if I said, aerialcrop spraying, but the science
of it.
We were all into the kind ofoutdoor pursuits that could get
you killed in an instant.
And aviation well, not flying,but well, yeah, a bit of hand
gliding, parachuting, diving,caving, climbing, as I say,
anything where one falls, moveand you're a goner.
(03:03):
So off we went and sure enough,we got our six hours flying
lessons and learned all aboutaircraft and sprays in
particular and this is wherethis is my lead in learning a
lot about water sprays andmisting systems and all this
kind of thing for killing pestsand applying herbicides and
(03:25):
forest firefighting was in thereas well a bit as part of them.
Fuel and oil spill clear up andso on, but when it got towards
dissertation time we'reapproached by a guy from the
been in the air accidentinvestigation branch.
I was there in 1988 and theManchester Air Tours disaster
had happened in 1985, which wasthe airliner that had an engine
(03:50):
blow out on its takeoff runAugust 85.
And the trap was basically frompart of the engine blowing out,
hit a fuel tank, ignited behindthe engine and so the pilot
stopped his run.
He was in nil wind conditions,two knots or something, but
there was enough that when hestopped the plane it blew the
(04:11):
flames onto the side of theaircraft and as they tried to
evacuate the fire burned its wayin and killed 55 people.
And a chap tried in theaftermath of it, a fella by the
name of Jim Steele, who I don'tthink with us any longer.
He came up with an idea forputting fine water mists sprays
(04:34):
inside an aircraft to keep thepassengers alive in the event of
an aircraft accident fire.
So bearing in mind thatsurvivable air accidents
generally happen either ontakeoff or landing rather than
falling out of the sky from agreat height and you need to
keep people alive long enoughfor the fire trucks to get there
.
And he did three ad hoc testswhich looked like they were
(04:58):
promising, and then poor fellahad a heart attack.
Had a heart attack, so the chapfrom ai, or had been with aib,
approached these studentsinterested in spray crops.
Had anyone interested in fire?
Oh, that sounds interesting andeventually dangerous.
That's right up my street and Iended up at the end of the
runway, because it's anoperational airfield, in a what
(05:21):
had been a munitions bunker thatby coincidence happened to be
the same shape inside as a, Ithink, an Airbus with aircraft
seats in it, left over fromcrash testing, lighting aviation
fuel fires, with the airportfire brigade there who were
having a whale of a time,because not much happens on an
(05:41):
airfield normally.
Not much happens on an airfieldnormally and I'd approached the
fire research station because Ididn't have a clue how to
monitor the fire and what to do.
So I'd contacted them and theysaid oh, yeah, come and talk to
us, we'll lend you somethermocouples and a data logger.
So I went and told them what Iwas planning and they lent me
(06:01):
the equipment, showed me how touse it, said, oh, send us your
dissertation at the end, which Iduly did, and they said oh,
come and have a chat when youbring all the equipment back.
So I went and had a chat, teaand biscuits, talked about my
MSC and at the end they said sowhen can you start?
And I said, oh, and they saidyou've just preempted a joint
(06:25):
Civil Aviation Authority FederalAviation Administration project
onto this whole thing.
You've basically done theleading work.
We'll employ you as soon as youcan start Monday if you want as
a contractor while we do yourthree months to get your civil
service vetting done, months toget your civil service vetting
(06:45):
done.
And the next thing I knew I'mdoing fire research at
Borehamwood and in particular atthe Cardington hangar which
back then was the biggest firelab in the world.
It was the old R101 airshiphangar.
And there's an irony therebecause of course the R101, like
the Hindenburg, caught fire andkilled everyone.
I was setting fire to a Boeing707 fuselage for a year or so in
there and we were doing bigfires.
Speaker 1 (07:08):
I remember as part of my cram fields.
I mean, I was later, a decadelater than you, but we still
used to go to the hangar for avisit because they were still
doing well, I don't know if theystill doing fire research there
, but no, we used to go theresadly BRE well, I say sadly got
privatised in the late 1990s,became BRE Global eventually and
(07:29):
a few years after that theCardington hangar became too
expensive for them to upkeep andit got sold.
Speaker 2 (07:38):
I think at the moment it certainly was a film studio.
I don't know if it still is.
Oh yeah, it had been used tostore cars for a while from some
factory.
I mean, they had everythingthere.
The last time I visited it,which was on a European network
of forensic science institutes,forensic fire investigation,
they had six sessions where fireinvestigators went along,
(08:00):
forensic scientists from aroundEurope, and did the kind of fire
experiments they wanted to do,but the police wouldn't pay for.
We did Europe and did the kindof fire experiments they wanted
to do, but the police wouldn'tpay for.
We did explosions.
There was a lot of petrol bombthrowing and room fires.
They had a six-storey hotelbuilt inside that hangar at that
time, full-on hotel staircases,the lot and we were given a
(08:21):
room to do repeat fire testing.
And they had an eight-storybuilding at the back which could
be turned into variouslyoffices or multi-story car park.
Big, big fire tests there, highrack storage systems.
It was an amazing place.
I loved working at cardington onthe big fires.
But after I got involved withthe European Space Agency
(08:43):
project, the space station, wedid fire tests for that with
Martin Schiff, ram Knows, but Ibuilt a rig.
I designed and built a rig sothat we could do floating fire
experiments in the Vomit Cometand I never could fly.
I was really disappointed.
Martin flew in it and PeterFardell who was one of the fire
(09:03):
chemistry guys.
Most people were sick as a doginside that thing.
I was due to fly on the nextround of tests but then personal
circumstances changed.
My wife's job moved toYorkshire and and at that point
I got a civil service transferto the health and safety
(09:24):
laboratory at Buxton, part ofthe HSE.
So suddenly I changed fromdoing all this fire research and
I'd been to a few fireinvestigations at that point.
As a sort of lead-in to doingthey took me to one and I loved
it.
They thought, all right, we'llbring Steve next time and I went
to the HSE, the Health andSafety Lab, and got involved in
(09:47):
a lot more investigative work.
Then we did do some scene workbut a lot of it was doing
reconstruction experiments totry and solve how things have
happened.
I was mostly working on dustexplosions.
I was doing big scale dustexplosions.
I was doing big scale dustexplosions.
I had a nine story pair ofbucket elevator rigs.
(10:09):
I was doing explosions inbucket elevator towers to a
height of nine stories.
It was like the space shuttletaking off when I set one of
those off.
I'd be delighted when theaction committee from Buxton
would ring up to complain thatfluorescent light tubes had
fallen out in people's housesand windows had shaken, which
would happen when there was atemperature inversion or when we
(10:31):
had flat cloud, and the shockwave would bounce off the cloud
so I studied that for seven oddyears.
And then a job advert came upfor the Forensic Science Service
who were trying specifically torecruit fire investigators.
(10:51):
I think it was the first andonly time they ever did it.
This was in 98.
And they took me from Buxton.
I went to the Chorley lab inLancashire and a lady called
Helen Rosser, who I think was afire engineer at the time, got
taken on at the FIU in Londonand I think she's with Burgoyne.
I think she went to Burgoyne noHawkins actually, I think she
(11:15):
was Hawkins okay and suddenly Iwas full-time fire investigation
so I'd had to do my, you know,the proper training.
So I did a gardener course andI did the Morton in the Marsh
course.
Within a year of qualifying.
I was teaching fireinvestigation on the Morton in
the Marsh course did right upuntil the demise of the FSS.
(11:37):
It was perfect job for me.
Speaker 1 (11:39):
How many years were you there at the FSS?
I was there from 1998 till 2010.
Speaker 2 (11:46):
So 12 years full-on fire investigation.
I got involved towards the endwith firearms examination but I
didn't quite.
They closed our lab before Igot to qualify as a reporting
officer.
I was starting to get involvedwith firearms casework as well.
There's quite a lot ofsimilarity when you go out to
scenes, a bit like collisioninvestigation.
(12:07):
There's quite a fewsimilarities.
Speaker 1 (12:09):
Yeah, very similar.
I mean, it's forensicengineering kind of, at the end
of the day, isn't it?
It's under that kind ofumbrella.
When you were at the FSS, whatsort were you dealing with?
Obviously, mostly fatality andpolice work.
Speaker 2 (12:21):
Yes, it was almost exclusively.
There were a few colleaguesthat did criminal defence work
as well and kind of what we'dcall a Chinese wall in so that
nobody spoke to anyone else.
Towards the end of my timethere I applied to join the team
that did that, but I neveractually picked up any defence
casework.
So it was all police work, alot of criminal work, and I
(12:45):
think you'll have heard fromEmma Wilson I listened to her
the other day an awful lot offatal fires.
To begin with we did a bigrange of fires, so we'd go to
industrial fires and things likethat as well, but with police
contracts and so on iteventually became much more
focused towards fatalities.
I somehow ended up specialisingin what I would call man-on-fire
(13:09):
cases, or, more often than not,woman-on-fire cases, some of
which would be.
A lot of them were murders,some were suicides, a few.
There were a few accidentalones, but the majority were
deliberately set by a killer orthe victim themselves.
This is where I ended upbuilding my fire test dummy.
(13:31):
I built a wooden mannequin todo reconstruction work, one of
the things that I always andthis is something, when you come
to top tips, which is sort ofmentioned at the end.
I think a few people have saidburn to learn, but wherever
possible, do the test, do thereconstruction test, demonstrate
your hypothesis by settingthings on fire.
(13:53):
And because of my background insetting things on fire and
blowing them up, I wascompletely tuned into that from
the word go.
And we were really fortunate atChorley because we shared a site
with Lancashire Fire and RescueServices Training Centre.
So if I wanted to do a firetest I literally walked out of
the gate and across and knockedon the door and said, hey, can I
(14:15):
do some fire tests?
And they were always willing tohelp me.
So I did full-scale room,staircase, hall stairs, landing,
reconstruction, fire tests, allsorts of room tests, wheelie,
been against the front door test, all manner of tests and a lot
of fire test dummy experiments.
(14:35):
The fire test dummy was made outof wood so that you could look
at the burn pattern, sand itdown, do another one, sand it
down another one and look atdifferent postures.
We worked out a way to do a manor person moving around on fire
by hanging it basically from ascaffolding pole strapped to a
(14:56):
ladder on the back of a fireappliance and driving along at a
kind of walking pace with itsfeet just touching the ground
and it would walk, its feetwould trip touching the ground
and it would walk, its feetwould trip on the ground and it
would appear to walk.
And I had these metal strings,which were actually bike brake
cable, cobbled together.
(15:16):
I could pull the arms up tocover its face or be held out in
front of it.
We did some tests where weactually moved it around to see
the fire as it moves around thebody.
Speaker 1 (15:28):
Do you think we've lost?
I mean, I remember I was atLambeth for a little while in
physics and metallurgy oraccident investigation and I
remember going up to variousplaces and throw it on the skid
pan and car we would throw tosee if a ball bearing could
smash a window and cause injury,that sort of stuff and throw in
the dummy off of a top of abuilding, actual, real sort of
(15:50):
test.
Do you think nationally, withthe shutting of the fss there's,
we don't seem to do that burnto learn type thing.
That seems to be restricted.
I think more and more now.
Or would you agree with that ornot?
Speaker 2 (16:01):
I suspect I hope more is going on than we hear about,
but because everything'sprivatised, people just don't
talk about it so much, and theinsurance industry, I imagine,
do quite a bit.
Again, I hope so, but againit's all client confidential
then.
So, very little comes out.
We're not very good in thiscountry at publicising case
(16:25):
studies.
We don't publish them in firejournals or forensic journals so
much as other countries do.
If you've had an interestingcase, and in the Forensic
Science Service we were neverparticularly encouraged to try
and publish work.
In fact, one of the criticisms,particularly after the Forensic
Science Service closed, was thatthere was all this knowledge
(16:46):
that was in-house and lots ofinternal research documents that
had never been put intoscientific journals.
So a lot of that informationhas ultimately ended up probably
having to be repeated.
I'm as guilty of that now asprobably I ever was, because
there's so much that I've wantedto publish since being at the
university.
(17:07):
I never had a chance.
We just never get any headspaceto publish anything.
I managed to get one paperpublished on the transfer of
ignitable liquid residues frombag to bag through nylon bags if
they're stored in closeproximity.
Nylon bags if they're stored inclose proximity.
We got that published myselfand a master's student who's in
(17:27):
the UK Association of FireInvestigators, Philippa Belcher.
But other than that it's beenvery difficult to get work out
just because out there, yeahwell, I think as well.
Speaker 1 (17:37):
I mean, we've come into a sort of university period
now, I think as well.
With the uk afi, the conferenceis coming up on monday actually
, although this podcast will goout a few weeks later, but we
have a few case studies there.
But it's limited, isn't it?
And I think that's maybe alsoto do with the fam.
From a policing perspective, Igive a presentation about a fire
scene, a murder fire scenescene.
You have to seek permissionfrom the SIO, you have to seek
(18:00):
permission from the family andthat kind of stuff.
So I think, from a culturalpoint of view, I think the Brits
do tend to shy away from it alittle bit, in the sense of it's
about picking the audience andmaking sure the audience is
right for it.
I guess you mentioned EMPCthere as well earlier on.
I mean, they tend to do morestandards and it's kind of like
a European network of how thatworks.
But would you like to see moreresearch coming out?
(18:22):
Do you see a mechanism for thatkind of stuff to come out?
Speaker 2 (18:26):
They certainly get work published, but on the
continent people seem to getpublished more, I would argue.
Also in Scotland the NivenicDade managed to get a lot
published through the LeversversHume Forensic Science Institute
thing.
Yeah, university wise, it hasbeen a struggle.
I started at the universityshut down and by then I'd got
(18:48):
about 10 years of experiencealready with teaching, because I
was going to Morton in theMarsh once, if not more times, a
year, or by the time I wasthere, there we were the only
masters in fire investigationaround, because the one at
Anglia Ruskin or Anglia, whichhad been Anglia APU when had its
(19:09):
course Anglia PolytechnicUniversity, that one was shut
and then one appeared for two,three years perhaps at
Wolverhampton and then closed.
And then sort of my ambitionwas work being done that I could
make out, I think universitiesdoing undergraduate work.
But I didn't see much gettingpublished and, as I say, I'm as
(19:30):
guilty as anyone for not gettingthat done.
Speaker 1 (19:32):
Sure Most people will know you, steve, from UCLan, so
tell us all about UCLan and howthat came about and what you're
involved with in UCLan.
Speaker 2 (19:40):
UCLan is the city of central Lancashire, which has
its main campus in Preston,which is where I work, and I
became involved with thatactually before the forensic
science service closed down.
I was wanting to do firereconstruction tests in two
cases in fairly quick succession.
One was an accidental fire thatwas potentially going to lead
(20:02):
to a manslaughter case and theother was a murder of a family.
Petrol through the letterboxand I wanted toxic gas
monitoring doing, and somebodyat the fire brigade suggested I
contact the university becausethey had a team who did fire
toxicity work who might be ableto help, which indeed they did,
(20:25):
and so, once they knew me, I gotco-opted as an industry
specialist when they weresetting up a fire investigation
master's degree.
They tried to poach me a coupleof times, but I didn't want to
go, and then the governmentdecided to close down, first of
all, part of the ForensicScience Service and ultimately
(20:47):
all of it.
So they set up a situationwhere we had three competing
private companies who thegovernment had encouraged.
So there was Selmark ForensicServices, eurofins, which at
that time was called LGC, andKey Forensic Services, and the
(21:10):
government in 2010 decided itwould shut down three of the six
forensic labs Chorley, where Iworked, birmingham and Chepstone
and at the time they were goingto leave three open.
Ultimately, not long after Iactually left the forensic
science service, they decidedthey were going to close them
all and shut the whole thingdown.
(21:31):
But they were closing evidencetypes one by one in each lab,
and so I actually left theChorley lab in September 2010.
The lab closed in March 2011,so I left just before the final
closure of it and walkedstraight into a job at the
university as a lecturer in fireinvestigation on a new or new
(21:56):
master's degree, which had beenrunning in full-time mode for
about a year, and there was alsoa part-time variant of it,
which was actually a little bitdifferent, geared towards fire
brigade personnel that had beenrunning for perhaps two years
before I got there, I joined theuniversity and started teaching
(22:17):
.
I went to the university ratherthan private sector because at
the time the lab was closing, myson was only nine months old.
I felt that I wanted to becoming home at night to see him
grow up, rather than not knowingif I was going to end up at a
post-mortem at two o'clock inthe morning and then stay in a
hotel in Birmingham or Newcastleand then stay in a hotel in
(22:38):
Birmingham or Newcastle orsomething.
So I started teaching at thatpoint.
So we had a, as I say, afull-time version of a master's
degree in fire investigation anda part-time version.
I taught four of the six taughtmodules on the full-time one
and two of the modules.
Well, actually, to begin withonly one of the modules on the
(23:00):
part-time one, which was thepractical fire investigation
module.
So the practical fireinvestigation module is very
similar in many ways to thelevel five courses for audience
members who, plenty of whom,will have done one of those
where we do practical live roomburns.
(23:20):
We would also do vehicle firesas well.
We would start off by givingthe students a vehicle fire
between sort of one car, betweentwo, to examine the car fires
we set up mainly as a teambuilding exercise getting your
hands dirty for those thatweren't already doing fire
investigation and as an evidencerecovery exercise.
(23:43):
So we'd always put lots ofuseful things in the car.
So we might set one up, forexample, as a hit and run,
another one as a armed robbery,getaway car being burned out,
that kind of thing.
So we'd have cartridge casesand weapons and all sorts of
things spirited away in them andeverything from boxes and
(24:03):
matches, cigarette packets,things like that, that to amaze
the students when they actuallyfound them, they hadn't all
burned away, and car fires arereally quite hard to excavate
because everything weldstogether.
We also which I think made ussomewhat, I think, unique was we
would also give the students acar to set on fire themselves,
(24:26):
which, apart from being greatfun and an opportunity for a
football squad style team photowith a burning car in the
background was, uh, showed themhow either easy or difficult it
is to set a vehicle on fire by avariety of methods that local
arsonists might use, or yourperson wanting to do a
(24:46):
fraudulent car arson forinsurance money, having a go at
setting it on fire and gettingit wrong, that sort of thing and
also to witness the speed atwhich the fire grows, the noise,
the sound of the airbagsexploding and the tires
exploding, because that givesyou an idea of what information
from witnesses might be tellingyou, because people often may
(25:09):
exaggerate or say they heardexplosions or think they heard
gunshots or a bomb going off allthese sort of thingsave them a
good grounding in that.
And then the room fires.
On a typical year we might burnfour rooms one month and then,
if we had a good cohort ofpeople, we might do another one
and possibly even a third roundas well.
(25:31):
And we would always make surethe rooms were not just nicely
furnished but made to look asthough they were properly lived
in.
So there'd be half a pizza on aplate under the sofa and drunk
cups of tea and cigaretteseverywhere and all that kind of
stuff as realistic as possible.
(25:51):
Yeah, and always power them upwith electricity, Okay that's
good you don't have to do theelectrical examination and the
arc mapping.
We always have a door on thefront as well.
Not just we do use the shippingcontainers with a window cut in
the side, but we would alwaysmake sure it had a door on the
(26:11):
front and a normal house door,not least so that we can squirt
petrol through the letterbox orshoot a firework in or something
like that and do variations ofdoor open, door closed and that
sort of thing and have aconsumer unit on the outside.
So they have to examine allthat and so on.
So make it as realistic aspossible.
The other thing is that becauseof my other key module, which
(26:34):
was the forensic analysis module, if they found ignitable liquid
residues or suspected inelectrical appliance of starting
the fire or wanted to rule itout or look at a bit of wiring,
they would have to bring backtheir exhibits to the lab,
suitably packaged, and then theywould do the gas chromatography
(26:57):
, mass spectrometry, and have towrite a report on that as well.
Or they might do electricalexamination using microscopes,
either an ordinary optical oneor a lovely fancy digital one
that produces lovely stackedimages.
Where everything's in focus andyou can move the image around
(27:21):
is where everything's in focusand you can move the image
around or even go to electronmicroscope and could examine
things on the electronmicroscope, even look at things
like the metal composition usingenergy dispersive x-ray with
the scanning electron microscope.
So they could do some seriousanalysis afterwards or do little
burn tests.
The two modules would knittogether very nicely.
That's always been the bestpart of it.
(27:42):
Now I get the fun of settingthings on fire and people have
to work out how I did it.
Why is the report at the end ofit?
So that's the master's degree.
I also would teach a bit onundergraduate courses.
Initially so much I'd do amodule on fire investigation for
third year fire engineering,but that was all lectures, no
(28:05):
practical, often to a class ofabout 80.
And some more specific forforensic students, some specific
parts of modules aboutignitable liquid residue
analysis primarily.
They would get a more firechemistry grounding I did also
because of the firearms stuffthat I'd done.
(28:26):
I would get involved in a bitof firearms teaching and
firearms related undergraddissertation projects as well.
Speaker 1 (28:33):
Andy coin was on.
I've had various people and youlook at certain organizations
or institutes etc, and they'vehad various people.
And you look at certainorganisations or institutes etc.
And they've all got a lot ofthem, particularly if they're
ex-fire service personnel.
I've got the UCLAN and they allknow you.
One thing I wanted to do waswhat's happening next, steve?
What's happening I think yourtenure's coming to an end now
and what's happening next foryou?
Speaker 2 (28:53):
It's all a bit unfortunate really.
The University of CentralLancashire, along with about 50
others 45, 50 other universities, has been this year in a very
serious financial crisis kind ofperfect storm of freezing of
the university fees that we have, cost of living crisis, fuel
(29:15):
oil and gas prices going throughthe roof courtesy of the
Russians invading first Crimeaand then Ukraine, covid and all
of this sort of thing.
Covid had a big impact and alsowithout trying not to get too
political, especially at thistime in Britain immigration
(29:35):
policy, especially post COVID-19.
There's been a big reduction ininternational students coming
to universities and it came to ahead this year and we had a
sudden announcement at eastertime that our university needed
to lose about 165 people veryquickly by the end of july.
(29:57):
Volunteers, please, and if yougo voluntarily, we'll give you
an enhancement on yourredundancy package.
Well, I turned 60 in October,so financially it made perfect
sense.
So I took the deal and I'mmoving on.
Since I've been at theuniversity, I've been doing
(30:18):
consultancy work through FireInvestigations UK.
That was set up by Dr PeterMancy and John Galvin and Chris
Clark.
John Galvin was London FireBrigade, as well as Peter Chris
Mark West Yorkshire, and I'm oneof the associates.
There are about half a dozen orso of us who are associates and
(30:39):
those three are the partners,and they enabled me to do
consultancy work whilst doing myfull-time university work,
which probably helps to explainwhy I never had any time to
publish anything, but never mind.
I've picked up over the yearsforensic casework, which, since
about 2018, has been almostexclusively criminal defence
(31:03):
casework, though I did pick uppolice casework before that and
a little bit of the insurancecasework.
The snag with insurancecasework was that I rarely had
an opportunity to go out to afire scene unless it happened in
the middle of summer, when Iwas in the middle of teaching.
I couldn't just sort of notturn up at a lecture because I
(31:25):
was going to a fire.
So I'm leaving the universityand all being well, picking up
more consultancy work on theinsurance and, probably for the
time being anyway, defense casework and if I'm lucky, I'll pick
up some teaching, because I dolike the teaching, and if I can
(31:45):
pick up short courses here andthere, then great well, there
you go if anyone needs any shortcourses.
Speaker 1 (31:50):
Steve, you've been in the industry for a long time.
You've got a massive amount ofexperience and the fact I've not
really said that much todayjust shows you've got a massive
amount of experience and I'dlike to get into.
You mentioned early on aboutfire starters and psychology.
Is that something that you'restill sort of interested in, or
is that an area?
Speaker 2 (32:08):
I was always interested in it.
I never did much in the way ofbecause I'm not a psychologist
as such.
I never got into doing any workon it other than looking at.
We did do some work with amaster's student when I first
started looking at what I calllady on fire cases.
A part of that actually was tosee whether my impression of how
(32:31):
many of these were going on wasled by an unconscious bias on
my part, because I was thinkingI've seen an awful lot of these.
Is it widespread or am I justgetting a lot of them?
So my student had a project onit and it turned out that I was
seeing a lot of them, not manypeople.
Luckily, in this country we'reseeing as many.
(32:54):
So I suppose that's a blessingwhere it's a curse because it
just means I've seen an awfullot of them.
I've always been interested inthe human behaviour side of
fires and why people fail toescape, why people set fires.
One of my other modules wasabout human behaviour in fire
and witness reliability andcognitive interviewing and
(33:21):
although I was never trained inthat, I had help from a police
lecturer who used to teach itwhen he was in the police, but
at least telling people about itand how not to do it, how not
to don't be an interrogator anddon't do what I've just been
doing for the last however long,which is talk non-stop.
Speaker 1 (33:36):
I have to do what you , I love guests like you,
because it's easy for me,because the experience and
everything just shines throughreally.
And the other thing thatconcerns me I guess steve is
with you moving on is that Iknow that the number.
I'm not entirely sure how manyyou've had through over the
years you've been there, but Iknow that a lot of dissertations
have been undertook, somereally good sort of interesting
(33:56):
research been undertaken.
So what's going to happen withall those?
Are they still going to beavailable in the library or
whatever?
Speaker 2 (34:03):
what I want to try and do is, through some of my
colleagues who are staying atthe university, is try and get
some of them published.
The university always wantpeople to go for the big guns
like science and justice,justice, yeah, journal of
forensic sciences or forensicscience international or fire
materials and that sort of, forthe big guns like Science and
Justice, journal of ForensicSciences or Forensic Science
International or Fire andMaterials and that sort of thing
(34:25):
.
I'm personally more interestedin telling the people that need
to know.
I think by time I startedtrying to get some of them into
the UK AFI's journal, which Isuspect might be my first port
of call.
But I would like to, not leastfor my colleagues at the
(34:48):
university, try and get some ofthem into publications which
have more of a hit from theuniversity's point of view yeah,
it gets the information tothose who need it really.
That's on my list of things totry and get done quickly.
I've got a couple in thepipeline that I want to get done
very soon.
One is about portable gaschromatography mass spectrometry
.
The late great John De Haanmanaged to get some work he'd
(35:09):
done published in the Fire andArson Investigator and he and I
it turned out I bumped into himat a conference once and we were
both working on the same thing.
It turned out I bumped into himat a conference once and we
were both working on the samething, so we shared some of our
results on these portable GCMSinstruments and the one we were
looking at, which is the oneavailable to fire services in
(35:30):
the UK, wasn't doing very well,and the one he was looking at
was doing quite well.
It turns out that I'd done somead hoc tests with the one he was
using, but I didn't know whichone it was until he published
and that looks very promising.
But it would require fire andrescue services for their DIM
vehicles detection,identification, monitoring
(35:51):
vehicles to upgrade from theexisting one to this newer one
which is better.
So I want to get some of thatwork done.
My former student, ellie gillat, who ellie honeyball as she was
when she joined.
She's in south york's fire andrescue group managing her, so
we're trying to get thatprobably somewhere.
We're working on it and thenthe redundancies come along in
(36:15):
the meantime.
So it's stalled a little bitokay brilliant, so yes I
desperately want to get some ofthis work published.
Some of the guys and ladies havebasically gone back out into
the fire service, have gotreally good dissertations that I
would like to sort of jointlyget published somewhere with
them as well.
So some of them getting back intouch.
(36:37):
If I've lost touch with them,there's definitely information
that needs to be put out there.
Speaker 1 (36:43):
Yeah, I think, just having spoken to a few of my
guests and them having gonethrough the MSc and stuff, then
we've got into some of theirdissertations and I think, oh,
some of that's really useful andinteresting and it's just a
shame that we need to, as thiswhole intention of this podcast
really is to try and get themessage and that education out
there and try and get rid ofsome of the myths and understand
(37:05):
fire behaviour and understandfire investigation a bit better.
Speaker 2 (37:09):
Absolutely, absolutely.
I was trying to tot up before Ispoke to you.
I think I've had 30 fireofficers on the MSC.
I've had about just shy of 90people altogether.
Increasingly, though, it wasquite a lot of young graduates
We'd always get new graduatesand quite a few international
students very high calibreinternational students from the
(37:31):
Middle East and the Far East inparticular, really top people,
some of whom again did wonderfulresearch that we need to get
published.
Sadly, since COVID, the lastintake of fire officers was in
2020.
So they hit COVID year and then, since then, we've had no fire
officers on the course and thenumbers just dwindle, which I
(37:54):
hate to say, but that's one ofthe reasons I was happy to go
was we just weren't seeingpeople on the Masters course and
I thought, well, they're goingto shut it if they've got them.
Speaker 1 (38:03):
Did you have many CSIs come through?
Speaker 2 (38:05):
Oh, one or two.
We didn't get many CSIs.
We got a couple of people fromthe insurance sector, two or
three of those.
The one CSI I can remember wasJim Egan.
He joined a company called GBBwho are based in Preston now a
lot of vehicle crash stuff butthen he left there and actually
went back to CSI work in the endbecause he was offered a very
(38:28):
nice post Devon and Cornwall sohe saw out the last couple of
years before he retired nicelydown in Cornwall.
You can see his point inCornwall, jim had been a CSI.
I can't remember any others,but no, mostly fire service
personnel and graduates, eitherforensic graduates or on various
(38:48):
fire courses fire engineeringor one of the related fire
courses.
Yeah, so yeah, about 90 peopleall told 30 odd fire officers.
So that's not bad.
Speaker 1 (39:00):
Yeah, I mean there's a lot of research there, isn't
there.
There's a lot of dissertationsthere.
Speaker 2 (39:05):
With the demise of the.
Once I've gone, I don't knowwhat they're going to do,
because well, I was itWolverhampton.
Theirs isn't running anymore.
In terms of mastered modules, Imean Cranfield's, the obvious
one, but they at the momentaren't, to the best of my
knowledge, doing a practicalfire investigation bit.
Speaker 1 (39:23):
They might be just starting, I'm not sure yeah, I
mean the one that I ran for acouple years.
We went down to Hampshire anddid a live burn there and then
dug that out in a not dissimilarto yours, but we didn't have
the electric hooked up well, sowe couldn't do any kind of map
or anything.
So there is a practical.
But I know I think lucy pinkardis one of the guests she works
for if I know she was running itafter me and mary jane hardy.
(39:46):
But I think the two modulesthat I kind of set up, which was
forensic and fire engineeringmodule and fire and explosion
investigation, I think they'rechoosing not to run that as well
.
So I think they're probablysuffering the same as the rest.
Speaker 2 (39:58):
I don't remember Cranfield being on the list of
people in trouble, but I haven'tseen the full list.
But yeah, he's a big problem inhigher education at the minute.
But I actually worry now thatwe're in a bit of a crisis with
fire investigation education inthe UK.
We've got the Level 5 courses,which are brilliant.
In fact, I used to run one ofthose as well.
(40:20):
From 2014, we also did a levelfive fire investigation course
at UCLan.
We'd only run it once a year,typically twice if we were lucky
, and it was meant to be runningthis week but I had to cancel
it for obvious reasons thatweren't going.
We did quite a lot of those,though not everybody came out of
(40:43):
it with the skills for justicepart because it was kind of
double badged.
You got a university bit andthen if you did the additional
work yeah, that's right,additional papers you had to do
and send us evidence of yourback at the fire brigade,
mentored fire scenes or scenesyou've done yourself afterwards
(41:05):
then you would get the skillsfor justice accreditation as
well I mean I know garden isstill running there for level
five.
Speaker 1 (41:13):
I think lee asprey, I think he's just started up on
the level five side.
Upper t side, yeah, and I thinkmorton and the marsh fire
service college they obviouslystill run the level five.
Side up at teeside, yeah, and Ithink morton and the marsh fire
service college they obviouslystill run their level five, but
they're all slightly tailoreddifferent, aren't they?
I think I mean I did thegardeners course way way back in
2005 as well.
Yeah not particularly biased inone way, but to me that was a
brilliant course.
Yeah, so if you are looking foreducation, there are still
(41:35):
people out there.
But yeah, I think in terms ofthe msc wise for specialists, it
does seem to be dying out,which is a shame and we're right
at the point where we've gotiso 17 020 hanging over us where
there isn't it?
Speaker 2 (41:51):
well, and there should be an expectation anyway
that people do continuingprofessional development and try
and get more educated.
There's obviously csi trainerout there, which is I always try
and promote to people throughthe I, double, ai and so on, but
I've always told my studentsabout it.
I'm not sure however many ofthem actually do the modules in
(42:14):
it.
Speaker 1 (42:14):
Yeah, I mean again, I'm a member of the I doubleI
both, and UK AFI as well.
But yeah, I think it'sfantastic.
But CFI trainers is great, youknow it's fantastic.
It is by its very natureAmericanized and some of the
modules are a bit more Americanbiased, if you like, in that
sense their systems are bits andpieces and their methods and
their legal kind of framework.
(42:34):
But it is a fantastic sort ofresource, I think.
But I think that's the problemwith it at the minute is in,
certainly in the uk.
I mean, some people are.
I know individuals from jensenhughes for example, some, yeah,
jensen hughes now who are cfiaccredited.
So if I fire investigators thensome people are level five,
some people are chartered fireas charters for fire
(42:55):
investigation.
It seems a bit of a hodgepodgereally and, and quite rightly,
like you say, with iso kind oflooming over our head and the
necessary cpd that's going to berequired, for that does seem to
be a bit messy at the minuteand it doesn't seem to have a,
there's not a direct path.
But then I guess as well that'skind of indicative of all our
(43:15):
backgrounds we're all from verydifferent backgrounds.
Doesn't seem to be one kind ofroutine.
You can be an engineer chemist.
Speaker 2 (43:22):
It's quite remarkable the different backgrounds
people have.
Really it's a difficult one,but it does worry me quite a lot
that just we got to thiscritical time and I'm walking
away from university of centrallancashire and kai boshing their
course potentially and who elseis out there doing it.
(43:42):
It's really difficult.
I don't know what we're goingto do.
Speaker 1 (43:46):
Well, steve, it's been absolutely fascinating
listening to you.
Unfortunately, sadly, we'recoming to the end of the time.
I'd love to have you back onagain, and now you're not going
to be with the university.
Hopefully you'll have a bitmore time.
But just top tips or any kindof always give every guest.
Is there anything you wanted tosort of get across today, any
kind of top tips, learningoutcomes or anything like that
for a new fire investigator orfor those already in the field?
Speaker 2 (44:07):
I think the one I always tell everybody is I think
several people have said it andin fact it used to be mick
gardner's conference title whenhe ran conferences it burned to
learn is what called live learn,pass it on, but same principle.
I learned so much over theyears by setting things on fire
and running the courses because,I mean, I've been doing fire
(44:31):
investigation teaching for 23,24 years now.
Every time we do room burns andcar burns, we are learning as
well and sometimes seeing somesurprising events or fire
development or fires notdeveloping like you wanted them
to.
But also, if you're going to goto court and say something like
(44:53):
your theory about you dropped acigarette and it set fire to
the petrol, that doesn doesn'twork.
Well, I always say put yourmoney where your mouth is, or,
in this case, put your mouthwhere your money is.
I always demonstrate smokingover a can of petrol on every
course I've ever done Well sinceabout 2003, when I first did it
(45:14):
for a murder case.
People in court and again Ithink another guest has said
this get their idea of fire fromwatching TV and watching the
movies, where it's bright,orange flames, no smoke and
people running through a room atflashover with no breathing
apparatus and their turnout coatundone to rescue a baby when
they're being incinerated andthey've kind of stopped doing it
(45:38):
now but plenty of action moviesshowed the cigarette dropped
into the petrol.
Well, if you're going to tell ajury that it doesn't happen, do
it, make a video and show them.
I once volunteered to do itlive at a trial and asked the
judge if we could take everyoneout to the car park.
He declined, and so I said well, I've got this video on my
(45:59):
memory stick, so we showed himthat instead.
Speaker 1 (46:02):
It's amazing as well.
I think I did a review for ukpolice force.
I showed the sio, just showedthem a couple of videos, and
those two videos kind of reallygot the point across that I was
trying to make in the sense ofthe witnesses counts, the, the
suspects account and stuff, etc.
Etc.
I don't want to go too far intoit, but it clearly showed that
one was correct and one wasincorrect.
(46:23):
It's amazing.
The visual you can describe itas much as you like, but it
tends often to people are muchmore.
Juries, are much more open to avisual demonstration rather
than you just telling themthey'll believe it when they see
it.
Speaker 2 (46:36):
I guess is the way to go, I suppose another thing is
there are times when I've donefire reconstruction tests,
partly to demonstrate thehypothesis but partly also to
drum into the court just whathappens when you do something
like pour petrol through aletterbox but I brought a court
(46:56):
to tears showing them video firereconstruction of me pouring
petrol through the letterbox ina murder case and they had to
have an adjournment becauseeveryone was so upset, which
sounds terrible.
But that was a win for gettingthe guy convicted.
Well, actually getting threepeople convicted on that one, it
(47:17):
has a a massive impact If youcan show people just how little
time the people in the househave to get out, or just what
exactly it means when you pourlighter fluid on a sleeping
person and setting them on fire.
It has a huge impact and Ithink it should not be
underestimated the power ofproving your point with a visual
(47:39):
demonstration Burn to learn.
Speaker 1 (47:42):
Yeah, fantastic, Thanks, obviously.
One last question, Steve, whichhas come to me the dummy, the
mannequin.
Are you taking that with you oris that yours?
Speaker 2 (47:50):
Yes, I built it when I was at the Forensic Science
Service, rescued it from beingthrown in a skip when the lab
closed and I've used it forvarious dissertation projects
since and a couple of man onfire cases consultancy since
I've been at the universitycurrently in my loft needing a
bit of a sanding down because itgot used for some flammability
(48:11):
of clothing with emollient oil,emollient cream, research.
I didn't clean it up after that, so it's a little bit the worse
for wear, but it's still goingstrong.
Speaker 1 (48:22):
Send me a picture of it I'd love to see a picture.
We'll put it on the podcastit's looking a bit sad now.
Speaker 2 (48:26):
I mean, I've presented conference
presentations about it in thepast, but that's another one I
need to get published.
Actually it's some it's my workon that.
I built a couple for mickgardner actually I don't know
okay, if that's, oh yeah okay,yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1 (48:39):
Fantastic, all right, well, thanks ever so much,
steve.
I really appreciate it.
I'm really sorry that I have tokind of cut you off, but I try
to no, that's okay, we've beennearly over an hour now already,
so that's fantastic.
But thanks ever so much.
Really appreciate you coming on, delighted to have been invited
(49:01):
.
Thank you very much.
All right, thanks so much.
Cheers, mate.
Thank you, hey.
Thank you for listening to csion fire.
Please don't forget to like,subscribe and suggest future
topics on our web page.
Remember factor non-verbal.
Take care, good hunting.
I hope to see you on the nextone.
Cheers.
Hi, welcome to CSI on Fire, the podcast that takes
you behind the scenes of thefire investigation community.
I'm your host, mike Moulden,and episode after episode, we'll
attempt to excavate the oftendifficult but always fascinating
world of the fire investigator.
Okay, welcome to CSI on Fire,your fire investigation podcast.
(00:27):
I've got a fantastic guest ontoday.
He's very, very busy at thistime of year, so I really
appreciate him coming on.
Steve Andrews, welcome to thepodcast.
Thanks very much for coming on.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
Thank you very much, Mike.
I'm glad to be here.
Speaker 1 (00:39):
Great.
Thanks very much.
I really do.
I know you're busy this time ofyear with MSc graduates and
bits and pieces and marking, butI really appreciate you coming
on Tell us how you've ended upon the podcast.
Give us some details about your30 plus years in fire
investigation.
Speaker 2 (00:53):
I think, like a lot of people, I fell into it by
complete accident.
I had never intended to do itI'm only in fire investigation
because I never got to do what Ireally wanted to do since I was
a kid which was become a doctor.
So I flunked my a-levels,didn't get into med school.
A bizarre chain of eventshappened.
So I've been doing a bit of umvoluntary nursing work up until
(01:16):
then to get ready med school,and so I thought I'll try nurse,
like the hospital environmentand I'd missed a recruitment
round for training for becominga student nurse.
So they said oh yeah, well,have you, there's always a place
for someone in nursing.
And I got put straight into alocked forensic ward in a
psychiatric hospital.
(01:37):
Some very dangerous men yeah,we had people that either hadn't
quite made it to the BroadmoorSpecial Hospital or had come
from it to a less securehospital.
So that was a bit of a rudeawakening.
There were quite a fewbiosetters in that lot.
I can tell you I really enjoyedit actually.
(01:58):
But the clinical psychologistsaid you know what?
Don't be a nurse, you'll alwaysbe bitter about not being a
doctor.
Go to university and dosomething and maybe try and get
in as a graduate.
So I went off and did a jointhonors zoology and psychology
degree because very interestedin human behavior and so on, and
really enjoyed that.
(02:19):
Never got into medical schoolsecond time around, tried for a
sort of neuroscience PhD anddidn't make that.
And then a mate of mine saidthere's an amazing master's
degree course at Cranfield atthe minute where you get six
hours of flying lessons as partof the course and what it was a
strange master's calledbioaeronautics, which in
(02:42):
layman's term, if I said, aerialcrop spraying, but the science
of it.
We were all into the kind ofoutdoor pursuits that could get
you killed in an instant.
And aviation well, not flying,but well, yeah, a bit of hand
gliding, parachuting, diving,caving, climbing, as I say,
anything where one falls, moveand you're a goner.
(03:03):
So off we went and sure enough,we got our six hours flying
lessons and learned all aboutaircraft and sprays in
particular and this is wherethis is my lead in learning a
lot about water sprays andmisting systems and all this
kind of thing for killing pestsand applying herbicides and
(03:25):
forest firefighting was in thereas well a bit as part of them.
Fuel and oil spill clear up andso on, but when it got towards
dissertation time we'reapproached by a guy from the
been in the air accidentinvestigation branch.
I was there in 1988 and theManchester Air Tours disaster
had happened in 1985, which wasthe airliner that had an engine
(03:50):
blow out on its takeoff runAugust 85.
And the trap was basically frompart of the engine blowing out,
hit a fuel tank, ignited behindthe engine and so the pilot
stopped his run.
He was in nil wind conditions,two knots or something, but
there was enough that when hestopped the plane it blew the
(04:11):
flames onto the side of theaircraft and as they tried to
evacuate the fire burned its wayin and killed 55 people.
And a chap tried in theaftermath of it, a fella by the
name of Jim Steele, who I don'tthink with us any longer.
He came up with an idea forputting fine water mists sprays
(04:34):
inside an aircraft to keep thepassengers alive in the event of
an aircraft accident fire.
So bearing in mind thatsurvivable air accidents
generally happen either ontakeoff or landing rather than
falling out of the sky from agreat height and you need to
keep people alive long enoughfor the fire trucks to get there
.
And he did three ad hoc testswhich looked like they were
(04:58):
promising, and then poor fellahad a heart attack.
Had a heart attack, so the chapfrom ai, or had been with aib,
approached these studentsinterested in spray crops.
Had anyone interested in fire?
Oh, that sounds interesting andeventually dangerous.
That's right up my street and Iended up at the end of the
runway, because it's anoperational airfield, in a what
(05:21):
had been a munitions bunker thatby coincidence happened to be
the same shape inside as a, Ithink, an Airbus with aircraft
seats in it, left over fromcrash testing, lighting aviation
fuel fires, with the airportfire brigade there who were
having a whale of a time,because not much happens on an
(05:41):
airfield normally.
Not much happens on an airfieldnormally and I'd approached the
fire research station because Ididn't have a clue how to
monitor the fire and what to do.
So I'd contacted them and theysaid oh, yeah, come and talk to
us, we'll lend you somethermocouples and a data logger.
So I went and told them what Iwas planning and they lent me
(06:01):
the equipment, showed me how touse it, said, oh, send us your
dissertation at the end, which Iduly did, and they said oh,
come and have a chat when youbring all the equipment back.
So I went and had a chat, teaand biscuits, talked about my
MSC and at the end they said sowhen can you start?
And I said, oh, and they saidyou've just preempted a joint
(06:25):
Civil Aviation Authority FederalAviation Administration project
onto this whole thing.
You've basically done theleading work.
We'll employ you as soon as youcan start Monday if you want as
a contractor while we do yourthree months to get your civil
service vetting done, months toget your civil service vetting
(06:45):
done.
And the next thing I knew I'mdoing fire research at
Borehamwood and in particular atthe Cardington hangar which
back then was the biggest firelab in the world.
It was the old R101 airshiphangar.
And there's an irony therebecause of course the R101, like
the Hindenburg, caught fire andkilled everyone.
I was setting fire to a Boeing707 fuselage for a year or so in
there and we were doing bigfires.
Speaker 1 (07:08):
I remember as part of my cram fields.
I mean, I was later, a decadelater than you, but we still
used to go to the hangar for avisit because they were still
doing well, I don't know if theystill doing fire research there
, but no, we used to go theresadly BRE well, I say sadly got
privatised in the late 1990s,became BRE Global eventually and
(07:29):
a few years after that theCardington hangar became too
expensive for them to upkeep andit got sold.
Speaker 2 (07:38):
I think at the moment it certainly was a film studio.
I don't know if it still is.
Oh yeah, it had been used tostore cars for a while from some
factory.
I mean, they had everythingthere.
The last time I visited it,which was on a European network
of forensic science institutes,forensic fire investigation,
they had six sessions where fireinvestigators went along,
(08:00):
forensic scientists from aroundEurope, and did the kind of fire
experiments they wanted to do,but the police wouldn't pay for.
We did Europe and did the kindof fire experiments they wanted
to do, but the police wouldn'tpay for.
We did explosions.
There was a lot of petrol bombthrowing and room fires.
They had a six-storey hotelbuilt inside that hangar at that
time, full-on hotel staircases,the lot and we were given a
(08:21):
room to do repeat fire testing.
And they had an eight-storybuilding at the back which could
be turned into variouslyoffices or multi-story car park.
Big, big fire tests there, highrack storage systems.
It was an amazing place.
I loved working at cardington onthe big fires.
But after I got involved withthe European Space Agency
(08:43):
project, the space station, wedid fire tests for that with
Martin Schiff, ram Knows, but Ibuilt a rig.
I designed and built a rig sothat we could do floating fire
experiments in the Vomit Cometand I never could fly.
I was really disappointed.
Martin flew in it and PeterFardell who was one of the fire
(09:03):
chemistry guys.
Most people were sick as a doginside that thing.
I was due to fly on the nextround of tests but then personal
circumstances changed.
My wife's job moved toYorkshire and and at that point
I got a civil service transferto the health and safety
(09:24):
laboratory at Buxton, part ofthe HSE.
So suddenly I changed fromdoing all this fire research and
I'd been to a few fireinvestigations at that point.
As a sort of lead-in to doingthey took me to one and I loved
it.
They thought, all right, we'llbring Steve next time and I went
to the HSE, the Health andSafety Lab, and got involved in
(09:47):
a lot more investigative work.
Then we did do some scene workbut a lot of it was doing
reconstruction experiments totry and solve how things have
happened.
I was mostly working on dustexplosions.
I was doing big scale dustexplosions.
I was doing big scale dustexplosions.
I had a nine story pair ofbucket elevator rigs.
(10:09):
I was doing explosions inbucket elevator towers to a
height of nine stories.
It was like the space shuttletaking off when I set one of
those off.
I'd be delighted when theaction committee from Buxton
would ring up to complain thatfluorescent light tubes had
fallen out in people's housesand windows had shaken, which
would happen when there was atemperature inversion or when we
(10:31):
had flat cloud, and the shockwave would bounce off the cloud
so I studied that for seven oddyears.
And then a job advert came upfor the Forensic Science Service
who were trying specifically torecruit fire investigators.
(10:51):
I think it was the first andonly time they ever did it.
This was in 98.
And they took me from Buxton.
I went to the Chorley lab inLancashire and a lady called
Helen Rosser, who I think was afire engineer at the time, got
taken on at the FIU in Londonand I think she's with Burgoyne.
I think she went to Burgoyne noHawkins actually, I think she
(11:15):
was Hawkins okay and suddenly Iwas full-time fire investigation
so I'd had to do my, you know,the proper training.
So I did a gardener course andI did the Morton in the Marsh
course.
Within a year of qualifying.
I was teaching fireinvestigation on the Morton in
the Marsh course did right upuntil the demise of the FSS.
(11:37):
It was perfect job for me.
Speaker 1 (11:39):
How many years were you there at the FSS?
I was there from 1998 till 2010.
Speaker 2 (11:46):
So 12 years full-on fire investigation.
I got involved towards the endwith firearms examination but I
didn't quite.
They closed our lab before Igot to qualify as a reporting
officer.
I was starting to get involvedwith firearms casework as well.
There's quite a lot ofsimilarity when you go out to
scenes, a bit like collisioninvestigation.
(12:07):
There's quite a fewsimilarities.
Speaker 1 (12:09):
Yeah, very similar.
I mean, it's forensicengineering kind of, at the end
of the day, isn't it?
It's under that kind ofumbrella.
When you were at the FSS, whatsort were you dealing with?
Obviously, mostly fatality andpolice work.
Speaker 2 (12:21):
Yes, it was almost exclusively.
There were a few colleaguesthat did criminal defence work
as well and kind of what we'dcall a Chinese wall in so that
nobody spoke to anyone else.
Towards the end of my timethere I applied to join the team
that did that, but I neveractually picked up any defence
casework.
So it was all police work, alot of criminal work, and I
(12:45):
think you'll have heard fromEmma Wilson I listened to her
the other day an awful lot offatal fires.
To begin with we did a bigrange of fires, so we'd go to
industrial fires and things likethat as well, but with police
contracts and so on iteventually became much more
focused towards fatalities.
I somehow ended up specialisingin what I would call man-on-fire
(13:09):
cases, or, more often than not,woman-on-fire cases, some of
which would be.
A lot of them were murders,some were suicides, a few.
There were a few accidentalones, but the majority were
deliberately set by a killer orthe victim themselves.
This is where I ended upbuilding my fire test dummy.
(13:31):
I built a wooden mannequin todo reconstruction work, one of
the things that I always andthis is something, when you come
to top tips, which is sort ofmentioned at the end.
I think a few people have saidburn to learn, but wherever
possible, do the test, do thereconstruction test, demonstrate
your hypothesis by settingthings on fire.
(13:53):
And because of my background insetting things on fire and
blowing them up, I wascompletely tuned into that from
the word go.
And we were really fortunate atChorley because we shared a site
with Lancashire Fire and RescueServices Training Centre.
So if I wanted to do a firetest I literally walked out of
the gate and across and knockedon the door and said, hey, can I
(14:15):
do some fire tests?
And they were always willing tohelp me.
So I did full-scale room,staircase, hall stairs, landing,
reconstruction, fire tests, allsorts of room tests, wheelie,
been against the front door test, all manner of tests and a lot
of fire test dummy experiments.
(14:35):
The fire test dummy was made outof wood so that you could look
at the burn pattern, sand itdown, do another one, sand it
down another one and look atdifferent postures.
We worked out a way to do a manor person moving around on fire
by hanging it basically from ascaffolding pole strapped to a
(14:56):
ladder on the back of a fireappliance and driving along at a
kind of walking pace with itsfeet just touching the ground
and it would walk, its feetwould trip touching the ground
and it would walk, its feetwould trip on the ground and it
would appear to walk.
And I had these metal strings,which were actually bike brake
cable, cobbled together.
(15:16):
I could pull the arms up tocover its face or be held out in
front of it.
We did some tests where weactually moved it around to see
the fire as it moves around thebody.
Speaker 1 (15:28):
Do you think we've lost?
I mean, I remember I was atLambeth for a little while in
physics and metallurgy oraccident investigation and I
remember going up to variousplaces and throw it on the skid
pan and car we would throw tosee if a ball bearing could
smash a window and cause injury,that sort of stuff and throw in
the dummy off of a top of abuilding, actual, real sort of
(15:50):
test.
Do you think nationally, withthe shutting of the fss there's,
we don't seem to do that burnto learn type thing.
That seems to be restricted.
I think more and more now.
Or would you agree with that ornot?
Speaker 2 (16:01):
I suspect I hope more is going on than we hear about,
but because everything'sprivatised, people just don't
talk about it so much, and theinsurance industry, I imagine,
do quite a bit.
Again, I hope so, but againit's all client confidential
then.
So, very little comes out.
We're not very good in thiscountry at publicising case
(16:25):
studies.
We don't publish them in firejournals or forensic journals so
much as other countries do.
If you've had an interestingcase, and in the Forensic
Science Service we were neverparticularly encouraged to try
and publish work.
In fact, one of the criticisms,particularly after the Forensic
Science Service closed, was thatthere was all this knowledge
(16:46):
that was in-house and lots ofinternal research documents that
had never been put intoscientific journals.
So a lot of that informationhas ultimately ended up probably
having to be repeated.
I'm as guilty of that now asprobably I ever was, because
there's so much that I've wantedto publish since being at the
university.
(17:07):
I never had a chance.
We just never get any headspaceto publish anything.
I managed to get one paperpublished on the transfer of
ignitable liquid residues frombag to bag through nylon bags if
they're stored in closeproximity.
Nylon bags if they're stored inclose proximity.
We got that published myselfand a master's student who's in
(17:27):
the UK Association of FireInvestigators, Philippa Belcher.
But other than that it's beenvery difficult to get work out
just because out there, yeahwell, I think as well.
Speaker 1 (17:37):
I mean, we've come into a sort of university period
now, I think as well.
With the uk afi, the conferenceis coming up on monday actually
, although this podcast will goout a few weeks later, but we
have a few case studies there.
But it's limited, isn't it?
And I think that's maybe alsoto do with the fam.
From a policing perspective, Igive a presentation about a fire
scene, a murder fire scenescene.
You have to seek permissionfrom the SIO, you have to seek
(18:00):
permission from the family andthat kind of stuff.
So I think, from a culturalpoint of view, I think the Brits
do tend to shy away from it alittle bit, in the sense of it's
about picking the audience andmaking sure the audience is
right for it.
I guess you mentioned EMPCthere as well earlier on.
I mean, they tend to do morestandards and it's kind of like
a European network of how thatworks.
But would you like to see moreresearch coming out?
(18:22):
Do you see a mechanism for thatkind of stuff to come out?
Speaker 2 (18:26):
They certainly get work published, but on the
continent people seem to getpublished more, I would argue.
Also in Scotland the NivenicDade managed to get a lot
published through the LeversversHume Forensic Science Institute
thing.
Yeah, university wise, it hasbeen a struggle.
I started at the universityshut down and by then I'd got
(18:48):
about 10 years of experiencealready with teaching, because I
was going to Morton in theMarsh once, if not more times, a
year, or by the time I wasthere, there we were the only
masters in fire investigationaround, because the one at
Anglia Ruskin or Anglia, whichhad been Anglia APU when had its
(19:09):
course Anglia PolytechnicUniversity, that one was shut
and then one appeared for two,three years perhaps at
Wolverhampton and then closed.
And then sort of my ambitionwas work being done that I could
make out, I think universitiesdoing undergraduate work.
But I didn't see much gettingpublished and, as I say, I'm as
(19:30):
guilty as anyone for not gettingthat done.
Speaker 1 (19:32):
Sure Most people will know you, steve, from UCLan, so
tell us all about UCLan and howthat came about and what you're
involved with in UCLan.
Speaker 2 (19:40):
UCLan is the city of central Lancashire, which has
its main campus in Preston,which is where I work, and I
became involved with thatactually before the forensic
science service closed down.
I was wanting to do firereconstruction tests in two
cases in fairly quick succession.
One was an accidental fire thatwas potentially going to lead
(20:02):
to a manslaughter case and theother was a murder of a family.
Petrol through the letterboxand I wanted toxic gas
monitoring doing, and somebodyat the fire brigade suggested I
contact the university becausethey had a team who did fire
toxicity work who might be ableto help, which indeed they did,
(20:25):
and so, once they knew me, I gotco-opted as an industry
specialist when they weresetting up a fire investigation
master's degree.
They tried to poach me a coupleof times, but I didn't want to
go, and then the governmentdecided to close down, first of
all, part of the ForensicScience Service and ultimately
(20:47):
all of it.
So they set up a situationwhere we had three competing
private companies who thegovernment had encouraged.
So there was Selmark ForensicServices, eurofins, which at
that time was called LGC, andKey Forensic Services, and the
(21:10):
government in 2010 decided itwould shut down three of the six
forensic labs Chorley, where Iworked, birmingham and Chepstone
and at the time they were goingto leave three open.
Ultimately, not long after Iactually left the forensic
science service, they decidedthey were going to close them
all and shut the whole thingdown.
(21:31):
But they were closing evidencetypes one by one in each lab,
and so I actually left theChorley lab in September 2010.
The lab closed in March 2011,so I left just before the final
closure of it and walkedstraight into a job at the
university as a lecturer in fireinvestigation on a new or new
(21:56):
master's degree, which had beenrunning in full-time mode for
about a year, and there was alsoa part-time variant of it,
which was actually a little bitdifferent, geared towards fire
brigade personnel that had beenrunning for perhaps two years
before I got there, I joined theuniversity and started teaching
(22:17):
.
I went to the university ratherthan private sector because at
the time the lab was closing, myson was only nine months old.
I felt that I wanted to becoming home at night to see him
grow up, rather than not knowingif I was going to end up at a
post-mortem at two o'clock inthe morning and then stay in a
hotel in Birmingham or Newcastleand then stay in a hotel in
(22:38):
Birmingham or Newcastle orsomething.
So I started teaching at thatpoint.
So we had a, as I say, afull-time version of a master's
degree in fire investigation anda part-time version.
I taught four of the six taughtmodules on the full-time one
and two of the modules.
Well, actually, to begin withonly one of the modules on the
(23:00):
part-time one, which was thepractical fire investigation
module.
So the practical fireinvestigation module is very
similar in many ways to thelevel five courses for audience
members who, plenty of whom,will have done one of those
where we do practical live roomburns.
(23:20):
We would also do vehicle firesas well.
We would start off by givingthe students a vehicle fire
between sort of one car, betweentwo, to examine the car fires
we set up mainly as a teambuilding exercise getting your
hands dirty for those thatweren't already doing fire
investigation and as an evidencerecovery exercise.
(23:43):
So we'd always put lots ofuseful things in the car.
So we might set one up, forexample, as a hit and run,
another one as a armed robbery,getaway car being burned out,
that kind of thing.
So we'd have cartridge casesand weapons and all sorts of
things spirited away in them andeverything from boxes and
(24:03):
matches, cigarette packets,things like that, that to amaze
the students when they actuallyfound them, they hadn't all
burned away, and car fires arereally quite hard to excavate
because everything weldstogether.
We also which I think made ussomewhat, I think, unique was we
would also give the students acar to set on fire themselves,
(24:26):
which, apart from being greatfun and an opportunity for a
football squad style team photowith a burning car in the
background was, uh, showed themhow either easy or difficult it
is to set a vehicle on fire by avariety of methods that local
arsonists might use, or yourperson wanting to do a
(24:46):
fraudulent car arson forinsurance money, having a go at
setting it on fire and gettingit wrong, that sort of thing and
also to witness the speed atwhich the fire grows, the noise,
the sound of the airbagsexploding and the tires
exploding, because that givesyou an idea of what information
from witnesses might be tellingyou, because people often may
(25:09):
exaggerate or say they heardexplosions or think they heard
gunshots or a bomb going off allthese sort of thingsave them a
good grounding in that.
And then the room fires.
On a typical year we might burnfour rooms one month and then,
if we had a good cohort ofpeople, we might do another one
and possibly even a third roundas well.
(25:31):
And we would always make surethe rooms were not just nicely
furnished but made to look asthough they were properly lived
in.
So there'd be half a pizza on aplate under the sofa and drunk
cups of tea and cigaretteseverywhere and all that kind of
stuff as realistic as possible.
(25:51):
Yeah, and always power them upwith electricity, Okay that's
good you don't have to do theelectrical examination and the
arc mapping.
We always have a door on thefront as well.
Not just we do use the shippingcontainers with a window cut in
the side, but we would alwaysmake sure it had a door on the
(26:11):
front and a normal house door,not least so that we can squirt
petrol through the letterbox orshoot a firework in or something
like that and do variations ofdoor open, door closed and that
sort of thing and have aconsumer unit on the outside.
So they have to examine allthat and so on.
So make it as realistic aspossible.
The other thing is that becauseof my other key module, which
(26:34):
was the forensic analysis module, if they found ignitable liquid
residues or suspected inelectrical appliance of starting
the fire or wanted to rule itout or look at a bit of wiring,
they would have to bring backtheir exhibits to the lab,
suitably packaged, and then theywould do the gas chromatography
(26:57):
, mass spectrometry, and have towrite a report on that as well.
Or they might do electricalexamination using microscopes,
either an ordinary optical oneor a lovely fancy digital one
that produces lovely stackedimages.
Where everything's in focus andyou can move the image around
(27:21):
is where everything's in focusand you can move the image
around or even go to electronmicroscope and could examine
things on the electronmicroscope, even look at things
like the metal composition usingenergy dispersive x-ray with
the scanning electron microscope.
So they could do some seriousanalysis afterwards or do little
burn tests.
The two modules would knittogether very nicely.
That's always been the bestpart of it.
(27:42):
Now I get the fun of settingthings on fire and people have
to work out how I did it.
Why is the report at the end ofit?
So that's the master's degree.
I also would teach a bit onundergraduate courses.
Initially so much I'd do amodule on fire investigation for
third year fire engineering,but that was all lectures, no
(28:05):
practical, often to a class ofabout 80.
And some more specific forforensic students, some specific
parts of modules aboutignitable liquid residue
analysis primarily.
They would get a more firechemistry grounding I did also
because of the firearms stuffthat I'd done.
(28:26):
I would get involved in a bitof firearms teaching and
firearms related undergraddissertation projects as well.
Speaker 1 (28:33):
Andy coin was on.
I've had various people and youlook at certain organizations
or institutes etc, and they'vehad various people.
And you look at certainorganisations or institutes etc.
And they've all got a lot ofthem, particularly if they're
ex-fire service personnel.
I've got the UCLAN and they allknow you.
One thing I wanted to do waswhat's happening next, steve?
What's happening I think yourtenure's coming to an end now
and what's happening next foryou?
Speaker 2 (28:53):
It's all a bit unfortunate really.
The University of CentralLancashire, along with about 50
others 45, 50 other universities, has been this year in a very
serious financial crisis kind ofperfect storm of freezing of
the university fees that we have, cost of living crisis, fuel
(29:15):
oil and gas prices going throughthe roof courtesy of the
Russians invading first Crimeaand then Ukraine, covid and all
of this sort of thing.
Covid had a big impact and alsowithout trying not to get too
political, especially at thistime in Britain immigration
(29:35):
policy, especially post COVID-19.
There's been a big reduction ininternational students coming
to universities and it came to ahead this year and we had a
sudden announcement at eastertime that our university needed
to lose about 165 people veryquickly by the end of july.
(29:57):
Volunteers, please, and if yougo voluntarily, we'll give you
an enhancement on yourredundancy package.
Well, I turned 60 in October,so financially it made perfect
sense.
So I took the deal and I'mmoving on.
Since I've been at theuniversity, I've been doing
(30:18):
consultancy work through FireInvestigations UK.
That was set up by Dr PeterMancy and John Galvin and Chris
Clark.
John Galvin was London FireBrigade, as well as Peter Chris
Mark West Yorkshire, and I'm oneof the associates.
There are about half a dozen orso of us who are associates and
(30:39):
those three are the partners,and they enabled me to do
consultancy work whilst doing myfull-time university work,
which probably helps to explainwhy I never had any time to
publish anything, but never mind.
I've picked up over the yearsforensic casework, which, since
about 2018, has been almostexclusively criminal defence
(31:03):
casework, though I did pick uppolice casework before that and
a little bit of the insurancecasework.
The snag with insurancecasework was that I rarely had
an opportunity to go out to afire scene unless it happened in
the middle of summer, when Iwas in the middle of teaching.
I couldn't just sort of notturn up at a lecture because I
(31:25):
was going to a fire.
So I'm leaving the universityand all being well, picking up
more consultancy work on theinsurance and, probably for the
time being anyway, defense casework and if I'm lucky, I'll pick
up some teaching, because I dolike the teaching, and if I can
(31:45):
pick up short courses here andthere, then great well, there
you go if anyone needs any shortcourses.
Speaker 1 (31:50):
Steve, you've been in the industry for a long time.
You've got a massive amount ofexperience and the fact I've not
really said that much todayjust shows you've got a massive
amount of experience and I'dlike to get into.
You mentioned early on aboutfire starters and psychology.
Is that something that you'restill sort of interested in, or
is that an area?
Speaker 2 (32:08):
I was always interested in it.
I never did much in the way ofbecause I'm not a psychologist
as such.
I never got into doing any workon it other than looking at.
We did do some work with amaster's student when I first
started looking at what I calllady on fire cases.
A part of that actually was tosee whether my impression of how
(32:31):
many of these were going on wasled by an unconscious bias on
my part, because I was thinkingI've seen an awful lot of these.
Is it widespread or am I justgetting a lot of them?
So my student had a project onit and it turned out that I was
seeing a lot of them, not manypeople.
Luckily, in this country we'reseeing as many.
(32:54):
So I suppose that's a blessingwhere it's a curse because it
just means I've seen an awfullot of them.
I've always been interested inthe human behaviour side of
fires and why people fail toescape, why people set fires.
One of my other modules wasabout human behaviour in fire
and witness reliability andcognitive interviewing and
(33:21):
although I was never trained inthat, I had help from a police
lecturer who used to teach itwhen he was in the police, but
at least telling people about itand how not to do it, how not
to don't be an interrogator anddon't do what I've just been
doing for the last however long,which is talk non-stop.
Speaker 1 (33:36):
I have to do what you , I love guests like you,
because it's easy for me,because the experience and
everything just shines throughreally.
And the other thing thatconcerns me I guess steve is
with you moving on is that Iknow that the number.
I'm not entirely sure how manyyou've had through over the
years you've been there, but Iknow that a lot of dissertations
have been undertook, somereally good sort of interesting
(33:56):
research been undertaken.
So what's going to happen withall those?
Are they still going to beavailable in the library or
whatever?
Speaker 2 (34:03):
what I want to try and do is, through some of my
colleagues who are staying atthe university, is try and get
some of them published.
The university always wantpeople to go for the big guns
like science and justice,justice, yeah, journal of
forensic sciences or forensicscience international or fire
materials and that sort of, forthe big guns like Science and
Justice, journal of ForensicSciences or Forensic Science
International or Fire andMaterials and that sort of thing
(34:25):
.
I'm personally more interestedin telling the people that need
to know.
I think by time I startedtrying to get some of them into
the UK AFI's journal, which Isuspect might be my first port
of call.
But I would like to, not leastfor my colleagues at the
(34:48):
university, try and get some ofthem into publications which
have more of a hit from theuniversity's point of view yeah,
it gets the information tothose who need it really.
That's on my list of things totry and get done quickly.
I've got a couple in thepipeline that I want to get done
very soon.
One is about portable gaschromatography mass spectrometry
.
The late great John De Haanmanaged to get some work he'd
(35:09):
done published in the Fire andArson Investigator and he and I
it turned out I bumped into himat a conference once and we were
both working on the same thing.
It turned out I bumped into himat a conference once and we
were both working on the samething, so we shared some of our
results on these portable GCMSinstruments and the one we were
looking at, which is the oneavailable to fire services in
(35:30):
the UK, wasn't doing very well,and the one he was looking at
was doing quite well.
It turns out that I'd done somead hoc tests with the one he was
using, but I didn't know whichone it was until he published
and that looks very promising.
But it would require fire andrescue services for their DIM
vehicles detection,identification, monitoring
(35:51):
vehicles to upgrade from theexisting one to this newer one
which is better.
So I want to get some of thatwork done.
My former student, ellie gillat, who ellie honeyball as she was
when she joined.
She's in south york's fire andrescue group managing her, so
we're trying to get thatprobably somewhere.
We're working on it and thenthe redundancies come along in
(36:15):
the meantime.
So it's stalled a little bitokay brilliant, so yes I
desperately want to get some ofthis work published.
Some of the guys and ladies havebasically gone back out into
the fire service, have gotreally good dissertations that I
would like to sort of jointlyget published somewhere with
them as well.
So some of them getting back intouch.
(36:37):
If I've lost touch with them,there's definitely information
that needs to be put out there.
Speaker 1 (36:43):
Yeah, I think, just having spoken to a few of my
guests and them having gonethrough the MSc and stuff, then
we've got into some of theirdissertations and I think, oh,
some of that's really useful andinteresting and it's just a
shame that we need to, as thiswhole intention of this podcast
really is to try and get themessage and that education out
there and try and get rid ofsome of the myths and understand
(37:05):
fire behaviour and understandfire investigation a bit better.
Speaker 2 (37:09):
Absolutely, absolutely.
I was trying to tot up before Ispoke to you.
I think I've had 30 fireofficers on the MSC.
I've had about just shy of 90people altogether.
Increasingly, though, it wasquite a lot of young graduates
We'd always get new graduatesand quite a few international
students very high calibreinternational students from the
(37:31):
Middle East and the Far East inparticular, really top people,
some of whom again did wonderfulresearch that we need to get
published.
Sadly, since COVID, the lastintake of fire officers was in
2020.
So they hit COVID year and then, since then, we've had no fire
officers on the course and thenumbers just dwindle, which I
(37:54):
hate to say, but that's one ofthe reasons I was happy to go
was we just weren't seeingpeople on the Masters course and
I thought, well, they're goingto shut it if they've got them.
Speaker 1 (38:03):
Did you have many CSIs come through?
Speaker 2 (38:05):
Oh, one or two.
We didn't get many CSIs.
We got a couple of people fromthe insurance sector, two or
three of those.
The one CSI I can remember wasJim Egan.
He joined a company called GBBwho are based in Preston now a
lot of vehicle crash stuff butthen he left there and actually
went back to CSI work in the endbecause he was offered a very
(38:28):
nice post Devon and Cornwall sohe saw out the last couple of
years before he retired nicelydown in Cornwall.
You can see his point inCornwall, jim had been a CSI.
I can't remember any others,but no, mostly fire service
personnel and graduates, eitherforensic graduates or on various
(38:48):
fire courses fire engineeringor one of the related fire
courses.
Yeah, so yeah, about 90 peopleall told 30 odd fire officers.
So that's not bad.
Speaker 1 (39:00):
Yeah, I mean there's a lot of research there, isn't
there.
There's a lot of dissertationsthere.
Speaker 2 (39:05):
With the demise of the.
Once I've gone, I don't knowwhat they're going to do,
because well, I was itWolverhampton.
Theirs isn't running anymore.
In terms of mastered modules, Imean Cranfield's, the obvious
one, but they at the momentaren't, to the best of my
knowledge, doing a practicalfire investigation bit.
Speaker 1 (39:23):
They might be just starting, I'm not sure yeah, I
mean the one that I ran for acouple years.
We went down to Hampshire anddid a live burn there and then
dug that out in a not dissimilarto yours, but we didn't have
the electric hooked up well, sowe couldn't do any kind of map
or anything.
So there is a practical.
But I know I think lucy pinkardis one of the guests she works
for if I know she was running itafter me and mary jane hardy.
(39:46):
But I think the two modulesthat I kind of set up, which was
forensic and fire engineeringmodule and fire and explosion
investigation, I think they'rechoosing not to run that as well
.
So I think they're probablysuffering the same as the rest.
Speaker 2 (39:58):
I don't remember Cranfield being on the list of
people in trouble, but I haven'tseen the full list.
But yeah, he's a big problem inhigher education at the minute.
But I actually worry now thatwe're in a bit of a crisis with
fire investigation education inthe UK.
We've got the Level 5 courses,which are brilliant.
In fact, I used to run one ofthose as well.
(40:20):
From 2014, we also did a levelfive fire investigation course
at UCLan.
We'd only run it once a year,typically twice if we were lucky
, and it was meant to be runningthis week but I had to cancel
it for obvious reasons thatweren't going.
We did quite a lot of those,though not everybody came out of
(40:43):
it with the skills for justicepart because it was kind of
double badged.
You got a university bit andthen if you did the additional
work yeah, that's right,additional papers you had to do
and send us evidence of yourback at the fire brigade,
mentored fire scenes or scenesyou've done yourself afterwards
(41:05):
then you would get the skillsfor justice accreditation as
well I mean I know garden isstill running there for level
five.
Speaker 1 (41:13):
I think lee asprey, I think he's just started up on
the level five side.
Upper t side, yeah, and I thinkmorton and the marsh fire
service college they obviouslystill run the level five.
Side up at teeside, yeah, and Ithink morton and the marsh fire
service college they obviouslystill run their level five, but
they're all slightly tailoreddifferent, aren't they?
I think I mean I did thegardeners course way way back in
2005 as well.
Yeah not particularly biased inone way, but to me that was a
brilliant course.
Yeah, so if you are looking foreducation, there are still
(41:35):
people out there.
But yeah, I think in terms ofthe msc wise for specialists, it
does seem to be dying out,which is a shame and we're right
at the point where we've gotiso 17 020 hanging over us where
there isn't it?
Speaker 2 (41:51):
well, and there should be an expectation anyway
that people do continuingprofessional development and try
and get more educated.
There's obviously csi trainerout there, which is I always try
and promote to people throughthe I, double, ai and so on, but
I've always told my studentsabout it.
I'm not sure however many ofthem actually do the modules in
(42:14):
it.
Speaker 1 (42:14):
Yeah, I mean again, I'm a member of the I doubleI
both, and UK AFI as well.
But yeah, I think it'sfantastic.
But CFI trainers is great, youknow it's fantastic.
It is by its very natureAmericanized and some of the
modules are a bit more Americanbiased, if you like, in that
sense their systems are bits andpieces and their methods and
their legal kind of framework.
(42:34):
But it is a fantastic sort ofresource, I think.
But I think that's the problemwith it at the minute is in,
certainly in the uk.
I mean, some people are.
I know individuals from jensenhughes for example, some, yeah,
jensen hughes now who are cfiaccredited.
So if I fire investigators thensome people are level five,
some people are chartered fireas charters for fire
(42:55):
investigation.
It seems a bit of a hodgepodgereally and, and quite rightly,
like you say, with iso kind oflooming over our head and the
necessary cpd that's going to berequired, for that does seem to
be a bit messy at the minuteand it doesn't seem to have a,
there's not a direct path.
But then I guess as well that'skind of indicative of all our
(43:15):
backgrounds we're all from verydifferent backgrounds.
Doesn't seem to be one kind ofroutine.
You can be an engineer chemist.
Speaker 2 (43:22):
It's quite remarkable the different backgrounds
people have.
Really it's a difficult one,but it does worry me quite a lot
that just we got to thiscritical time and I'm walking
away from university of centrallancashire and kai boshing their
course potentially and who elseis out there doing it.
(43:42):
It's really difficult.
I don't know what we're goingto do.
Speaker 1 (43:46):
Well, steve, it's been absolutely fascinating
listening to you.
Unfortunately, sadly, we'recoming to the end of the time.
I'd love to have you back onagain, and now you're not going
to be with the university.
Hopefully you'll have a bitmore time.
But just top tips or any kindof always give every guest.
Is there anything you wanted tosort of get across today, any
kind of top tips, learningoutcomes or anything like that
for a new fire investigator orfor those already in the field?
Speaker 2 (44:07):
I think the one I always tell everybody is I think
several people have said it andin fact it used to be mick
gardner's conference title whenhe ran conferences it burned to
learn is what called live learn,pass it on, but same principle.
I learned so much over theyears by setting things on fire
and running the courses because,I mean, I've been doing fire
(44:31):
investigation teaching for 23,24 years now.
Every time we do room burns andcar burns, we are learning as
well and sometimes seeing somesurprising events or fire
development or fires notdeveloping like you wanted them
to.
But also, if you're going to goto court and say something like
(44:53):
your theory about you dropped acigarette and it set fire to
the petrol, that doesn doesn'twork.
Well, I always say put yourmoney where your mouth is, or,
in this case, put your mouthwhere your money is.
I always demonstrate smokingover a can of petrol on every
course I've ever done Well sinceabout 2003, when I first did it
(45:14):
for a murder case.
People in court and again Ithink another guest has said
this get their idea of fire fromwatching TV and watching the
movies, where it's bright,orange flames, no smoke and
people running through a room atflashover with no breathing
apparatus and their turnout coatundone to rescue a baby when
they're being incinerated andthey've kind of stopped doing it
(45:38):
now but plenty of action moviesshowed the cigarette dropped
into the petrol.
Well, if you're going to tell ajury that it doesn't happen, do
it, make a video and show them.
I once volunteered to do itlive at a trial and asked the
judge if we could take everyoneout to the car park.
He declined, and so I said well, I've got this video on my
(45:59):
memory stick, so we showed himthat instead.
Speaker 1 (46:02):
It's amazing as well.
I think I did a review for ukpolice force.
I showed the sio, just showedthem a couple of videos, and
those two videos kind of reallygot the point across that I was
trying to make in the sense ofthe witnesses counts, the, the
suspects account and stuff, etc.
Etc.
I don't want to go too far intoit, but it clearly showed that
one was correct and one wasincorrect.
(46:23):
It's amazing.
The visual you can describe itas much as you like, but it
tends often to people are muchmore.
Juries, are much more open to avisual demonstration rather
than you just telling themthey'll believe it when they see
it.
Speaker 2 (46:36):
I guess is the way to go, I suppose another thing is
there are times when I've donefire reconstruction tests,
partly to demonstrate thehypothesis but partly also to
drum into the court just whathappens when you do something
like pour petrol through aletterbox but I brought a court
(46:56):
to tears showing them video firereconstruction of me pouring
petrol through the letterbox ina murder case and they had to
have an adjournment becauseeveryone was so upset, which
sounds terrible.
But that was a win for gettingthe guy convicted.
Well, actually getting threepeople convicted on that one, it
(47:17):
has a a massive impact If youcan show people just how little
time the people in the househave to get out, or just what
exactly it means when you pourlighter fluid on a sleeping
person and setting them on fire.
It has a huge impact and Ithink it should not be
underestimated the power ofproving your point with a visual
(47:39):
demonstration Burn to learn.
Speaker 1 (47:42):
Yeah, fantastic, Thanks, obviously.
One last question, Steve, whichhas come to me the dummy, the
mannequin.
Are you taking that with you oris that yours?
Speaker 2 (47:50):
Yes, I built it when I was at the Forensic Science
Service, rescued it from beingthrown in a skip when the lab
closed and I've used it forvarious dissertation projects
since and a couple of man onfire cases consultancy since
I've been at the universitycurrently in my loft needing a
bit of a sanding down because itgot used for some flammability
(48:11):
of clothing with emollient oil,emollient cream, research.
I didn't clean it up after that, so it's a little bit the worse
for wear, but it's still goingstrong.
Speaker 1 (48:22):
Send me a picture of it I'd love to see a picture.
We'll put it on the podcastit's looking a bit sad now.
Speaker 2 (48:26):
I mean, I've presented conference
presentations about it in thepast, but that's another one I
need to get published.
Actually it's some it's my workon that.
I built a couple for mickgardner actually I don't know
okay, if that's, oh yeah okay,yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1 (48:39):
Fantastic, all right, well, thanks ever so much,
steve.
I really appreciate it.
I'm really sorry that I have tokind of cut you off, but I try
to no, that's okay, we've beennearly over an hour now already,
so that's fantastic.
But thanks ever so much.
Really appreciate you coming on, delighted to have been invited
(49:01):
.
Thank you very much.
All right, thanks so much.
Cheers, mate.
Thank you, hey.
Thank you for listening to csion fire.
Please don't forget to like,subscribe and suggest future
topics on our web page.
Remember factor non-verbal.
Take care, good hunting.
I hope to see you on the nextone.
Cheers.
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