In the middle of the night, a fire on a playground on Cincinnati’s riverfront grew into a roaring fireball that caused significant damage to the Daniel Carter Beard Bridge, a major artery connecting the city to Northern Kentucky.
The flames reach up over 40 feet and were so high above the bridge some witnesses thought a vehicle was on fire on the roadway. Even after the main blaze was extinguished, flames were still rekindling after seven hours.
There’s been no official word on what started the blaze.
The Cincinnati Fire Department’s fire investigation unit has been tasked with figuring it out. It’s a nine-member unit that takes on between 250 and 280 investigations each year, about a quarter of all the fires in the city.
But these are not normal firefighters. The road to join the unit is long. Sherman Smith is the Cincinnati Fire Department’s assistant chief over the division of fire prevention and community risk reduction. In an interview with The Enquirer, he explained the process of becoming a fire investigator and how the unit works.
First, the members became firefighters which has its own training program and testing process. Then after about four years of working for the department, members can take a test for a promotion into the fire investigation unit.
Only the top scorers are admitted, but not before they complete the full Ohio Peace Officer Training at the Cincinnati Police Academy and become certified law enforcement officials in the state of Ohio.
Then they head to Maryland to the National Fire Academy to learn everything from how electrical systems work to how to present testimony to a jury in a court case.
Once the firefighters complete their training at the national academy, they start working on investigations at home. They complete continuing education courses and learn more under the wings of the other investigators.
After another four years of conducting investigations, they may meet the requirements to become a certified fire investigator through the International Association of Arson Investigators. The candidates have to provide documentation to the association of the work they’ve done and take a final test.
In Cincinnati, eight of the nine members of the fire investigation unit are IAAI certified. The last and newest member just completed their work at the police academy.
Smith said the investigators use a meticulous, scientific process to try to determine the cause and origin of each fire. More basic fires, about 75% or so, are investigated by a fire officer at the scene who can determine how a fire started.
Smith said if a homeowner says they were smoking on the couch and fell asleep and then a cigarette butt was found near a smoldering couch, it might not require a fire investigator. But if there’s any doubt, Smith said, the unit is called in.
He said the investigators use many of the same tools police use. They interview witnesses, review surveillance footage and send evidence off to local and state crime labs for testing.
The investigators are armed, like police officers, because they could find themselves working alone or in pairs at night in an isolated part of the city. The subjects of their investigations could be criminals who were trying to harm people.
Smith said the investigators find that about a third of the fires they investigator are unintentionally set, another third are “incendiary fires” that were set intentionally. The final third are undetermined.
“Because of the need for scientific certainty as to the cause, it can be very difficult to close the book on a case,” Smith said. “There might be a strong theory, but they really want to be able to testify in court to what happened. It absolutely comes down to science.”
Smith said there is no typical amount for a fire investigation to be complete, and no timeline for when the bridge fire investigation will be finished. It could take weeks or even years to nail down exactly what happened, he said.
This article originally appeared on Cincinnati Enquirer: Daniel Carter Beard Bridge fire: What we know about the investigation
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