Appliance Analysis Findings - Newsletter

October 2007

Appliance Analysis had a unique opportunity last spring. We were able to perform a LIVE burn in the kitchen of a house that was scheduled to be demolished. We used this opportunity to reenact a scene we had been investigating…

A couple came home allegedly inebriated. The husband went to bed. The wife started cooking and fell asleep. Sometime later the house was engulfed in flames. The wife made it out; the husband didn’t. Appliance Analysis investigated the glass top electric range at the scene at the fire.

This live burn gave us the opportunity to come into the kitchen and recreate the scene. Our goal was to find burn patterns and/or fire direction on the bottom side of the glass of the glass top range. We wanted to see if these patterns matched the burner or burners that were on during the time of the fire.

We set up the kitchen with a similar glass top range, and general debris (fuel) in the kitchen. We placed a sauce pan of rice and sauce pan with 1 table spoon of oil on the burners and turned the burners on. We waited. For a while nothing happened. The smoke became almost overwhelming, but no fire. Just as we were about the help the fire along, we had ignition.

We were surprised to see that the sauce pan with cooking oil started on fire first. A small fire started in the pan. It didn’t catch onto anything else in the kitchen and eventually burned itself out. At about the time the first fire was extinguishing, the sauce pan with rice started on fire. The kitchen fire was allowed to burn to flash over; we had fire burning down to the top of the kitchen counter tops.

We removed the electric range from the house and took it back to the lab to disassemble. We compared the underside of the glass top with the before the fire photographs. We were unable to determine direction of the fire from the underside of this glass top – but we have video to watch and hope to be able to recreate another fire scene in the future. See the video of the live burn!