Rod Ammon:

Welcome to the CFITrainer.Net Podcast. Just over a year ago, two devastating fires in one week shook the New York, New Jersey, Philadelphia area. On January 5th, 2022, an early morning fire occurred in a Philadelphia housing authority row house, split into two apartments, housing at least 26 people. Nine children and three adults, all in the same family, died. A surviving child told investigators he had been playing with a lighter, and accidentally lit the Christmas tree on fire. A lighter was found near the tree after the fire. None of the smoke alarms in the apartment where the fire started were operational. Four days later, a tragic fire occurred in the Twin Parks northwest high-rise apartment building in the Bronx. 17 people, including eight children, were killed. 44 people were injured, most of them children. Many were critically hurt. A space heater caused the fire, which was mostly contained to one apartment, but a self-closing door on the apartment, and two others at the stairwell, did not function correctly.

This failure of compartmentation allowed smoke to rapidly fill the building. A history of false alarms caused many to ignore the fire alarm at first. The complex interior structure of the building, and its multi-floor apartments made escape confusing and difficult, particularly in low visibility conditions. All the victims died of smoke inhalation. A couple weeks ago, a year later, an NBC News Four followup report, found that the building continues to experience complaints about cold temperatures and broken fire doors.

These two fires are not isolated cases. Every day, there are fires in multi-unit buildings. Many of them occur in under-resourced communities, involve older buildings with design and maintenance issues, and affect vulnerable populations like children, seniors, and families whose incomes are in the lowest income bracket. Given recent fires like these two, and the continued issues they highlighted, the CFITrainer.Net team felt the intricacies of investigating multi-unit, multi-fatality fires, merited closer attention.

With us today to discuss this topic is Sergeant Paul Makuc, commanding officer of the Connecticut State Police Fire and Explosion Investigation unit. Sergeant Makuc is an IAAI certified fire investigator, and certified instructor. Sergeant Makuc was the first assigned to the unit in 2005 as a detective. He also served as the certified accelerant detection canine handler. He is the immediate past president of the Connecticut Chapter of the IAAI, and President of the Litchfield County Fire Marshals Association.

He's an instructor at the University of New Haven, the State of Connecticut Fire Marshals Certification Program, the Connecticut Advanced Fire Investigation and Vehicle Fire Investigation Schools, the Connecticut State Police Academy, and the FBI Academy. He has investigated hundreds of fires, and testified at numerous criminal arson trials in both federal and state court. Sergeant Makuc, welcome to the podcast.

Sgt. Paul Makuc:

Hi Rod. Thanks for having me. It's great to be here.

Rod Ammon:

Well, we're very grateful. We've been talking about the brutal fires last year in our region, so let's get to it, and talk about how these types of fires can be better investigated. Paul, what are some of the in investigative issues that become more prevalent when you're investigating a multi fatality, or a multi-unit fire, or both?

Sgt. Paul Makuc:

When I approach some of these investigations, one of my first thoughts goes to legal entry, and I think that's something that should be on the forefront of every public sector fire investigation. Because, so often that piece gets overlooked, or it gets missed. I think having that initial thought about legal entry is going to slow us down a little bit. We're going to be forced to ask those questions, and answer the questions that are going to come up about how we can legally enter into a fire scene to do that investigation. Because if we miss that step, it can be a huge detriment to the overall outcome of that particular case.

Rod Ammon:

Good point. What about ownership? What about some of the other issues around the building, and the people that live there?

Sgt. Paul Makuc:

It can be overwhelming, in that there are a lot of people. They can be very chaotic, and we really have to try to make that effort to identify who belongs there, who should be there, who isn't required to be there, who wasn't there at the time of the fire. And start to make those identifications of witnesses and occupants, so that we can sort out who has legal authority to allow us to enter the building.

This is particularly difficult to do when you, as the investigator, maybe by yourself, or you don't have a whole team available to you, or other resources to assist you with this process. Because again, people are going to be fleeting, and they're going to be moving around, and they're going to be leaving the fire scene perhaps before we can get a chance to even identify them. And I think if we can do that, that is going to be something that you need to come up with a process for, to start to triage these people. Make sure that you record enough information, so that you'll be able to find them later.

Rod Ammon:

Excellent. One of the things that we talked about was dealing with ownership in a multi-dwelling, or a multi-unit fire. How do you find out about the owner, and the issues surrounding the area?

Sgt. Paul Makuc:

Ownership of a property can really be a tricky thing, because many times what we find with some of these larger apartment buildings, or complexes, or associations, that they may have multiple layers to ownership. Usually, I like to start by looking at a field property card from a tax assessor's record. What's nice about technology in today's day and age, to be able to get right on the internet from the scene, and go to those databases that contain the information about ownership of a property. Whether it be through Vision Appraisal, for instance, or the municipality's website. Their governmental page may have a link to their field record card.

You can go in and get an idea, at least start to gather some information about the property itself, and who may own it. Legally, to get into these scenes, obviously, exigent circumstances is something that we can use to at least preliminarily get into these fire scenes to start making some preliminary determinations, and assess what we need, what we might need for resources.

But at some point in time that exigency is going to run out, and so we need to look for other legal entry means to get into that scene. And I always recommend getting a written consent. Again, in that toolbox that you arrive at the fire scene with, I always tell new investigators, "Have some written consent forms, and get that written consent early and often. Because that written consent then can carry you through your investigation for the hours or days that it may take, even if they're not available." So even if they do leave the scene to go stay with somebody, or get other services, you have that piece of paper.

Rod Ammon:

Yeah, good points. All good points. I guess I want to step in for a second and say to the audience, some of this started out as a timeline, and some of these things you may or may not be able to do in the order that we're presenting them. While I get it, I've heard this before, make sure you make contact with as many witnesses and gather the information about them, as you had said. Some of these owner issues may be down the road, and like you said, getting a document signed, that's wonderful. What are some of the other issues going into these multi-unit places that are tight-knit communities? What are some of the challenges for you?

Sgt. Paul Makuc:

Rod, I think one of the things that we find difficult when we're starting to get into these scenes, is we sometimes will rely on the friends and neighbors to give us information, and that information may not be accurate information. And I think sometimes we get stuck with facts and details that we think are presented to us in truth, but in fact may not have occurred the way that they are. That's why it's really, really important to not only get the information from witnesses, but to be able to get into that scene to start to collaborate the information, and start to validate the witness accounts.

When we've got multiple people living in these buildings, that in some cases we run into issues with different cultural backgrounds, cultural differences. Maybe language barriers, where it becomes difficult for the investigator to communicate, we need to be able to reach out to get more assistance, and more help from other resources. Whether it be a language line, or others in our departments who can help us to navigate through some of these challenges.

We find it's best, the model fire investigation team consists of, I think, both fire investigators who are trained in investigation from both the fire side, and the law enforcement side. I think way back in the day, the late '70s, early '80s, New Haven, Connecticut put together a great model of that joint team concept of a fire investigation team, that's comprised of fire, law enforcement professionals who kind of worked together, trained together so that they understand what each other does, but they each play certain roles.

I think if you can do that in your own community, it really goes a long way. Because now you can have some of the police officers, or the detectives who may be available to help you, they know how to identify some of these folks, and what questions to ask them, and how to extract some of this important information from them. And again, process of getting this information is very, very time consuming.

Rod Ammon:

How do you do that?

Sgt. Paul Makuc:

You have to start somewhere, right? You get out of your vehicle, and you're going to be inundated with information and you're probably going to obviously check in with the incident commander. A lot of times the incident commander is going to have some information as to who to talk to. And then, as we start to fan out, you're going to get approached by, in some cases, numerous people who trying to give you information. So the good old pad and pen trick to start writing down names and, "Hey, what unit do you live in? Who lives around you? How many other units are in the building? Have you seen any of the other folks that live here? Are they at work, or are they away on vacation?"

And start collecting as many names as possible, and hopefully if you can enlist some help from others on scene, whether they be other investigators that are working with you. I often find that many, many municipalities have volunteer organizations that come out to assist with some of these fire disasters, and the Red Cross being one of them.

If they respond with a response vehicle, and they do some interviews of the fire victims to get demographic information, and a lot of times they'll offer them some goods and services so that they have a place to go. We collaborate with the Red Cross folks to get some of that information. Other towns may have volunteer CERT groups that are coming out to provide rehab for the fire department, and for some of the victims. Part of that is having a good working relationship with everybody on the scene.

They all know that we're trying to get this information, get everybody identified. Again, your police officers who may be on scene to assist and provide some type of ... Whether it's traffic control or crowd control, a lot of these police officers routinely get people's information. Really, it's just collecting as much of the data that you can, and then following, circling back around. If you're a team of investigators, it's always good to say, "Look, let's meet back in 20 minutes to discuss where we're at, what information we've gathered, and what we still need to get so that we can move forward."

Communication is really, really important when it comes to fire investigation, and working together with a team of investigators so that we don't duplicate information. The worst thing that can happen is, you get a couple of witnesses, and you're starting to talk to them, and halfway through an interview you realize that your partner had talked to them 20 minutes ago, and they're repeating everything that they said.

We want to be efficient with this information. We want to be sympathetic to the victims as well. Their time is valuable, and they've just gone through a traumatic event. We want to treat them with the compassion and with the sympathy that they need so that we can ... Again, they can understand what we're there trying to do, that we're really there trying to help. Sometimes, it needs to wait. Sometimes, we have to just identify somebody, and we're not able to interview them right away. We're going to have to come back to them later on.

Rod Ammon:

Got it. Let's talk about fire. Obviously there's a lot of things you need to corral a lot of people and information that you need to corral at these types of fires. What do you need to know about fire in a multi-unit situation?

Sgt. Paul Makuc:

Rod, I think one of the most important things that we need to start to assess when we do our preliminary size up of the scene is how that building is constructed, what the makeup of the building is. Because we need to understand about smoke and fire flow path, travel. We need to really get a good understanding of what type of construction the building is made of, so that we can start to develop our hypotheses about the origin of the fire, and how that fire developed, and where that fire traveled. How it affects each of the components of that building, and ultimately, maybe some of the fire victims. If we're talking a multi-story building that maybe consists of 14, 15 floors, obviously, we know that there are going to be cores in the building that are going to act as chimneys to carry smoke and fire throughout that building.

We need to identify those areas. Number one, first and foremost for the safety of the investigator. But as far as how we can start to hypothesize where this fire started and how it traveled. Again, as with any fire investigation, we can't even begin to really effectively determined cause until we've determined origin, and origin can be difficult when it comes to some of these buildings based on travel. We rely ... statements of witnesses and the firefighters. We need to start gathering that information, and really doing an assessment of the building as a whole. And again, it becomes difficult when there's catastrophic damage to a building, because we may not have anything to really look at.

And so, we're going to start to rely on people with knowledge of that building to start drawing us sketches, or maybe locate and produce some schematics, or some architectural drawings that they may have of that building so that we can start to put this information together, and plug it in into some of the steps of our scientific method.

Rod Ammon:

Okay, so in a lot of these fires, it seems like a lot of the building, or most of the building is left. And I know there's a huge frustration, even when I read some of the stories earlier about smoke detectors not working, and what ends up happening there. What else should investigators be thinking about, related to fire suppression systems?

Sgt. Paul Makuc:

Talk to the fire department incident commander, and try to get an idea of what that building contains, for ... Whether it's fire suppression, or fire alarm systems. Many times in our jurisdictions, you may already have that knowledge of the building, because many of these buildings are inspectable, and they're required to be inspected at certain intervals. And so, you as the investigator may be responsible in that instance for conducting the inspection of the very building that you're now investigating a fire. And that can be very, very valuable information to you as the investigator.

Because you know the building system already, pre-fire. In that case, you've got an idea of what should be there, but you don't necessarily know what is there at the time of the fire. That's where it becomes real critical for the fire suppression teams that are in that building to be able to report back to the incident commander about what conditions they found.

We're now faced with this building that's been damaged by a fire, and we know that the systems that are supposed to be there, but what went wrong. One of the first places that we start is on the outside of the building. We can make a lot of observations by doing an exterior examination. Oftentimes, I think we get caught as investigators by not stepping back, and really taking a look at the surroundings. Whether it be where the electricity enters into the building, where does that electricity come from? Take a step back, look around at these systems. Do we have a situation on the outside of the building that failed, that could have contributed to why one of the building systems inside the building failed? Right? Did we have a water main break? Was the gate valve shut off on the fire suppression system? Those are things that we're going to want to ...

Hopefully, we can gather that information fairly quickly when we do our exterior examination. The fire department may have already discovered some of those things, and they may have that information. It's real critical in these situations to document what's going on at the time that the fire department arrives, and what types of things they've done to either shut off a system in the building, whether it be a gas main, or some type of a fuel system that feeds the building. The same thing with these fire suppression systems. Many times when we talk to witnesses, and we talk to firefighters, one of the questions that we should be asking is, if you were in the building at the time of the fire, and you evacuated, what caused you to become aware of the fire? Did you hear somebody screaming? Did you smell the smoke? Did you hear an alarm going off?

Many times those details can become very, very important, and people forget, or they're just not asked the question. I find a lot of times what I like to do when we do go to these fires, especially when it involves fatalities or injuries where smoke alarms and fire alarm systems become very, very important information for this incident. Because believe me, they'll play out down the road in litigation, whether it's criminal or civil litigation, a wrongful death litigation. We need to know, as investigators, what was going on with those systems.

I'll often go back to the 911 calls that come in about that given incident to hear the call, and to listen, to see if I can hear in the background that fire suppression, whether the suppression system, or the detection system, the alarm system, activated. We need to, again, talk to the firefighters who went in initially to find out, "Did you hear the alarm system? Did you do anything to either activate the alarm, or turn it off?" In some cases when the fire department arrives, if the system hasn't been activated, they may take steps to activate it, to evacuate other floors that may not even be affected. Those are the types of things that we need to keep in mind and document.

Rod Ammon:

Boy, the word documentation just keeps coming up. I don't know how anybody'd survived the job you guys do without writing down, or recording, or keeping track of everything that was going on. Because seems like you're surrounded by a whirlwind of information. We haven't talked much about fatalities, and I don't think we need to get in depth about fatalities. We are going to be doing a couple of modules on CFITrainer related to fatal fires, but I would like to hear what you think about the sensitivity, or the changes that happen to you when you're dealing with a fire that has fatalities.

Sgt. Paul Makuc:

I want to do the best fire investigation that I can do for my own personal pride, so that when I go to bed at night, I can say, "Look, I had an assignment today. I went out. I hopefully did a little bit better job on this fire than I did the last fire," because that's always one of my goals, is to improve and get better. I think we can all improve at what we do in everything, but especially when it comes to fire investigation. And when I approach a fatality, I think about those things. But I also think about getting answers. Getting answers for the loved ones of the victim who passed away in a fire. I mean, it's just one of those things that, let's face it, we've all, as investigators either read about, or been involved in a fire investigation involving a fatality that hits close to home, maybe it's a neighbor, maybe it's a child.

God forbid. We have these losses with children, and we have children of our own. We have to stop, and sometimes remind ourselves that while the situation, and the circumstances are very tragic, we have to push forward, and do what we're trained to do so that we can provide answers for the families and the loved ones of these victims.

I've had the unfortunate privilege, and it sounds like an oxymoron, but of investigating several line of duty deaths involving firefighters. I think that always hits a little bit close to home. There's a lot of emotion and grief that exists on those fire scenes. There's a very delicate way to approach the firefighters who went in, and maybe did work right alongside of their fallen brothers or sisters who we have to get that information from. It's sometimes difficult to do because of the emotion involved, and we want to make sure that we get as many facts as we can.

Rod Ammon:

All good thoughts. You always come through as a caring person who's thorough, and I'm sure everybody you work with is grateful for that as well as the victims and the families that you work with. What about Bridgeport? You spoke of this earlier.

Sgt. Paul Makuc:

I had a very tragic case down at Bridgeport. It involved city-owned housing units that were occupied by various families, and we responded to assist with the investigation of a four-person fatality, and it was tragic. The mother was in her early twenties, and she had three small children. Two twins who were four, and then she had a six-year-old, and they perished in this fire that occurred in their apartment. The fire was caused by unattended cooking on the kitchen stove.

Mom had been out earlier in the evening at school, and she came home. The children were sleeping upstairs in their bedrooms, and she fell asleep on the couch as she was cooking on the stove. When she was awoken to the smoke by the smoke alarms that were actually functioning in the apartment, her children had now come downstairs and they were trying to get out, and unfortunately mom was not oriented enough to be able to get to the door to unlock the door, and get any of them out.

They all were found in the apartment, on the first floor level, in the living room area trying to get to the door. It was a very, very emotional scene, because we could see in the apartment the sooty hand prints, and the sooty footprints where these children had been running around, trying to get out, and they just couldn't get mom's attention enough to get out.

One of the first things that we did in that particular case, because the city had provided us with maintenance records of the units, we identified that apartment as having just been inspected, ironically, the day before the fire. The inspection had been completed, there had been some deficiencies noted and corrected, particularly with some of the smoke alarms in the unit at the time. There were ... I can't remember the exact number of smoke alarms, but I believe one or two of them had been just replaced the afternoon before the fire. All had been tested and documented in this report as having been functioning. And that information, that report that we got from the property manager became critical information to the investigation, because we knew that down the road this was going to be an element to some litigation.

It's ironic that, that in inspection had happened so close to the fire. We find that many times people will remove smoke alarms, and they'll take them down, or remove batteries from them after an inspection. When they're cooking, they go off, or steam from the shower. Anything that sets these alarms off, it's very difficult once the inspector leaves to really enforce the maintenance of those ... That equipment by an actual tenant.

But in this case, we were aware that all of those detectors were functioning before the fire, hours before the fire, based on this report. Also, during the investigation we were able to locate all of the detectors, and determine their functionality, which in fact they were all functioning properly. We have eyewitnesses from neighboring and then adjacent units that heard the alarms going off, in some cases for several minutes, before the call to 911 was made.

That's a frustrating thing. I think we see this all too often in these larger buildings. Really, I think as a society we sometimes become complacent. One false alarm leads to a second false alarm, to the point where people just don't really take these alarms as seriously as they should. They're assuming in a lot of cases that, "Oh, it's just another alarm. Somebody's cooking. They set their smoke alarm off on a weekly basis when they're cooking," or something. So they ignore them, and they don't make those efforts to check, and verify, or even call 911 for the fire department response, whether it's a false alarm or whether it's an actual, real fire or smoke condition.

Gathering that information is critical, and we were able to get witnesses to give us information that these fires were ... I'm sorry, these smoke alarms were going off several minutes before, and it all seemed to validate what the housing authority inspector had documented in his report.

And that's huge information to have, because down the road, this particular case became a huge, huge civil litigation case. I was deposed on it a couple of times by several different attorneys, and these cases linger for a long, long time because of the ramifications that they have. One of the things that I learned, and throughout my career, we learned lessons the hard way, right? I remember investigating a fatal fire earlier on in my career, and I remember getting deposed.

I had documented the smoke alarms in the building, and in the particular residence, and took photos of them, and documented their locations within the building. I noted all that in my report, and I remember during a deposition, I got a question from an attorney about the smoke alarms. I referred to my report to explain how many there were, and where they were. The next couple of questions that he asked I was unprepared for.

There were questions such as, "Hey, what kind, what brand of smoke alarm was it? What type was the smoke alarm? Was it an ionization, or was it a photo electric smoke alarm? What was the serial number on it? What was the battery condition? What was the expiration date of this detector?" I kind of learned a lesson that day. I didn't have that information. I didn't take the time to document those alarms that thoroughly. Now, what I've learned to do, and what my teams do is we take the time to not only document the locations and the number of alarms, but we'll go as far as to, without spoliation issues, and without any destructive testing, or destructive examination of these items, we'll more thoroughly document them. We may remove them from the ceiling or the wall. We'll photograph all the information about what type, and brand, and expiration date.

We actually started removing batteries, and doing battery testing with a volt meter. We'll take a brand new nine volt battery, we'll calibrate it with the volt meter to show nine volts, and then we'll photograph that, and then we'll next photograph the battery and the smoke detector on the meter, to show how many volts are in that battery. In some cases, we can actually function the alarm to see if it's functioning. In other cases we may not be able to, but the documentation that we do with smoke alarms, just for instance, now is much more thorough than we used to for those reasons. And then-

Rod Ammon:

You know ... Go ahead.

Sgt. Paul Makuc:

Some cases we'll take great care to preserve those smoke alarms. I know in the Bridgeport case, we had no reason to seize them, or take them from the scene. That's usually not a good idea, especially in the public sector. But I knew that there was going to be private investigations as a result of this fire, and there were going to be other investigators coming in after us. I preserved those smoke alarms by, again, we documented everything in place, and where we found it.

But then I took a step further, and I removed each of the alarms, and I had put them in bags, and labeled where they were found. And then I put them in a secure place in the fire scene, so that they wouldn't get damaged, or they wouldn't get lost, if you will, or inadvertently discarded or destroyed. Those are the things that we need to think about, unfortunately, as investigators. That we need to think down the road. We need to think about the questions that we're going to be asked, and the answers that are going to be asked of us after we do these investigations. I think that's something to take away from some of the lessons that I've learned, is just how thorough we are when we're documenting.

Rod Ammon:

Everybody's learning every day, and with what you guys do, it just continues to amaze me as long as I've been working with you, how many details you're dealing with, and how many different jobs, and processes are included inside of your overall job to investigate a fire with this much going on. You talked about how you learned, from being in this court case, and having this lawyer come and ask you these kind of questions. Any other tips that you'd like to give to investigators where they've seen, relating to multi-unit, or multi fatality fires where it's easy to get tripped up?

Sgt. Paul Makuc:

Rod, I think, as I said before, I think that the most important thing to remember here is you're not alone as a fire investigator. We oftentimes, due to various restrictions or constraints that we have on a budget or on manpower, I know everybody's suffering these days from lack of manpower, is to remember that you're not alone. There's always somebody that you can call, and at least consult with, or ask questions, and hopefully bring some extra resources in that you may not have. And I think we need to, in these instances with multi-units, sometimes we do need that extra help.

You may need to look whether you're local, or state, or federal ... You need to look to some of the other resources that are out there that can help us out. And again, looking beyond just the fire scene investigation, there are many code issues that sometimes will come into these equations when it comes to some of these building that require the building code, or the fire code to be present in these particular buildings so that we don't have injuries or fatalities when fires happen.

Sometimes just consulting and making sure that you've dotted your I's, and crossed your T's, and done the documentation, sometimes you may want to hold that scene for a little bit longer. Often, when we're done with the scene, I'll step back and say, "Okay, I think we're done, but do we want to just maintain custody of the scene, and go home and sleep on it, and come back in the morning just to make sure that we got everything?"

Because when we walk away from that scene, we don't know what's going to happen, and things can be changed, or altered, or again, discarded. Whether it's inadvertently or inadvertently, and we want to make sure that we don't have that happen to us if we're not sure. Use your resources, work together, work in those teams that we talked about. I'm a firm believer of a team concept, and doing these investigations, communicating together. Again, they take time. Look for those witnesses. You keep searching for the witnesses until you've exhausted all your possibilities.

We've had witnesses come forward or found witnesses weeks after a fire that have provided answers that really add to our data and allow us to either prove or disprove a hypothesis. Obviously, when it comes to these multi units, more and more people to interview, it does make the task a little bit more challenging, but again, it's exhausting work sometimes, but it can have great results that can be really, really successful.

Rod Ammon:

Thanks for coming on today. I and we all really appreciate your focus on these fire, some of them very tragic, Paul, or Sergeant Makuc, I should say. I'm sure you joined us at CFITrainer.Net, and sending condolences to the families and departments affected. And once again, just thanks so much for your time.

Sgt. Paul Makuc:

Absolutely, Rod, and thank you for all you and Stonehouse Media and your team does for fire investigation. You guys are a huge asset, and we're really, really lucky as an industry to have you behind us, and have your support, and the great work that you do. It has a huge impact on us as investigators, and I think I can speak for myself, and a lot of my colleagues, and even some of my students that use CFITrainer.Net, and listen to the podcast that you do here. And it's just, we're real lucky to have this, because it's a great way to get information out and share information, so thank you to you and all your staff.

Rod Ammon:

Wow. Thank you, Paul. That means a lot coming from you. We're incredibly grateful for what we've been able to get involved in, and it's been life-changing. Thanks again for your time today.

Sgt. Paul Makuc:

All right, Rod, thanks.

Rod Ammon:

Just a reminder, register for the IAAI's ITC in North Carolina. It's coming up quick, and it's happening this spring. It's a great place. There's a casino there, beautiful surroundings. We look forward to seeing you there. Again, go to the IAAIITC.com website to register and book your hotel room.

Last month, the IAAI Foundation kicked off a fundraising drive with a goal of raising $100,000 in 2023, to support CFITrainer.Net's future. The driving force behind this challenge is IAAI past president, Jerry Naylis. Jerry, thanks for your support. We hope to have Jerry on the podcast next month. We've included a link to donate to CFITrainer on this podcast page.

This podcast and CFITrainer.Net are made possible by funding from a fire prevention and safety grant from the Assistance to Firefighters Grant Program, administered by FEMA and the US Department of Homeland Security. There's also support from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco Firearms and Explosives, and voluntary online donations from CFITrainer.Net users and podcast listeners.

Thanks for joining us today on the podcast. Stay safe. We'll see you next month. For the IAAI and CFITrainer.Net, I'm Rod Ammon.

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Jerry Naylis’ Challenge Letter

Fire and Explosion Investigation Unit. Connecticut State Police.

Singhvi, Anjali, et. al. The Chain of Failures That Left 17 Dead in a Bronx Apartment Fire. The New York Times. 8 Jul 2022.

Glorioso, Chris and Courtney Copenhagen. I-Team: Fire Door and Heat Complaints Persist Year After 17 Die in Bronx Inferno. 10 Jan 2023.

City Releases Preliminary Findings of the Investigation of Fatal Fire in Fairmount. City of Philadelphia press release. 11 Jan 2022.

Scott, Katherine. 1 Year Anniversary of Deadly Fairmount Fire that Killed 12, Including 9 Children. WPVI-TV 6 Action News. 5 Jan 2023.