Fire Marshal investigators get to bottom of what causes blazes
Some of their findings lead to changes to equipment, changes in legislation
When James Allen’s phone rings, he never knows what to expect.
He might be gone for days or weeks, to the farthest reaches of Ontario or two blocks away.
The Sudbury-based fire investigator — one of 18 employed by the Office of the Ontario Fire Marshal to investigate the province’s most serious blazes — has to be ready for anything.
He could be investigating an arson, a fatal fire, a drug lab, an explosion — fires that cause more than a half-million dollars damage or ones at vulnerable buildings.
Each of the approximately 600 blazes investigated by the provincial agency leaves questions behind: what happened and, more importantly, what can be done to prevent similar fires from happening?
The Office of the Ontario Fire Marshal tries to find those answers.
The work the agency’s investigators do isn’t always understood or even reported on. It happens out of the public eye, behind the police tape and in its engineering lab northwest of Barrie.
Allen has spent days shovelling the charred remnants of a home through a sieve until he found the clues he was looking for — a melted smoke alarm, a faulty wire or evidence the fire was deliberately set.
He’s done a six-month investigation that included trips to the United States to do research with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to complete.
In his 15 years with the Fire Marshal’s Office, Allen has spent hundreds of hours in autopsy suites, witnessing post-mortems of people who died in fires.
He’s spent thousands of hours poring over photos, engineering reports and notes from fire scenes he’s investigated to draft his final report. It’s all just part of the job. Whatever the scene Allen is headed to, he has no idea what he’s getting into, and he doesn’t want to.
He wants the facts of the scene to speak for themselves.
“It’s very physically and mentally demanding work,” he said.
“We work for three or four days at a scene, nine, 10 or 12 hours a day, then we’re gone. Then I could be gone to another scene. There’s been times when I’ve been to backto-back-to-back fires in different communities.”
A spate of fires killed 13 people in the region in less than a month last winter, including four family members in Port Colborne and a father and his four young boys at a home on Oneida of the Thames First Nation in December 2016.
Ontario Fire Marshal investigators probed each one.
It’s different in other provinces, such as Alberta, where fire investigations are done by speciallytrained firefighters in municipal departments. The province collects and analyses reports from city and municipal departments and employs only a handful of its own investigators.
Reports can take investigators in both provinces weeks or months to complete. Their findings have to hold up in court, the recommendations have to stand up to legislative scrutiny.
“The public doesn’t see the amount of research and testing that goes on behind the scenes,” Allen said. “You could go to a fire scene, which I did, and still be testing six months later.”
That’s where the Ontario Fire Marshal’s engineers come in.
At scenes and in their specialized lab in Midhurst, the team of eight helps Fire Marshal investigators probe about 200 fires every year — everything from natural gas explosions to suspected electrical fires or malfunctioning appliances.
“We’re in it because we love doing this. I’ve been to at least 2,000 fires in my career and every day is a new day,” said James Bennett, who has worked as a forensic fire prevention engineer with the Fire Marshal’s office for 12 years.
The engineers are always on call and often visit fires with investigators. Their trucks have portable Xray machines, air compressors and tool kits. Some even use drones to get aerial views of scenes.
Though Bennett said the engineers handle many natural gasrelated fires, they’ve also seen ones caused by people tampering with fuses or breakers, homeowners stealing electricity, drug labs and marijuana grow operations.
“Everything we see every day is different, it’s new. You have to be someone who wants to learn something new everyday,” said Bennett, who didn’t imagine he’d be studying fires when he graduated from the civil engineering program at Ryerson University.
“I had no idea this kind of work even existed . ... I’m just lucky. I wouldn’t do anything else.”
It’s the same story for most of the Fire Marshal investigators. The majority spent years in law enforcement before joining the agency. Most are older and on their second careers. Few have firefighting experience. Some are academics, one was a pastor and funeral director, another a homicide detective, but they all have one thing in common — an uncanny attention to detail.
“It’s not all about putting bad guys in jail,” said Scott Evenden, a former police officer who’s now one of the agency’s lead investigators.
“You’re always going to have a guy, next in line, willing to commit a crime. We’re not going to change that . ... Where we shine is when we can identify a safety gap.”
Over its 101-year history, the provincial agency’s findings have sparked recalls, prompted legislation amendments and changed public safety policy.
One is happening right now at Queen’s Park.
The Rea and Walter Act — a building code amendment named for two North Perth firefighters who died while battling a blaze at a Listowel dollar store in March 2011 — passed its second reading in April and is now awaiting committee approval.
Volunteer firefighters Ray Walter, 30, and Ken Rea, 55, were trapped inside the burning building when the roof collapsed, a failure the Fire Marshal’s report pinned on a commonly used construction material, engineered trusses.
Instead of nailing wooden beams together to build a roof or floor, planks are pressed between metal plates — a relatively inexpensive and commonplace material that has one Achilles heel.
“They’re strong but they’re not so strong in the face of fire,” Evenden said. “They’ll fail fairly quickly. That was a big factor in the firefighters’ deaths.”
The private member’s bill, tabled by Perth–Wellington MPP Randy Pettapiece, would require commercial, industrial and many residential buildings built with engineered trusses to display an emblem outside so emergency crews know what they’re dealing with.
“When the firefighters respond, they’ll see that there and know not to go in or be cautious when they go in,” Evenden said. “I do know from our investigation we certainly had influence and impact on the legislation change.”
Other times, Ontario Fire Marshal investigations prompt safety standard changes or sweeping recalls.
Bennett’s investigation into heat recovery ventilators — home heating devices also called air exchangers — changed a Canadian Standard Association benchmark.
The forensic fire prevention engineer seized a ventilator from a house fire and took it back to the agency’s lab for testing.
Because the investigator didn’t suspect criminal activity, Bennett called in the ventilator’s manufacturer and certification agency representatives to watch the tests unfold.
“They’re getting involved in the investigation process so if you need to make a change, it’s much easier to convince them to fix it,” he said. “That’s how it started with the ventilators.”
In London, a faulty air exchanger was blamed for a $1-million blaze at an Oakridge home in May 2013, one of nine in the province linked to the devices. The ventilator that sparked the blaze was voluntarily recalled by Ontario’s Electrical Safety Authority after the Ontario Fire Marshal investigation.
But the Fire Marshal’s investigators and engineers aren’t ones to gloat. They do their testing, file their reports and let legislators and safety standards groups run with them.
“We normally wouldn’t even know. We just keep going on to the next one,” Bennett said. “We work away, stuff gets recalled. No one ever knows that it was the OFM engineers that truly did the work.”
It’s the same story for the agency’s investigators.
Each one is on call for one week a month and is usually — but not always — deployed to fire scenes in their region.
It’s an unpredictable job Allen admitted doesn’t suit everyone.
“It’s very difficult on the family. When I started, I had just started having children. I had two small boys,” he said. “The phone rings at any moment, and without any lead time, you’re gone. It could be for a day, three days or two weeks.”
But it’s rewarding work, said Allen.
Whether he’s getting in his truck to investigate a fire in Niagara Falls or hopping on a bush plane to Kashechewan First Nation near James Bay, Allen knows he wouldn’t want to be doing anything else.
“I think the public are very happy when we give them answers, when I can deal with the family and put their minds at rest . ... It gets them some closure,” he said.
“If I can give them an answer and help them out at a painful time, that’s what I’m there to do.”
The public doesn’t see the amount of research and testing that goes on behind the scenes. You could go to a fire scene, which I did, and still be testing six months later.