How does an investigator tell whether a fire was accidental or arson?
There are as many ways to determine if fire is arson as there are to set fires deliberately. It would be next to impossible to describe them all here. However, most of the common ways are really just common sense. For example, if you have ever had a camp fire, you know that the best way to use newspaper to start a fire is to crumple it up in to a small ball and then set fire to it. You may notice that often if you can not get your fire to catch the on the first try, these balls of burned paper will remain largely intact in the pit. At the same time, if you have ever tried to start a fire by simply placing layer after layer of newspaper on top of each other and it does not catch, you will find that the middle layers often arent even scorched. Fire investigators look for exactly this sort of thing. If they find a bunch of crumpled up newspapers in a corner where the fire obviously started (Ill save the description of how they determine where a fire started) then there is a good chance th
