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Behind the Scenes of Fire Investigation with Candace Ashby · Fire Engineering Podcast

• Nat Kapustin: From MSA helmets and streamlight flashlights to seek thermal imaging cameras and so much more, the firestore.com has everything you need to serve your community safely and effectively. Good evening, everyone. Welcome to another episode of Point of Fortune Podcast. I'm your host, Billy Hux, and joined this evening by none other than Battalion Chief Candice Ashby. Chief, how are you? Good. How are you? Good. Good. I think I think we kinda got caught there at the beginning while this is recorded and hopefully the producing crew leaves it in there that I don't ever have issues with the computer or the soundboard or anything else until someone else who records a lot of podcasts that the same setup uses. So Yeah, we won't mention her name, like Stephanie. Yeah, no, you you may be familiar. but funny enough, I watched an episode of The Hard Knock today and poor poor Chris Scott was the one that was having the technology issues for once. It's always it's always stuff. So anyway, well I am super excited for for this episode for for a number of reasons. But mainly because I don't think many people know that out of your entire career that you still have this little side business that may investigate some fires. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Well, tell us tell us about your your background and how you how you ended up there in fire investigations and especially working for the dark side. Well, I actually took investigator back around nineteen ninety. So when I when I took the class, it was the old way of teaching it based on a lot of forklore and the the bad way of doing the business, if you will, that everything's been debunked in in today's world. But I took it and I fell in love with it and I started investigating on the department that I was on at the time, which was on the south side of Indianapolis, and we merged into Indianapolis in 2009. But I that's where I got my feet wet in the investigation business. Well, the other guys that were investigating. They were going off into the private world and I got the opportunity to go help dig a couple of times in the private world, fell in love with it, said this is what I want to do. And as in the public side you're you're restricted to whatever your jurisdiction does. And I saw this bigger horizon where I could expand and do more fire investigations because I fell in love with it. I thought it was just a cool aspect of the job. The problem was is back then I couldn't find anybody that would hire me. because in the early nineties there weren't a lot of women in the fire investigation community. And the women that were in there didn't have twenty, twenty-five years in fire investigation. So I found myself at a complete loss that I couldn't find anybody to to hire me outside of being a digger. So I decided to start my own company and I did. and I started key fire investigations in nineteen ninety nine, two thousand. I started my own business and so we've been in business for twenty six years. I've been investigating fires for well over thirty years and I say I've been saying thirty years for quite a few years now, but I guess it's even been longer than that. But I it is just a really cool aspect of the job and that's that's how I got started, how I wound up on the private side. So I don't do public side investigations. I only do private investigations for insurance companies and law firms or the self insured. And At one point I had my own office and had ten different employees and now it's just me as I've downsized and moved from an office into my my house and I just do what fires that I can, but I spend most of my time on the road teaching under a nonprofit that I do leadership consulting and things. So the I still do the aspect of the fire investigations and I'm actually teaching a fire investigation class this week, which is a lot of fun when I get to step into that arena and And teach a scientific method. That's that's a heck of a story. It's an amazing story, first and foremost. the fact that you're not just working for yourself also has to be better because people tend to screw things up, in in in any aspect of w what we do. But that that I said a great, great segue. obviously every state is set up a bit different for for you on the being on the public side as well as the the private side of things, if you will, what are the biggest differences, you know, from an investigation standpoint? you know, obviously there's a huge criminal component there, you know, from the fire department side of things versus you said you do work for, you know, insurance companies and you know, law firms. What's what's the biggest difference there? Well I think you just said it. The biggest difference is criminal versus civil. But on the public side, all the the fire department is worried about is is there a crime? Is there been a crime committed? Is it the is it arson? Is it incendiary fire? Is it not? If it's the dishwasher or the coffee maker, the fire department doesn't care. It's an accidental fire, they're out. where on the private side, it's interesting because an a person will have a fire at their house, and like in the state of Indiana, the fire chief is has a state statute that they will investigate the fire. They traditionally give that to pr somebody that's in the investigation division. And if it's a small enough department and they don't have their own investigation division, then a state fire marshal will step in and help them investigate their fire or if there's a fatality. Now, on when that person calls their insurance company and says, hey, I report a fire. Now the insurance company, even though the fire department and the state fire marshal may go out and do it, they're gonna protect their own interest and hire their own fire investigator to go out and take a look at it. Now, we are also concerned on whether or not there was a crime that was committed. But we're gonna take it a step further because we're also interested in something called subrogation. Is it product liability? Did the coffee maker start it or the dishwasher? And then the insurance company is gonna pay that insured for their claim, but then they're gonna sue that product if it's product liability and get their money back. And that's what makes the world go round on the private side. So you have a lot of engineers, mechanical engineers, electrical engineers. There's a lot of deeper pockets on the private side than there are the public. meaning that I can go to a scene and if I need if it's in the middle of winter and I need to thaw it out, then I can c bring in the tarps and bring in the tents and we can heat it and we can thaw it and we can layer it. I can call in heavy machinery to pick it if it's it if it's a completely dys demolished. Where the public side don't have that kind of resources, we can call a forensic weather company and order a lightning strike report within feet of where a lightning struck where the public side don't typically have that unless they have a relationship with a you know a a weather reporting agency or whatever to be able to give them that because they don't have those deep pockets. So there's a big difference on the public and private side. A lot of the people on the public side don't realize how big the private side is and that's all it is is an investigator for hire. And you have a bigger jurisdiction that you're covering But it is absolutely I think one of the funnest aspects of the fire service and I think people that go through fire investigator training and classes it'll make a better firefighter by doing so. I I really believe that. That's one I think the fire investigator cert ought to be required for every single fire officer out there before fire officer one. No, you you mentioned that a little bit earlier that you've got a class coming up to teach, and I started to go down that road and the ADHD took over. Indiana, how how are you laid out when it comes to to training? Is it based on the locality? Do you teach as an adjunct for the state? I do. how do your crime investigation? So you teach for the state? So it's not really teaching for the state, is it because we were teaching for the state for quite a number of years, but then the funding for the state wanted to gravitate more toward firefighter one, firefighter two, FOSS classes, instructor classes. So they kicked us out and said, Why don't you guys go off on your own? So we did that. We we we teach state certified fire investigator class, but we do it on our own. So I actually charge and we run that through Elite Public Safety Consulting, and I charge four hundred ninety-five dollars a student for a five day class, and then we fill up the classes and we travel around the state. But at the end of the day, they get the state cert, Indiana State Cert. that says they're a fire investigator, which is typically what's required in their jurisdiction, either for promotion or for them to be a fire investigator for their fire department. But very few of them know anything about the private side until we come walking in. And there's three of us that teach this class. One's public. he retired from the fire marshal's office and two of us are on the private side. So I think the collection of all three of us coming together and makes the class a big hit. Because you get to learn from three different people. We're a typical state level class. It's got one lead instructor that runs through the entire thing and it's that one person's opinion. So we have a lot of fun with the class, but yeah, at the end of the time they get the state cert they get to take the class and the practical skills and get certified in the state of Indiana. Well that's that's awesome to hear to be able to tie in both sides of it. I know in for Virginia, you know, we've got numerous private companies as well. And the majority of those people that either work at or or run those private companies, you know, started in some fire marshal's office somewhere. It's kind of how they got their feet wet. you know, but typically they go through retirement. maybe maybe they decide, hey, I can I can make a run at this and and make more money than the the madness of of the fire department side of it and and go with it. and I think that kind of is a good spot to take me in the next question as well. what are the requirements in Indiana? So a fire marshal or fire investigator within a locality versus somebody like yourself who, you know, who owns a company, do you have to have the same certifications? Are you looked at the same from a legal perspective in the in the court's eyes when you go to testify? Well, we obviously when we testify on the private side, we have, you know, we put together curriculum by taste, which is a professional resume that shows a spotlight of everything that we do in that industry, if you will, because we want to be declared as an expert witness. Once we're declared as an expert witness, Katie barred the door, we can go in and and create our our positions and our opinions and things like that. Now, on the public side, most fire departments require their fire investigators to have fire investigator certification within the state. The state certification means nothing on the private side. On the private side, you gotta have national certifications. There's two organizations that have national certifications. IAAI, which is the International Association of Arts Investigators, has the big dog, which is certified fire investigator or CFI. And then NAFI, which is the National Association of Fire Investigators, has CFEI, which is certified fire and explosion investigator. Even though one is three initials and one is four initials. The biggest one of all is CFI because you have to have courtroom testimony in order to get that certification. So on the private side, you gotta have national certs. And you need if so, some of these insurance companies they want courtroom ready people. So you either have to testify twice or take a courtroom class that gives you that qualification of which to do that, because they want people that's ready to testify. on the public side they're not like that. So there is a difference on the public and private, but the at the end of the day, even the state of Indiana's public investigator follows ten thirty three. So we all have to whether you're public or private, you have to meet the same qualifications as seven JPRs in ten thirty three. Set up very, very, very similar to Virginia and how things kinda happen here. And from a courtroom perspective, from from your experience, do you feel like you're looked at a little bit harder or you questioned a little bit harder on the private side? even though it's it's typically a non criminal non-criminal charge, versus where where where you are on the private side? When I'm in a courtroom testifying with other fire investigators, such as the local fire department and the state fire marshal, the jury is going to look at those three people and say, okay, I've got the fire marshal, I've got a local fire department, and I've got a private investigator. They're automatically going to put the highest authority in that room at the fire marshal level because that's what people the normal citizen does. Now when I go in and testify, I'm typically not in a suit, I'm not in regular clothes. I will dress in a fire department class A uniform because I need them to see me as a firefighter first and a private investigator second. So I think that's the difference in public and private and getting across what you're trying to get across. Most of the times when I testify, I testify from the perspective of being a firefighter. but on the private side, I'll say this: on the public side, they really put the fear in you that you don't want to testify, and if you do You're gonna get hung out to dry. And most of the testimony courses that are out there today teach it based on fear. Meaning they will put a give you a botched investigation that you have to go through for 40 hours worth of pre-work. And then they put you on a stand with this botched investigation and they beat the hell out of you. And it and you can't win. No matter which way they're coming at you, there's no way for you to win. And that's the only experience that you have. in a courtroom, when it comes time to go, and at the end of the day everybody passes. But when it comes time to go to regular court and that's the only experience that you have, it puts the fear into you, no, I'm gonna go in and look like an idiot. I'm not gonna be able to do this the right way. Where on the public on the private side, we wanna get to court. Because when you're an expert witness, it's very lucrative, but when you're an expert witness, your fees even go higher. And you get the chance to go into court and state your opinion and be able to walk people through the entire scene. And so I try to get to court and I can't get to court because I want to go in and I want to tell a judge and a jury how I arrived at my decisions. Because I feel like I know how to do it the right way and I know how to do the scientific method and that I can stand all day long on that hill and be able to explain it based on fire dynamics and behavior, more than just fire patterns. I think some fire investigators, the ego takes over. They want to go in and try to prove what they had instead of coming down to the one that they can no longer disprove. And that's where they go south. And then I think the privates get a bad rap because it's like, you sold your soul to the devil to go out there and testify. And I don't think that necessarily is the case. It depends on the investigator because it doesn't matter if you're public or private and how many certifications that you hold or credentials that you have. I've seen plenty of CFIs, they couldn't investigate their way out of a cardboard box, even though they had the certification. Doesn't matter. Doesn't mean they're doing it right. Say it ain't so. And it's like, you know, it really goes into the quality of the individual and what they're out here. So it doesn't it doesn't matter to me if I have five undetermined fires. I will not jeopardize my reputation to make a call, even if there's an injury or a death on the line. And I think there's a lot of fire investigators that want to make that call. And they g they go above their means of making it and then it leads to a lot of mistakes and and that just can't happen. It it is what it is. And you gotta be able to stand firm on that. And I think if you under really truly understand the scientific method, it's your best friend in the entire thing. So it doesn't matter to me if you are on one way and I'm on another, there's only one truth to that fire. It's whose ever's scientific method could stand the test of a careful, serious challenge. You just had so many points, but the main one that I want to address is the fact that you said that there's egos in the fire service, especially in the fire marshal world, right? And fire investigator world. My God. It actually leads me to to my next question. Again, you're you're you're making it easy for me, serving it up, which is good because we didn't start recording this until nine o'clock at night. So how important is it able or or for you to be able to sit on a stand Or or even to sit before a group of people and say, I I don't know. I can't determine it. How how important is that to you? I think it's very important that you can be honest and open and that you feel comfortable in your in your expertise to be able to say that. I think there's a lot of fire investigators they feel inept if they go in there and say, I don't know, I can't determine it or they bring up, your last five fires were undetermined, does that mean you suck, you just can't figure it out? And I don't think that's the case. I think you have to be very open and honest. And I tell all the classes that I teach, if you hopefully we all do fires better today than we did five years ago. And it's always learning and growing and getting better. And if you don't go to court till three to five years later and you find out that you've made a mistake, instead of going in and trying to cover up for that mistake and proven your point, the best thing you could do is go in and say, you know what? I made a mistake and I own it. I would do fires different today than I would done back then. And I think that's the best way to go about it and and just be open and honest. And if you make a mistake, make a mistake. If you can't determine it, then you can't determine it. But when you make that step to try to make a call so that you look like well, you know what you're doing, you're it's gonna come back and bite you in the ass every time. Somehow we made it full circle back to the the beginning and I'm not gonna date you, but I know you said 30-ish years investigating fires. What do you think the biggest differences are from when you started investigating fires 30 years ago to current day? And and I know that's a completely open-ended question in many aspects, but what are what are your biggest things that pop to you? The way that I was trained is all the wrong way. So my initial fire investigator training, meaning this, if there was spalling on concrete. There must have been gasoline poured on it. Therefore, it's an incendiary fire. If the furniture springs are depressed, it's an incendiary fire. If there's black smoke when you pull up and it's rolling out of every window, it's an incendiary fire because it's hydrocarbons burning. Since the way that I was trained, most of which all of this stuff has been debunked, and a scientific method came into it to bring a scientific basis behind. So I believe. That fire investigations is both a science and an art on how you do the science to do it. So I think you have to be very good in both, but you also have to know where your limitations are at. And the fire burns away so much evidence, but it's not just the fire burning away the evidence, it's the firefighters that are going in and destroying the hell out of these scenes that's making it even harder today. So the the new construction that we have, the lightweight stuff, filling it with IKEA furniture and the plastics and the higher heat release rates than ever before is is I think we're gonna have more fires that become vent limited and they burn their self out, but it's gonna destroy so much. But unless we get a hold of these firefighters and train them in customer service and the fact that drywall is non combustible. And it actually has a fire rating until we go in there and tear the hell out of it. And it's because none of the firemen want to sit back and be and not have anything to do. And then when we ask firemen, when I was trained to do salvage and overhaul, we actually re made an inspection hole in the wall or the ceiling. And if the joists were clean or the studs were clean, you stopped. There's no stopping now. And they're bringing everything down on it. So one I think that to answer your question, the fire investigation community has come a long way through testing, through UL and NIST, doing their legacy versus modern and seeing how the you know side by side fires are burning. the ATF and doing their analysis where they let things reach flashover, and they went and got about 36 different experienced investigators to walk in and say, just tell me the quadrant in which this started. And only two could even tell them the quadrant because it's a slippery slope when you get to a flashover stage or full room involvement. But it's the level of training that has changed with that science. 921 is updated every three years. It has come a long way in bringing that full circle and really bringing the fire investigation community up to where it needs to be. It's just our firefighting has actually, I think, trended downward. in the way that we do overhaul and you know and I ask all the students when I'm teaching, if heaven forbid, if you had a fire in your house today, how many of you would want to know how it started? And every hand in the room goes up. And I said, Mr. and Mrs. Smith want to know the same thing. Unless they started it and they're trying to cover it up, they want to know what just turned our life upside down and how in the world can we prevent this from happening in the future? And by the time the firefighters are wreaking havoc, and I think it's a fundamental training issue, it is just it's it's lucky that an investigator can investigate anything. And then the firemen are saying, I say, why do you do this? Well, we're afraid of rekindle. And man, I would not be able to teach the class that I teach if the scenes weren't completely intact. And because I wouldn't be able to show the fire patterns and things, and I show fire after fire after fire that flashed over. And they never had a rekindle and there wasn't any drywall removed. And man, isn't that really going up against perspective and and attitudes? And I tell people in my classes that if you guys know without any fire investigation training, if you have a kitchen fire, so you pretty much know the area of the origin. And if you really think the fire got through non combustible drywall, then go to the around the other side of the room and tear a hole in the wall. Just don't do it inside the room of origin. And everybody's like, well, nobody's ever told us before. Well, I just did. And there's just no sense in and wreaking havoc. it's hard enough to investigate fires, but we need to do more education and training, even so today, even though the fire investigation community has come a long way. And you got people out there like John Lantini that wrote the scientific protocols, you got the late John DeHon that wrote Kirk's fire investigations and had plenty of additions to that. So you've had a real progress in the fire investigation community to really raise awareness that we have to use a scientific method. You cannot just go out and go with a gut hunch. There's there's people that they don't want to know things in the beginning, like because they feel that it's gonna create that biasness. And to me it doesn't matter. I'm gonna go whatever that evidence leads me and what I'm able to do I only gotta get down to the one I can no longer disprove. And we got too many investigators out here trained the wrong way. And they're trying to prove what they're their findings and they're not doing the scientific method the right way. I think this is where they the younger kids, at least our kids now are like preach. You just said again, said so many things there. I'll date myself a little bit here as well. So what you had mentioned about you know, teaching again, for me, fire investigator training goes back to firefighter one. It goes back to recruit school, it goes back to to your initial your initial start and all this stuff. And and I recall going through recruit school and we actually had a fire investigator come in several days during burn days, you know, to to talk about everything that you just said. And when you fast forward and look in 2026, recruit schools are not taught the same way. And it there's nothing that is taught at least in my experience in the last 10 years. in and around the training realm across the country of where there's an emphasis on, hey, yeah, go in and put the, you know, wet stuff on the hot stuff, but sh try to preserve the scene. You know, again, use your brain a little bit more than just being a bullheaded fireman that that runs into somewhere and, you know, puts a ton of water and destroys evidence. Right. And then rolls out, All right, my job's done, cool. And then as an investigator, you walk in and you're, you know, you're kind of scratching your head going, why did why did you Why did you do this? how did we how did we end up here? I think it also may go back to that ego thing you mentioned earlier as well. But you again, you you just hit on on on so many things there. And I think that that is a from an investigator standpoint as well as a firefighter one, whether you ever intend to go into the fire investigation world, we need to get better across the country on all of this from a training aspect. Yeah. Because we the hardest thing about us pulling off one of our classes is building the pods and filling them with furniture and burning them so that they have the practical skills. And some fire departments I would like to go in, build the pods, burn and then walk in and throw every bit of it out the window, out the front door, and then tear all the drywall down, down to the studs and throw it out there and then tell to go investigate it to give them a taste of what the fire investigators are handed when they walk into these organ these these buildings after the fire department's wreaking havoc on them. And as you said it, you know, it's it's this scene preservation. And there's you know, in the fire service there's three tactical priorities. And which is life safety, fire control, and property conservation. Property conservation, which is the third and most lost tactical priority out there. And sometimes when I teach fire investigator There's there's one thing that I take pride in and I and I have done this ever since I've taught investigator for the last years, few years, is that any of my students were overhauled differently once they take my class because I beat the hell out of them. tomorrow's my day two, and they will be like whip pups when I get through beating up over the salvage and overhaul aspect of it because we're just not doing it right. And this is what we're passing off to our young kids today. they've got insurance, just tear the hell out of it. And it's like, man, and we're trying to get down to the truth. And I a I tell the guys, where do you think consumer product safety commission gets their recall information from? They get it from us. But when you have a bunch of firefighters that don't understand that aspect of it, and they go in and they want to take the dishwasher and throw it out the window in a new housing edition because that fire just got limited to that dishwasher, and then they ruin the evidence because they spoil it, and then three years later They go back on another house with the same dishwasher that kills three kids in that house when they didn't do the job they did. Well, we could have found a recall in that. And spe and it and I g again, I don't think it's bad firemen that don't that are trying to wreak havoc on this. I think it's a fundamental training issue as you're saying, we're not training these people right. We're not doing anything about scene preservation or property conservation. So That's actually another class that I teach as a spinoff at my fire investigation classes that I will go around to fire departments and teach a property conservation class. And then that's another aspect that I just haven't had time because I've been so covered up with the leadership training that I want to write more articles on and things is the property conservation that the third tactical priority that's lost and how that wreaks havoc through Everything that it brings it full circle to our mission statement. yeah, we feel great as firefighters to go out and have a fire, but that's the first day of the nightmare happening for these people. And then the fire investigators go in, the cleanup has to happen. that's months of their life. And then we just go back to firehouse and we don't think anything of it, we're waiting on the next fire. And we don't realize how our actions may impact how far that happens. And now in this world where we've got lithium ion back. And we've got even more things that are starting fires that FDNY is bringing out. We have more chances to spoil that scene than ever before if we don't know what we're doing. So it's it's even more critical that we train the firefighters. If we're not gonna train them fully in fire investigation, there needs to be an awareness. And I know the National Fire Academy has come out with a couple awareness classes to educate firefighters, but we need more of that training to get out there and and teach the guys. Agreed. that's across the board. the the position that we've end up in. I again, I I've been around just long enough to step back and look and go, like, what what happened? Where did we go wrong? Where did we where did we stop doing the the basics of you know of a lot of this stuff? But, you know, that's again another great lead into the the next question. We know about the misconception within the fire service. you have a very unique role here again, being an operational battalion chief. on one side of it and then you have this fire investigations company on the private side over here. How does that play back into your training? you know, do you do you facilitate any sort of engine company level, truck company level training, you know, within your your area as a battalion chief? And if so, I I would hope to hear that the majority of your firemen are are pretty good with scene preservation at this point. Yes, they've they've learned kind of what my My niche is, if you will, and I will stick my head in, I would never stop anybody from making an inspection hole, especially if you have you know, flashover or full room involvement. But I'll stick my head in there and say, at what point do you realize those studs or those y what joists are clean? You know, those ceiling joists are clean. Well, I don't know, Chief, that means stop. Yeah, that that means freaking stop is what that means. But my exo is also trained. And and we have executive officers in Indianapolis, so my XO is trained in fire investigations and they will stop and protect that scene. As soon as the fire sparked under control, I want everybody to stop and get out so that we have an opportunity to bring the fire investigators in to look at a fresh set before we even get into the overhaul mode. If the fire investigators are not on the scene, then I will walk in and I will take a look at it and scan around and see where we need to protect or whatever based on my training so that I can help our fire investigation division out. So I do cross over, if you will, because of the fire investigator background and I do more scene preservation probably than most battalions do. And I educate my people in that. Now I I need to still take the battalion that I'm in now through my scene preservation class. I haven't done that yet to get them to understand when we need to stop pulling ceilings and stop pulling walls. But the one thing that I I tell firemen all the time, I said, You guys are trained in fire dynamics and behavior. If the drywall is still intact, do you really believe that the fire jumped through non-combustible drywall and spontaneous combusted the two by four sitting behind it? And then they're all just sitting there looking at me. Right, it doesn't happen that way. If the studs behind it are going to char, the drywall will no longer be intact. Now the paper on the outside of the drywall, it absolutely will burn. But if the drywall's intact, the fire never got through it. So that's one thing that I try to train firefighters on and and I t and I actually bring it into my leadership classes as well. I will stop and I will get on a kick about noncombustible drywalls. I'm trying to go around the country and get people to stop overhauling and and it's like it I did matter of fact there was an article that just came out in a fire bag trade magazine this week that said, you need we need to overhaul more and I'm like, my goodness, people are are they're just not gonna understand But they're just saying you overhaul more, we tear more shit up. And it's like we need to stop tearing stuff up. And I can show you scene after scene after scene after scene in these smaller communities that don't have truck companies, if you will, or if they do, they know what they're doing. And the scenes are intact. Could you imagine a world where we go in and use copious amounts of water to put a fire out and we don't touch any of the drywall? And we leave everything in place and we shut the nozzle down and we pick up the hose. That'd be amazing how many fires we could fight a day like that, and we wouldn't even be that exhausted. But these guys don't see that. They don't see that I actually believe, and this is my personal opinion, and people can disagree with me if they want. I believe we cause most of the rekindles. When we bring the non-combustible drywall down on the smoldering embers, because we didn't put them out, we open up the bones to the structure and then we go back four to six hours later on a rekindle. That we think we let go because we didn't overhaul enough, which I think the opposite is true. I think it's too much overhaul covering this stuff up and opening up the bones to the structure and then we go back when it's inside the structure. And I think it's led to a fallacy of people believing this overzealous overhaul. And I've seen chiefs want to they get a chainsaw out and take the entire wall down and I'm like, my lord, my goodness. But I can show you dozens of pictures that the entire scene is intact. And they never had a rekindle. It's an amazing thing. It's like, how can I show you evidence of that over and over and over? And then the ones that do have the rekindles are the ones that destroyed. What why is that? It's it, there's the evidence right there. Yeah, complete, complete side note. I I would hate to be an attorney and have to argue against you because A, you have a very articulate, common sense approach to everything that you talk about. Especially when it comes to investigations and the fact that it's a fire service, it's modern day fire service, whatever you want to call it. And I feel like we we overcomplicate everything because we feel like we need to overcomplicate everything. And when it comes to basic fire investigations, as you said, yes, we have evolved. We've evolved tremendously from from when I started in the fire service, you know, to to this thing that we call the scientific method. And and we are now in a position, to to be able to go as investigators, whether it be on the public or the private side, and and have a process that's tried and true, that stands up, it's defendable in court. the fact that again you have the ability to see both sides of it is is pretty awesome because you were very unique. I don't need to tell you that, but you're very unique in your in your position. to to be able as an operational battalion chief to go, all right, cool. There's nobody left inside the building. H fire's under control. Let's start preserving the scene, as as much as we can. So in the fact that if they don't, then as a battalion chief, you can also, you know, come back down on them as well. Not that you would ever do that, but you know. Right. Well they they know that I have a they know that I don't like the overhaul. They'll even tell people from other battalions like stop. You should go and get up your ass if you take out too much. There's just no sense in it. And we make more work for ourselves. I was gonna say it's you you're whether you wanna look at it this way or not, you're you're taking more risk. You're you're you're wearing yourself out even more. You again, you said it earlier. All right, you know, this fire was at eleven o'clock at night. why am I spending more energy on destroying something, you know, when I'm lucky if I get to go back and sleep for an hour or two and I'm and I'm back at it again. So Well, you know, we've been recording for for close to forty minutes. Has it really? my gosh, that's what fast. I I know. and I can tell you very quickly that you know, we won't do it immediately, but we're definitely gonna spin off a part two of this because we just we'll we'll we'll need to. but with that being said, we'll start kind of wrapping it up. I don't like to keep these things very long, especially when we're gonna you know, the land of misfit toys starts boring out the, you know, regular fire service 'cause they don't wanna hear Hear what we do. Right. But with that being said, you know, again, over your thirty years experience as an investigator, how much of the job do you think is actually spent at a fire scene? And again, this is from the private side of things. How much of your time is spent at a fire scene versus the research, the court preparation, the report preparation? How much physical time are you spending on average do you feel like at a at a s at a fire scene? Well, like you said earlier, I take a common sense approach. So if I go to a scene that's completely destroyed, I know the chances are very slim to none that I'm gonna come down to the one I can no longer disprove. And I pretty much take a hunch that that's this is gonna be an undetermined fire, depending on the amount of damage that's there. Now I can spot dig, I can certainly look for, you know, poor patterns and things like that. But I don't spend a lot of time there. This is where the private side gets a bad rap. Because it's no different than any other industry. You have some people in this industry that are about money and they're driven by money. The thing about the private side is it is lucrative and most people are paid per hour. And you have guys out there that will milk a scene. I call it milk a scene just to get billable hours because that's the way their organization is set up, that they get a bonus at the end of the year for how many billable hours they have. For me, I go out there and I get it done and I'm and I'm done. And I'm out the door and I I write my report. Now I have generated a way over the years that I'm very fast at writing reports because I write summary reports and I could come back and I could pound one out in less than an hour and I don't get paid until I get that report shoved out. So that report is done. Where in the beginning I was I was writing 30 page reports and it would take 30 days to turn a report around. Now as soon as I come back, I download that camera and I am putting pen to paper and getting that report typed out. it's very quick. I follow 921 and 1033. So I go right after the heart of it is you know, the witness statements, the fire patterns, the fire dynamics, and then the first fuel ignited, the heat source, the oxygen was sufficient, the act that brought them together. And I still, even though 921 did away with classifications, I still use the four classifications because I feel like I can explain it. And it doesn't 921 doesn't say you can't use them, it just says I'm not gonna dictate the four. Right. And it's up to you and your agency what you do. So I still teach those classifications and I will do that. And then if I took any evidence or not, I throw some pictures in there, the the origin and the cause, and I move on. so over time I've gotten very quick, but it depends on the fire itself, on how long I'm gonna be there processing that scene. to do the photographs alone probably take an hour and then it depends on how much dig in and stuff that I have, which is a common question I get all the time is well how how do you dig out a three by three section in a room versus the entire room that you're going to re s reconstruct? And my answer to that is is whatever you need for your scientific method. It that could be a three by three or that could be the entire room. It's what you need to be able to have your scientific method complete. So I think there's varying ways, but To case in point, I had a I had a very large loss of a dry boat storage fire, and there was there was probably over a hundred boats in this multi million dollar loss. It was a hundred by three hundred foot warehouse. And there was at least 30 privates that were brought in to represent anybody and everybody over these boats. And they even brought in heavy machinery and things. When I showed up, it was completely. Completely flat. there is nothing left. It was just there's only the trailers that the boats sit on. And I'm like, but I'm looking and I see a forklift, I see a box truck, I see a car, I see mattresses, and I'm like, there ain't no way I'm gonna be able to come down to the one that I can no longer disprove. Now, this was a five-day dig out on the private side. That is cha-ching, cha-ching, cha-ching, cha-ching, cha-ching. I call my client. Day one and I said, I'll sit here the whole week if that's what you want me to do, but I'm gonna tell you right now it's undetermined. And there's nothing I'm gonna be able to do. There's just way too many variables here, and this is where common sense kicks in. He's like, Well, just come back on the second day and see any, you know, just do do another day and then call me. So I went back a second day. I put in an eight hours. I called him at the end and I said, Listen, it's all still undetermined whether I'm here two days or I'm here five days. This is crazy. Well, the other privates are like, What are you doing, Candy? This is easy money. what are you doing? I was like, dude, you know, I'm not, I get it, and I like to make money like anybody else, but this is common sense. And I'm backing away, calling this undetermined and and walking. And I did. And six months later, I ran into another private. And he's like, man, you look you missed out on that boat fire that we had. And I was like, no, what did I miss? He's like, It ended up being a seven-day dig out, and they took evidence and went to an evidence exam and it evidence exam and it milked it out another two or three days. So they got ten days altogether, and I left at the end of day two, and I was like, no kidding. I said, What the hell did you guys determine that? it was undetermined. No shit. It took you ten days to come up to an undetermined fire. So that's the one where I think it really is common sense at that stage, and I will not milk a scene. even on the private side and I and I make good money doing this. But there's I think there's an ethical component to it that if you really know what you're doing, but but this business, as you know, allows people to go in and say, Well, you know what, it's it's gonna take me eight hours to dig this scene out. And you have that luxury to do when you're the expert and being able to dictate that scene like that. But there's just too many money hungry people on the billable hours. And so you get the good, the bad and the ugly on both the public and private sides. And that's the one thing I think we all fight is the ethical part of this. It's kinda like we started out talking about egos. And a lot of the egos is because I think we strap guns too early to these fire investigators and then they think they're cops. And then they get that in their head and it leads to egos and leads to I'm right, you're wrong, I'm you know, and it it's just like It's like anything else in the world, you gotta be humble and you gotta have humility and you gotta understand that nobody's perfect. You're gonna make mistakes. I can't believe how many scenes I have went to that I miss what's there until I come back and download my photos and I'm looking at my photos, I'm like, my gosh, I never even saw that when I was there. But I can see it come alive in my photos. That's why I think it's it's even more critical that you do stand tall when you make mistakes and two heads are always better than one. so we always tackle our th our investigations as a team. Yeah and being able to sh play off each other and stuff. Yeah, there's too many people just want to prove theirself right. It's like stop. This ain't about the proof. It's just what you can and what what can you can do with the scientific method. It's only a truth that you're trying to get to and uncover and that's it. It doesn't matter who started it, it's what started it and can we prevent it from happening again. Again, you've made this episode way too easy for me because you just teed it up for me again for the last question. But, you know, without getting into, you know, too much confidential information, for you as a fire investigator, what is what is probably your biggest example I'll ask this way of a situation where maybe the evidence led you in a completely different direction than you expected. Or or maybe completely different from what the what the disposition was. So you have to rephrase that so that I understand it. Yeah. Again, it's it's almost ten o'clock at night, so here here we are. Yeah, right. Yeah. So again, you you do have some experience testifying on a stand as well. Yes. I said, you know, you know, without getting, you know, with with within too many confidential parts of of any cases, you know, what's an example of a of a case that you investigated to maybe where the the evidence led you in a completely different direction than you you expected from from your initial impression of Raven onsing well I have one that it was a it was a tri-level house and it was very cold. It was the wintertime. I had no witness information at all because the homeowner wasn't anywhere around and I went in to do this everything appeared to be legit all of it did. And I felt that this was some type of accidental fire, whether it was a cigarette or whether it was electrical, it was cold. We just wanted to get in there, take photographs, do the scene, and get out. And when I was downstairs in this lower level of this tri tri-level, and I started looking around the room and I saw, you know, over here there's a left to right pattern, and here there's a right to left pattern, and I was like, Well I wonder that's an odd thing. That's that's a red flag. But then I looked and the w the fire had burnt the two windows out on the lowest level, and there was a doorway and there was this open stairs that came down. So I immediately went to this was the fire creating its own buoyant flow. And why the opposing burn patterns. And then I read the couch, and the couch it started in the in the left rear back of the couch and it proceeded forward. And There was a table lamp that the power cord had shorted, and there was a globule at the end of it where it showed the short. And I was ready to rule this. Let's rule this electrical and let's get out. And I stopped and I looked, and it was legacy furniture. And that arc mark was on the back of this very heavy wood table. And I kind of sit there and I stared at it for a minute, and I'm like, Candy, think about that. Even if there was an arc. And it separated the power cord. Is that arc gonna sustain burning long enough to raise that table to its ignition temperature? And I was like, gosh, and let me look at this. If that would have started the fire, why is the the patterns on the couch are going from back to front? And had this started, it would go from front to back if that was the case. So I started questioning it, but it wasn't until I looked at the recliner that was sitting in the middle of the room. And I had taken this table and I had turned it over so I could photograph the bottom side of it and the feet that were protected on the floor. And it was exposed the right what if you were sitting in the recliner, exposed the left side, which was closest to the table in the couch. On the right side, there was charring all the way to ground level, and this was sitting on a tile floor. I got the the the The pictures are phenomenal. And I started looking at it and I looked at the other side and I looked at this side and I was like, I think we have a problem here. Like what in the world would make a recliner burn on a tile floor char heavily char all the way down to the foot? And so I have to ask myself, like, one of the things that I've learned in fire investigations is what would I need to reproduce that fire? If you handed me a recliner. It said, Candy, I want you to reproduce these patterns. What would I need in my hand besides the lighter? Well, I'm gonna need an ignitable liquid. You put give me an ignitable liquid, I can do this. If you don't do it, I can't do it. So that's one of the biggest pieces of information. that's one that I thought I knew what it was, but when I got to looking at it, the evidence gave it away on this ri this recliner, and then it made me double double check and look at it again, go get warmed up, come back and look at it a little stronger and I ended up finding I think five different points of origin in this house. I took samples of all five and all five came back as lighter fluid. So I was like, man, I almost missed that just because I was cold. I thought it was accidental, everything looked legit. And it wasn't until the evidence started coming and I started letting the the things stop processes going, okay, if the fire started here, this is what the fire patterns would look like and it doesn't look like that, so now we have a problem. Well, I think you you just finished that off pretty pretty well because that's that's an easy one I feel like to to get caught up in. And as you said, I think we've we've all been there, but Well again, I can't thank you enough. you know, for for coming on. again, this is this is this is huge. the other side of battalion chief Candice Aspee that no one knows. That she's this amazing fire investigator as well. but something I've started recently and you get to be a part of is I'm gonna hit you with three rapid fire questions that have absolutely nothing to do with the fire service. That you didn't get ahead of time. and you you just get to answer as honestly as you want. you know, we can edit out whatever we need to edit out. And I I don't ever tell them to edit anything out, so I just let them leave it up to themselves if they want to. So All right, the first one. If the FBI confiscated your phone right now, what's the one thing that you'd be praying that they didn't find? I don't have anything. Because I've got about twenty thousand pictures on there of classes I've taught and my grandchildren. And I don't have any anything that I wouldn't want anybody to see because my grandkids pick up my phone all the time. So Fair enough. Fair fair fair enough. And I don't even have it locked down. I don't have my phone locked. Anybody could pick it up and just look at it and and stuff like that. But I don't I don't do nude shots. I don't do anything like that that, you know, that people normally get and I don't really have anything on there that I have to hide. it's good to know the next time that I that I see you I can just snag your phone and take some random selfies and You could and that yeah, right. You you definitely could for sure. You can get it out of my hands. All right. Well, leads me to the second question. Why do you admire Stephanie White so much and why does she have ability to give you bad ideas? Well, I admire Stephanie. Because she reminds me a lot of myself and I believe that we have a very similar linear thing way of thinking about the fire service, about life, about people, and we seem to see the same things out here. So I think that kind of draws us closest to closer together. And to her giving me bad ideas is because that's just what Stephanie White does. So, you know, it's like when she like, Well, I'm gonna do these re most ridiculous ten second video clips to invoke, bait rage to rage bait people out here and I'm like, my gosh, at least you get what some of these podcasters do and it's funny. But it's like she actually sees that and and sees things for what they are and she's not afraid to call out. And I think her and I both have very similar circumstances that's had happen to us in the fire service and But I like the no bullshit approach of just saying it. But I told her she she's trying to tell me that she thought she pissed a lot of people off, but I wear the crown and all the no no no when I make people that I'm just saying Stephanie White put me up to it. So Listen, it's easy and you know, you again just hit on it because you were about halfway through this episode and I I looked away a couple of times because it's very scary how similar the two of you are and your thought processes, the way that you read people, the way that you read situations. And I'm not sure if that's scary for me, if that's scary for the rest of the fire service. I I don't know, but you know we don't give a shit what anybody thinks. You know, that's we can't get caught up in that. So many people are caught up in what people think and how they look and everything. As long as you're comfortable in your own skin, hell with everybody else. Correct. Well That leads me to my my last question. It's a little warmer question for you, but I know from from Facebook, you know, social media, you spend a ton of time with your grandkids. You love those grandbabies. I do. If one of them decides one day, and I hope for your sake they don't, but if one of them decides one day to join the fire service, what is one thing that you hope that you could change for their future in the fire service? Well, first off, I'd show how to be fire investigators first. If they join the fire service. Because I would show him that there's more to the fire service to this than just going and fighting fires. It's actually being able to investigate them. And I actually put my three my what my oldest grandson, I put him in fire investigator training when he was three years old. And I have pictures of him walking through a fire scene with a flashlight. And it was trying to get him to read patterns. But then he went to school and he wasn't available, if you will, when I was teaching my fire investigator classes. But I certainly would love to to pass that on. But it's it's just training them as far as the fire service goes that, you know, you're gonna run into to anything in life, depending if it's a fire service or not, that's gonna have its ups, it's gonna have its downs, and there's days you're gonna get your way and there's days that you're not. But this really is a gratifying job to help people, but you gotta be in the right headspace in order to do it. And that's probably the one thing that I would work on the most if any of my grandkids joined the fire service is to put them in the right headspace and to make up rock stars. from the day they hit that street throughout their entire career and to never stop and get complacent and do a lot of the things that's led to a lot of the bad parts of the fire service to to get the better the betterment out of it and and take it you know, don't take it for granted. It you know how the it 'cause there's not a better job in the world that they're ever gonna find if they couldn't they'd only work a few days a year. And that's all we work. I mean everybody wants to say we're overworked. We're not overworked. you know, I work a fifty-six hour work week on a twenty four forty-eight and I only work ninety days a year. So I have a whole thing that I do on that, on time management. I'm I I'm like, you know, I'm in my 36 year career and people ask me all the time when I'm gonna retire. I'm like, Are you kidding me? Thirty-six years is just a warm-up. I want another thirty-six years in the fire service because I love it more today than I've ever loved it. But as you know and any other firefighter knows, the greatest part of this job is being able to help somebody in need. And I hope my my grandchildren do follow into that. Whether no matter what they decide to do in life, if they decide to they want to join me in the fire service, that one thing that they do know is how much that I love it. And yes, I try to spend time with them, but it also takes it away a lot because I'm traveling now and I'm not w around them as much and I try to take the summers off and spring breaks and fall breaks so I can take them on vacation and things, when they're out of school. But it it's it's a it's a it's a hard juggle to do, but it's not my place to raise them. You know, I raised my daughter and now I've got to let her raise her children and and while I love to be around them all the time, I love going out and making a difference in the fire service as well and hopes that that I can leave the world a better place on both sides with the grandchildren and the fire service as well. The fire investigator, that is definitely one thing I would train in. And they the anytime they want to learn the biz, that's the business I would be teaching right there. Listen, you have a student over here that would absolutely love to travel to Indy to to to pick up, you know, just a quarter of what you've probably forgotten at this point. But I still have a lot to learn. Thank you though. Listen, we we we all do and I think that's the attitude that you you have to keep, you know, regardless. You just said thirty thirty six years in the fire service, you know, and it it you finally feel like you get to a point to where like, all right, I think I have enough base knowledge now to to go forth and actually do something good for the next thirty six years. So it it is awesome and I and I share the same sentiment that you know, it's it is very it's it's a great career. You know, could stay a backstack fire fireman for your entire life. you know, you could be a, you know, an engineer for your for your whole life and and you can be happy. But, you know, you end your career and and unfortunately a lot of people do end their career, you know, on that fire marshal, fire investigator side of things. You know, there's there's something to realize that you put a lot of brain power and a lot of experience behind, you know, what you've seen and what you've done, you know, to be able, whether it be from a criminal aspect of prosecuting cases or, you know, God forbid that fatal fire that you're working, you know, of trying to figure out what the heck happened here. You talked about it earlier in the episode, you know, the CPSC, there's there's all these things that, you know, we get a thousand emails a day, but those are the ones that that actually catch my attention that I go, If they found it important enough that this has started to become a trend, it is this certain coffee pot, is this certain space heater, you know, is this air conditioning, you know, whatever the case may be, you know, is this something that's contributing across the country? And do we need to concentrate efforts on the prevention side to avoid the death? Yes. Simple, simple math. We can replace the building, we can replace the stuff, we can replace everything else, we can't replace the grandkids, we can't replace the people, we can't replace, you know, all those things. So Chief, again, thank you a ton you know for this episode. I I can't wait to to get with you at some point. Definitely gonna, you know, give you a break. again, in my personal opinion, you're a superhero. huh. and how you you know, you're running a full time business, you're you're teaching, you're bestowing knowledge that you've learned through your mistakes and you know, through all of your experience. by the way, you're still this operational battalion chief. by the way, you're still a wife. by the way, you're still a grandmother. women will always be far superior to men. And yes, I just admitted that, you know, on a podcast, it'll go on the internet, and I'm okay with that because as you said, I don't care what people think. it's just the truth behind it. So thank you aga again. And I can't I can't wait to get a around to at some point in the future. I appreciate that and thank you very much, but I still got a lot to learn. So I'm just I'm just trying to get better and better, but I always stay a student of this game and just just try to keep learning and and try to keep doing. Yeah. And thank you very much. Thank you, Chief. again, anybody out here that made it all the way through this episode with us, everything she just said in those last couple of sentences, never forget that. Thank you guys for listening and we'll see you on the next one. Thank you.