269 - Fire investigations and the scientific method with Vincent Brannigan

Welcome And Why Vincent Returns

Wojciech Wegrzynski 0:00

Hello, everybody. Welcome to the Fire Science Show. I like arguing with Vincent Brannigan on LinkedIn Because his views of the world are usually quite unique. He's, he's presenting quite unique opinions, uh, especially especially if we start discussing something like law and fire engineering, because that's where he is an expert. And I thought it could be nice to invite Vincent once again, uh, to the podcast, uh, to hear his opinion about fire investigations, because that's also a huge part of his life and career. Vincent did a lot of work in the courthouse. He worked for a judge. He's seen those cases. he has done investigations. Therefore, I thought, "Yeah, h-how about we discuss scientific method used in investigations?" I knew it's gonna be a nice topic because, uh, discussing stuff with Vincent is, uh, always, always fun, uh, full of anecdotes. So in this podcast episode, we go into fire investigations kind of in a way defined by NFPA 921, but, uh, viewed from the perspective of someone who is a historian of science, someone who's a lawyer, someone who's a fire engineer, and, you know, view that as how are we implementing the use of scientific method in the investigations, and can we even use truly a scientific method in a fire investigation? In this podcast episode, we discuss what terms like hypothesis, scientific hypothesis, model, theory, law, what, what do they mean in terms of the process and, uh, what distinguishes one from another. We, we discuss deduction, abduction, the ways of, uh, you know, figuring out what has happened, and again, from, from the filter of the scientific method. and as I said, uh, Vincent always gives a lot of anecdotes, and it just so happened that the podcast was recorded a few days ago on the anniversary of, uh, 9/11. Vincent is a New Yorker, so a big chunk of the podcast is a recollection of, of 9/11, uh, from, from his perspective, which I think is also interesting. And, uh, yeah, you'll also learn a little bit about Titanic. In the podcast episode, it's filled with, uh, interesting stuff and, uh, funny stories. I hope you will enjoy this one as much as I enjoyed recording it. So let's spin the intro and jump into the episode.

Sponsor Message From OFR Consultants

Wojciech Wegrzynski 2:56

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9/11 From A Fire Engineer’s Desk

Wojciech Wegrzynski 3:58

I am joined today by Professor Vincent Brannigan. Hey, Vincent. Welcome back to the podcast.

Vincent Brannigan 4:03

Happy to be here

Wojciech Wegrzynski 4:04

Uh, thanks for taking, uh, my invitation. We're gonna discuss, uh, investigation, science, uh, I guess, uh, a little bit of philosophy and law along the way, but I need to start, uh, with a special day we, we have today. It's 25th anniversary of, of 9/11, and, uh, maybe let's, let's first, talk a little bit about that. it's crazy. It's 25 years. I, I remember it vividly. I was in high school back then, you know. And even in Poland that was a huge thing. we just had a new news TV start. We didn't have a news TV in Poland before, and that was like the first week when our first 24-hour, uh, news TV was broadcasting, and it was like everywhere. Uh, that, that was insane day.

Vincent Brannigan 4:49

I, I can tell what happened 'cause it was really very interesting.

Wojciech Wegrzynski 4:52

Yeah

Vincent Brannigan 4:52

uh, I was professor in the Department of Fire Protection Engineering, my lecture topic that day in my course in building safety and the law was to be what we now call World Trade Center One, the first explosion in the World Trade... the first bombing back in '93, which people in my department were active investigating. so the... I was all prepared to talk about the World Trade Center. So I'm sitting in my office in the morning, I get a call from my wife, "Turn on your computer and see what, you know, what you're gonna see." And I saw the airplane hit the second tower, uh, live. And, All I can tell you is that what, what... Now let me, let me just explain. People may not know this. Uh, I am second-generation fire.

Wojciech Wegrzynski 5:33

Mm-hmm.

Vincent Brannigan 5:34

My father, uh, was the author of Building Construction for the Fire Service, Frank Brannigan, and was a world expert in building collapse during fires.

Wojciech Wegrzynski 5:42

Hmm.

Vincent Brannigan 5:43

So I had worked with him on the various editions, the early editions of the book, I had a real good understanding of the risk at the World Trade Center, and I can remember saying to people, "I hope they're vacuuming the people out of that building, because it could collapse." I, I didn't know it would collapse in an hour. I had n-n, no notion, but the risk that the World Trade Center would collapse was on my mind as we are watching fires go in the, in the, in the World Trade Center. So the collapse was not a sur- not a surprise, but I was still staggered by it, by the violence, by the death, by the I'm from New York

Wojciech Wegrzynski 6:18

Yeah

Vincent Brannigan 6:18

and my father was a, uh... A- and he was watching television at the same time. He was, uh, well known in the New York City Fire Department and was a founder of the, what was called the New York City Fire Bell Club, the Buffs Club in New York. So I had a lot of New York connections uh, and just watching this was a screaming nightmare. And of course, the other place the planes came was to Washington and hit the Pentagon, although one crashed in Pennsylvania due to the people on board. We lost a faculty member and her husband and two children in the Pentagon crash. And, uh, she was, she had gone to Georgetown from Maryland, but we all know her very well. you know, so it became very personal, uh, very, very quickly. And, um, just the nightmare. So then the university, for whatever reason, said we shouldn't cancel classes in the middle of an absolute horror. So, uh, I had a class that afternoon supposedly on the World Trade Center. So I went up to my class and I said, "The university says we have to have class." So I said, "We just had class," you know? "This is a terrible tragedy, want anybody who just wants to go home now and hug their kids or whatever, leave. No problem. I'll sit here as long as there's anyone else, and then I will go home and hug my kids and, and you know, they'll be home and my wife is at home." uh, so these are, these fire people and they're all just stunned by the, the whole situation. So we had a quick swing round, did anybody have anybody want to stay? And then we all went So that was my class. It one of the shortest but most meaningful classes I ever had. Um, since that time, and, uh, my dad's next edition of his book on building collapse has the World Trade Center collapse as the cover story, obviously. and I've been actively involved in the actual investigations and some of the questions people raised, and, then more dealing with the conspiracy theories

Wojciech Wegrzynski 8:11

Okay

Vincent Brannigan 8:12

who make various claims about the World Trade Center. And, uh, I, I taught that right to the point where I finally, uh, took emeritus status and retired from the university. So, um, was, uh, I mean, the, just the absolute nonsense that runs from people's, brains. And the difficulty of doing the actual investigation due to the tremendous destruction all of the issues of getting the steel out and looking at it and what the issues were and so forth. But, it took a federal law to give the federal government the ability to investigate the building. There was no federal capability to investigate the building, so they rushed through a federal law to give them the ability. And for the most part, the Bureau of Standards and the others did a, a very competent and thorough job. But, there were things that were just very difficult, like what was the fuel load in the building? And I know Jim Quintiere and some other people disagreed very strongly, and that certainly affected any part of the analysis.

Wojciech Wegrzynski 9:09

Oopsie

Vincent Brannigan 9:09

I, I kept up teaching it in my, winter term course until I stopped teaching. And, uh, I still participate occasionally in panels, on the World Trade Center. So I was only in the building once,

Wojciech Wegrzynski 9:20

Okay

Vincent Brannigan 9:20

uh, but I went all the way to the Windows on the World at the top. I was unimpressed by the restaurant, but had the fast- fanciest men's room I ever saw.

Wojciech Wegrzynski 9:28

Okay

Vincent Brannigan 9:29

the top of the World Trade Center spectacular. Um, and, uh, my judge... I was up there with my judge. We had a case that was actually heard in the adjoining federal building, so I had taken a moment to go look at the World Trade Center. So I was, I was in the building once, uh, and that was it. but it is, uh, it is one of the most painful places in the United States to go to.

Wojciech Wegrzynski 9:51

I can imagine. I mean, a- as I said, it was something everyone talked even, even in here, and we are thousands and thousands of miles. We were not even a part of European Union back then. That was 2001, so that, that, that's a whole different, uh, era, Uh, for, for me, later on scientifically, uh, World Trade Center 7 collapse was always interesting because, of the traveling fires and, you know, these new developments that followed and, and formalized, you know, this type of compartment fire dynamics for open plan compartments, which I believe today yields great results in, in, in, you know, finding, possible weaknesses of buildings against scenarios like that, I think. I think that's great. We, we, we at least learned, in our field a little bit from, from that

Vincent Brannigan 10:38

I will, I will mention that my father protested the construction of the World Trade Center when it was built,

Wojciech Wegrzynski 10:43

Really?

Vincent Brannigan 10:44

because it was built without sprinklers.

Wojciech Wegrzynski 10:46

Ah, okay

Vincent Brannigan 10:47

they were retrofitted um, of course it didn't make any difference in this particular disaster because they lost all the water when the airplanes hit the building. But, it was interesting that, uh, just in our,

Wojciech Wegrzynski 10:58

How do you retrofit the sprinklers into such a huge building? That's, that must have been amazing

Vincent Brannigan 11:04

But took a lot of work. That passed Local Law 5 in New York, and they were retrofitting the sprinklers.

Wojciech Wegrzynski 11:08

No

Vincent Brannigan 11:08

Um, the main thing was the difficulty. No, you know, had worked out that a couple of floors of fire could weaken the, floors and walls and because of the poor fireproofing until the '93 explosion, at which point the weakened fireproofing, uh, became a, legal and, We did, nobody to my depart- to my knowledge had published this so that... But what had happened in the World... And normally in fireproofing, columns are critical and floors are not.

Wojciech Wegrzynski 11:36

Hmm

Vincent Brannigan 11:37

So columns were protected to a higher degree than floors. But in the World Trade Center, the floors were just as important as the columns because the whole thing depended on the floors in avoiding collapse. So there was a fundamental error in the codes and the design and the integration and, that was one of the causes of the World Trade Center collapse.

Code And Design Lessons From WTC

Wojciech Wegrzynski 11:59

Yeah.

Vincent Brannigan 11:59

So if, if, let me, uh, perhaps it's worth just taking a moment for your listeners just to give a little bit of my background, because it's a little unusual

Vincent’s Unusual Path Through Law

Wojciech Wegrzynski 12:06

Yeah

Vincent Brannigan 12:06

First of all, I am currently professor emeritus, at the University of Maryland Department of Fire Protection Engineering Uh, my background, as I said, I'm second-generation fire. My dad was Frank Brannigan. I actually investigated my first fire in 1970 at the University of Maryland. Uh, a dormitory room was burned during a student protest and some people were blaming the students, and I determined by showing exactly that it had... It was a police department tear gas grenade fired through the window that ignited the closet. We recovered the grenade, we saw the hole in the window and so forth, so that was my first actual investigation of a fire. Um, I did my undergraduate degree in the history of technology from the University of Maryland and then went to Georgetown to law school, uh, where I did everything in fire I could possibly do. Uh, I was an engineering technician at the National Bureau of Standards for Jim Quinterie. I later served for the Fire Prevention and Control Administration and Joe Clark when they started that up. I did my legal writing on fire safety of the involuntarily confined mental patient, was lucky enough to get a clerkship at the Consumer Product Safety Commission for the judge, because we were gonna handle burning mattresses and aluminum wire and so forth. So, um, I started teaching in the department as a part-time faculty member in 1975, fire safety codes and standards, which included arson evidence, uh, in one of its areas. Okay. so that, that is how I came, and then, the university, in its wisdom, created an assistant professorship in consumer protection law and fi- and safety, which they appointed me to in, uh, 1978, I continued to work in fire, but I was in the consumer economics program, so I did a lot of work in cost-benefit analysis, but I still was teaching, some of the other areas of product liability. And the university reorganized again when I'd made full professor in 1990, and I was invited to engineering and to fire protection engineering in particular, to develop the area of fire protection engineering and the law. I did, did, concentrated on fire problems, but I actually did legal problems for the whole school of engineering in every kind of technology. Part of this was Uh, I was on the committee on the history and philosophy of science, on the question of how scientists know what they think they know because it is so critical to the question of scientific evidence. So I actually started this in the 1980s with lectures in Germany, and, uh, we'll get into some of the details of how that mattered. I stayed in the, uh, engineering school, in the School of Engineering as a professor until 2007, at which point I was given emeritus status and, no longer had to do administrative

Wojciech Wegrzynski 14:50

That, that sounds all, that sounds like a great deal

Vincent Brannigan 14:53

So I, it was like the filet mignon of, being a professor. You could just do teaching and research

Wojciech Wegrzynski 14:58

do you, do you keep your room or

Vincent Brannigan 14:59

Ah. No, I ga-- I, I gave that up as do most emeritus faculty 'cause th-th-the shortage. In laboratories you have to pay for with, with research grants. uh, for quite a while I taught in the winter term and I also, uh, I was available as a, as a substitute lecturer. I could always do something in almost, in about four different courses I could always do a piece that they could

Wojciech Wegrzynski 15:19

Yeah

Vincent Brannigan 15:20

and we did that for a while. So, uh, at the moment, I'm very grateful to the department and, uh, for their support and, but, uh, in fact, it's only slightly relevant to what we do here, but my wife developed Alzheimer's and she died last year.

Wojciech Wegrzynski 15:35

Hmm.

Vincent Brannigan 15:35

was

Wojciech Wegrzynski 15:35

Sad to hear

Vincent Brannigan 15:36

and so forth for an Alzheimer's patient, so that's what took up a lot of my detail work, you

Wojciech Wegrzynski 15:42

Well, fr-fr-from that very, very rich, uh, bio, I think the interesting parts for me are your, uh, law experience and at the same time history of science experience because as I promised to the listeners, this is an investigations ex- uh, episode, and I think, uh, a lot of our investigations are to some extent carried like, like a scientific, investigation. Like in, in the bigger idea there, they should follow a scientific method to be able to discern beyond any doubt what has happened. And, this is quite an interesting thing, can you even do that in case of such a complex thing as a fire? Like what, what are your immediate thoughts about scientific method and investig-

NFPA 921 And The Evidence Problem

Vincent Brannigan 16:31

When I was first appointed as an assistant-- as a lecturer actually, full-time, I was in part funded by the Institute for Physical Sciences and Technology to examine scientific evidence, and that was in 1977. And I gave my first presentations in Germany in 1981 on that in the United States. And so it was a constant issue of mine, um, the nature of scientific knowledge and how it's used as evidence in the regulatory and liability system. So I critiqued of the rules. I did a lot of work on what do scientists know when they claim they know something.

Wojciech Wegrzynski 17:06

Yeah

Vincent Brannigan 17:07

I was working on this at the same time the National Academy of Sciences, criticizing fire, among others, for essentially using nonsense, yeah, as expert testimony. I mean, there was stuff that was just... had no scientific found-founding at all. uh, calling it, as I said, calling it old wives' tales was an insult to old wives. Um, and th-they simply had these beliefs about alligatoring and and what... And people went to jail, people were executed based on, this kind of non-science stuff.

Wojciech Wegrzynski 17:40

Mm.

Vincent Brannigan 17:40

started, and I was not directly involved in the 921 effort, but when they came out with it, I took one look at it and it bore no resemblance to the scientific method I was familiar with, uh, when they said they were doing the scientific method. And

Wojciech Wegrzynski 17:56

That, w-w-when did it come out, uh

Vincent Brannigan 17:59

19-- I'm saying 1989.

Wojciech Wegrzynski 18:02

Okay.

Vincent Brannigan 18:03

I'd have to look.

Wojciech Wegrzynski 18:04

No, but this is like 1990s, we're talking '80s

Vincent Brannigan 18:07

This was in the early '90s, just when I moved to engineering. So this gave me a, a focus in engineering. Um, they were working on this for quite some time. I, I would have to go back and look at when the first standard was actually approved. But I, I, I, I knew the people who were working on it. I knew that they were very smart people, there was just something wrong in the way they were thinking about it. So finally, after the year 2000 and the World Trade Center and the obvious need for better quality, they upped their game and they finally published the standard as 921. And this was also when the National Academy came out with their report. So, there was a great deal of concern and worry and the Innocence Project looking at people. So this is all coming to a head around 19-- around 2010.

Wojciech Wegrzynski 18:52

to, to start with, like, uh, science is that thing that constantly evolves, and it's like the nature of science is that we have a theory of something, and it's proven by experiment, and eventually we reach the boundaries of that theory

Vincent Brannigan 19:07

Actually, actually you have to be very careful with the language, 'cause that's not a theory.

Wojciech Wegrzynski 19:11

Okay.

Vincent Brannigan 19:11

Okay, I'll, I'll, I'll go through the

Wojciech Wegrzynski 19:13

Yeah, please go.

Vincent Brannigan 19:14

All right.

Wojciech Wegrzynski 19:15

I invited you here to roast me on that, so go for it

Vincent Brannigan 19:18

people use

Hypothesis Versus Theory Versus Law

Vincent Brannigan 19:19

the word-- The word theory is used outside of science in a totally different way from the way it's used in

Wojciech Wegrzynski 19:24

Yeah

Vincent Brannigan 19:24

And, very simply, what you start with are always hypotheses. A hypothesis is

Wojciech Wegrzynski 19:28

Mm.

Vincent Brannigan 19:31

some kind of statement about how the world works.

Wojciech Wegrzynski 19:34

Hmm?

Vincent Brannigan 19:34

hypothesis. Now, the next step is to turn the hypothesis into a scientific hypothesis. A scientific hypothesis is one that you can test the scientific methods. And they're-- Scientific method's very complicated. 9/21 claims that it's piggybacking on essentially physics and other hard sciences and engineering, which is a very, very high level. There's no question that observational sciences psychology, sociology, are-- have a much lower level of certainty in their own, quote, "scientific methods." There are people who argue that they're not sciences at all. Somewhere in between the two is biology, which i- which simply because of the massive complexity. The person who explained this to me most carefully, the mother of bioinformatics, the who pioneered the true scientific analysis of proteins, was my mother-in-law,

Wojciech Wegrzynski 20:25

Okay

Vincent Brannigan 20:26

Dayhoff. and she created the first international atlas of protein sequence and did the first mathematical work how related you are to a frog, for example, or, or something. And by analyzing proteins, she created the concept of living fossils, and that we could do mathematical analysis of proteins and later DNA, proteins were simpler than DNA, to determine essentially how evolution worked. So whenever they talk about COVID, uh, uh, uh, let's say the COVID virus mutating, and we can look at the new one and look at the old one and determine, that's all derivative of the work of her and her colleagues.

Wojciech Wegrzynski 21:03

Mm-hmm

Vincent Brannigan 21:04

so she started doing this work in the late 1950s. She actually died in 1983, so, uh, she was very young. And so, this was something that fascinated me in the early days because I could build this hierarchy of different levels of certainty, science in different fields. And, you know, as I said, down at the bottom you have sociology

Wojciech Wegrzynski 21:24

so when you go from hypothesis to theory, what changes? The theory is proven by experiment?

Vincent Brannigan 21:29

next step. Do you have a scientific hypothesis? A scientific hypothesis is one according to Popper and, and a number of other philosophers of science, is one that's testable by the rules of science.

Wojciech Wegrzynski 21:40

Testable. Okay

Vincent Brannigan 21:41

And the fundamental rule as I interpret, this is my own interpretation, is that all testing must be independent of the operator. that requires, in doing the test is one thing, but the actual test of a scientific hypothesis, it doesn't matter who does the test because you have to be able to replicate it.

Wojciech Wegrzynski 22:01

S- so it's not,

Vincent Brannigan 22:01

people

Wojciech Wegrzynski 22:01

so it's not also subject to an opinion or

Vincent Brannigan 22:05

That's correct.

Wojciech Wegrzynski 22:06

interpre- interpretation, it's just result?

Vincent Brannigan 22:08

has to be the test.

Wojciech Wegrzynski 22:10

Okay.

Vincent Brannigan 22:10

words, Einstein said, "Gravity will bend light waves, and this is how you do it. As Venus goes behind the sun, you look for it, and the time will be different." And he proposed the test, and they went out when there was a transit of Venus, and sure enough, the light bent exactly the way said. it required skill in doing the test. I mean, I'm not saying that anyone could do the test. But 50 people could do the test, they should come up with the same answer. Okay. That's a scientific hypothesis, and that is a method of testing it. When the goal of such testing is to see if you can disprove the original process. Tests do not support the process. They are there to disprove it. And this is even recognized in 921, but they don't really have what it means. In other words, it's the c- it's the regular application of different tests to a hypothesis that cannot disprove it, and no one can think of a te-- uh, you know, you, you, you try. Finally, when the consensus of people who know what they're talking about "Aha, this has been sufficiently tested. We will now call it a theory." So, to scientists, a theory is something that has been repeatedly tested and not disproved. All right? It's not just someone's wild idea, which is the way the term is used in the lay public. the theory of evolution is a well-tested set of hypotheses that have never been disproved

Wojciech Wegrzynski 23:37

in terms of disproving, I understand that it's one If one experiment disproves it, that's it, it's disproven. But it's

Vincent Brannigan 23:45

is dispr-

Wojciech Wegrzynski 23:46

B-

Vincent Brannigan 23:46

i- and it, and it can't be part of a theory.

Wojciech Wegrzynski 23:48

but you cannot say that one experiment can prove it

Vincent Brannigan 23:52

Right. Nothing can prove it. As a matter of fact, the hypothetico-deductive method, as Popper and other people said, there is no way of proving a hypothesis.

Wojciech Wegrzynski 24:01

Okay

Vincent Brannigan 24:01

disprove it by showing something totally inconsistent with it. Now, you can have experimental errors all the t- I mean, this sometimes, and, sometimes hypotheses are structured in such a way that, the broad question, can be pr- can be, cannot be disproved, but some portions of it. So, example, the photoelectric effect is what Einstein actually got the Nobel Prize for.

Wojciech Wegrzynski 24:23

Hmm?

Vincent Brannigan 24:24

And the Nobel Pri- the photoelectric effect has been tested a thousand different ways, and nothing has ever shown that it was wrong. a very, very reliable thing. Then you get, you have an actual theory.

Wojciech Wegrzynski 24:37

Hmm

Vincent Brannigan 24:37

As you keep testing a theory and, and phrase it better, and they add other hypotheses, they kind of accumulate things, and they finally have a c- then the next step, when you've tested theories and stretched them and pulled at them, and a whole bunch of people look at them, then it can be, by scientists, it can be termed a law. A law is something that no one in their right mind thinks is wrong. And there is a law of gravity. is a theory, gravity is a law.

Wojciech Wegrzynski 25:05

Mm-hmm.

Vincent Brannigan 25:06

And they have a real good idea of the effect of gravity. On the other hand, there's a theory that, particles, that-- or that, not particles, but that gravity projects itself certain ways, and that is still in the area of theory. My favorite example of this is of, uh, actually I, I, um, questioned, uh, Dr. John Toll, who was president of the University of Maryland, world-class physicist, also president of, of SUNY, and finally president of the whole university system. And I said, "Dr. Toll says quarks. We see them in all the textbooks and everything. Are they real, or are they just mathematical approximations? Because no one's ever seen one." And he scratched his head. He said, "Well, bunch of us think they're real, but we don't know yet. And w- all-- everybody agrees the mathematics works."

Wojciech Wegrzynski 25:52

But, but going back to my original idea w- with the, with the theories evolving maybe, but maybe that was not the most precise wording. But w- what I meant that, perhaps it's not the theory that's lacking or it suddenly becomes disproven, but maybe the context window changes. Maybe, you know, like, uh, i- think about compartment fire in 1970s and today, right?

Vincent Brannigan 26:14

I, I was gonna get to that because it all depends on the nature of the hypothesis.

Wojciech Wegrzynski 26:18

Hmm

Vincent Brannigan 26:19

You can limit the hypothesis to avoid the confusion. Let me... I, I think one in fire, uh, possibly a good example was certainly when I was studying things, they thought you couldn't have open air detonations of a a flammable gas, have a true detonation. You would get deflagration l- as in a bleve and so forth. Then there was Bunce Field

Wojciech Wegrzynski 26:41

Mm.

Vincent Brannigan 26:42

And Buncefield was clearly a detonation of a, of a cloud of, combustible gas. Wow, was that a, you know, a cat among the pigeons. You know? In other, in other words, people had to go back and rethink. clear that the idea, a hypothesis or a, a theory, good question, that you couldn't have an open air detonation. They went back and looked at other, examples in the past and they found others. They found other examples, uh, Drysdale was involved in this and so forth, of where they had detonations in clouds of gas. So that has now become part of the belief structure, and there is a, a, an, an explanatory theory, I don't know it but I know it exists, explosions in, in flammable gases. So yes, a- an event can cause us to go back and re-look at even what we think of as a theory when a real event disproves it in some... In other words, you go back and look at the hypothesis and you restructure everything, and then you find something new. So yes, that even a theory, the theories are, are changeable. for example, in fire, at least 9/21 gets fuel load right. Fuel load is the stuff in the building that burns.

Wojciech Wegrzynski 27:54

Mm-hmm.

Vincent Brannigan 27:54

Okay. the other hand, the conversion of fuel load to fire load, which is how big a fire you get out of that stuff, is all over the lot. I mean, how good are we at predicting? It depends, because the fuel load calculations allow things like wood equivalents, there's no structure that allows us to accurately predict the fire load from the fuel load that I can find.

Wojciech Wegrzynski 28:16

It's also dynamic process

Vincent Brannigan 28:18

Right. It's a dynamic process that we do not fully understand.

Wojciech Wegrzynski 28:21

Mm.

Vincent Brannigan 28:21

So therefore, there are certain hypotheses that are essentially experimental hypotheses. You know, and we're looking at different, loads. And perhaps within a certain range you can say, "This amount of stuff produces somewhere between this and this," and then you can tr- you can test that. You know, you can see can you put boundaries on,

Models As Tests And What They Prove

Wojciech Wegrzynski 28:41

I, I, in my world, I would say I have models for that. Where models would go into your, tiers of, of science

Vincent Brannigan 28:48

models are, are a very interesting question because are they a test or not? models a test? In some ways, yes. are a method of testing. That is... what you're doing is, is the first thing you gotta do is test the model. In other words, your hypothesis is, "I have a model."

Wojciech Wegrzynski 29:04

Mm.

Vincent Brannigan 29:05

Okay, so you build a model. Your hypothesis is, "This predicts a fire." Then you go out and you set a bunch of fires, and you see if the model predicts the fire. This is the Christmas tree experiment, you

Wojciech Wegrzynski 29:16

Yep

Vincent Brannigan 29:16

Can people build models? And what, and what we know is we are pretty good if we know exactly what the configuration of the fuel is. We are pretty good at, at projecting the development of the fire in natural ventilation, and we're, we're pretty good at it. Um, uh... And yes, and th- but there what you're doing is your hypothesis is about the model,

Wojciech Wegrzynski 29:34

Hmm

Vincent Brannigan 29:35

not about the fire. The fire is the test of the model. And so doing that test, a model is not scientific until it has been repeatedly tested. then you have a theory that this kind of model replicates these kind of fires

Wojciech Wegrzynski 29:47

W-w-w-with this, those distinctions and, and now w-what has been said, how does that apply into an investigation where you are put front of a case, a fire has happened, so you know the outcomes, you don't know the process

Vincent Brannigan 30:03

Right. And that is the problem because the definition of a test is you don't know the outcome.

Wojciech Wegrzynski 30:08

Okay

Abduction Versus Deduction In Cases

Vincent Brannigan 30:09

And so, so what, what we have is a problem in 9/21, um, and we're now doing a real shift right here. The development of hypotheses and comparing them to what you know, all right, the reasoning to the best explanation or the whatever, this is not the hypothetical deductive scientific method that we know.

Wojciech Wegrzynski 30:29

Okay

Vincent Brannigan 30:30

It's a totally different process,

Wojciech Wegrzynski 30:32

Mm-hmm

Vincent Brannigan 30:32

and the best description of it is abductive inference. the person who invented the concept, the philosopher, was Charles Sanders Peirce in the late 19th century. And inference is the method of Sherlock Holmes. In other words, what Sherlock Holmes called deduction was not deduction.

Wojciech Wegrzynski 30:52

Okay

Vincent Brannigan 30:53

It was inference, uh, and it's also called ab- abductive

Wojciech Wegrzynski 30:56

S-so what's deduction? W-what's deduction? What's abduction? w-what's the difference between deduction and abduction?

Vincent Brannigan 31:02

In deduction you have, you have a primary and a secondary and a conclusion, and the conclusion must be true if the primary and secondary are true.

Wojciech Wegrzynski 31:12

Okay

Vincent Brannigan 31:12

It must be true. There's no, no probability, there's no whatever. Deductive

Wojciech Wegrzynski 31:17

so if there's A, if there's B, there must be C because...

Vincent Brannigan 31:20

be C.

Wojciech Wegrzynski 31:20

Okay

Vincent Brannigan 31:21

right. Whereas abductive inference is you look at all the stuff and you come up with the best fit of the stuff to your, to an idea.

Wojciech Wegrzynski 31:30

Hmm.

Vincent Brannigan 31:30

Now, in science, in real science, in hypothetical deductive real science, abductive inference is used to create the original hypothesis. other words, to create the hypothesis that you're going to test, you do use abductive inference.

Wojciech Wegrzynski 31:43

So we had a bunch of things among them A and B, so the C is pro--

Vincent Brannigan 31:48

Yeah. And you put it all in and you say, "This is the best hypothesis we can come up with." alter it as needed, but abductive inference doesn't say it's right or wrong, it just says it's the best guess we have.

Wojciech Wegrzynski 32:01

Okay

Vincent Brannigan 32:01

you run the test. Then you run the test. That's the scientific method. It's not what 921 does. 921 does the original abductive inference, creates theories or hypothesis, and then it replicates the same abductive process in what they call the deduction phase to eliminate other approaches. And this is exactly what Sherlock Holmes did. in other words, he was rigorous about eliminating anything which was contradicted. and whatever was left was what his version of the truth, that sometimes he was wrong.

Wojciech Wegrzynski 32:37

Mm-hmm.

Vincent Brannigan 32:38

And so because he didn't know enough facts in order to eliminate certain things, you know, and, and in other words, he was left with a hypothesis which was contradicted by reality, but not by his knowledge

Wojciech Wegrzynski 32:50

Okay. But i- if you wanted to do deduction in such a court case, wh- what would you have to do? Would that require a complete reconstruction of the event? Uh-

Vincent Brannigan 33:00

it's amazingly difficult to figure out even how to do it,

Wojciech Wegrzynski 33:04

Yeah

Vincent Brannigan 33:04

because science deals essentially with phenomena, not with events.

Wojciech Wegrzynski 33:09

Mm-hmm

Vincent Brannigan 33:09

All right, the event is what happened last week,

Wojciech Wegrzynski 33:12

Yeah

Vincent Brannigan 33:13

Now, here, here is deduction. The car was hit by a Molotov cocktail,

Wojciech Wegrzynski 33:18

Hmm?

Vincent Brannigan 33:18

okay? You, you, you, you're quite sure of that. You got videos, uh, whatever. Someone or something must have projected the Molotov cocktail.

Wojciech Wegrzynski 33:26

They rarely spontaneously project themselves.

Vincent Brannigan 33:30

Molotov cocktail is a very distinctive mechanical device to,

Wojciech Wegrzynski 33:33

Yes

Vincent Brannigan 33:34

a fire. So therefore, that it was an intentional act to start the fire because you found the incendiary device which would not normally have been found there.

Wojciech Wegrzynski 33:42

Mm-hmm

Vincent Brannigan 33:42

Okay, so that is deduction. There's no question. But here's the problem with, with 921. It has both the concept of an ignitable liquid, which is fine, and has the concept of an accelerant.

Wojciech Wegrzynski 33:54

Mm-hmm

Vincent Brannigan 33:54

The problem is an accelerant is something used by an arsonist. It, it, the definition includes the intention.

Wojciech Wegrzynski 34:01

Hmm.

Vincent Brannigan 34:02

so if you have gasoline, it's... You decide that it's an accelerant by what?

Wojciech Wegrzynski 34:08

But,

Vincent Brannigan 34:08

a scientific process

Wojciech Wegrzynski 34:09

mm, but it, it's important to, to, to, to have a concept like that because in the end you're also supposed to, to figure out like not just what happened, but who did it, or

Vincent Brannigan 34:21

agree. I agree. That's what police do all the time. They never call it science.

Wojciech Wegrzynski 34:25

Mm-hmm.

Vincent Brannigan 34:25

And here we get into an interesting language question. This is a question of language, and of course I have no Polish, but maybe there's a Polish equivalent. But I studied this in detail with Klaus Fuchs-Kittowski, a philosopher of science, okay? So, uh, the German word that was used for forensics is Wissenschaft, okay? Which roughly translates as organized knowledge, but is routinely translated into English as science.

Wojciech Wegrzynski 34:50

Yeah

Vincent Brannigan 34:51

But in German, Naturwissenschaft science,

Wojciech Wegrzynski 34:56

Mm-hmm.

Vincent Brannigan 34:56

okay? And that is not the same as Wissenschaft. what a butcher does in cutting the best meat in a cow is a Wissenschaft. is organized knowledge. They know how to do this. Anything you can train people to do is a Wissenschaft. And forensics in German is called a Wissenschaft.

Wojciech Wegrzynski 35:14

Hmm.

Vincent Brannigan 35:14

It's Forensische Wissenschaft. It's, it organized knowledge. It doesn't claim to be science.

Wojciech Wegrzynski 35:20

Mm-hmm.

Vincent Brannigan 35:21

But NFPA, because Americans routinely translate Wissenschaft as science, up this word and they created their own definition somewhere in the process of 921 of what science does. But the definition, when I look at it, is exactly the definition of abductive inference.

Wojciech Wegrzynski 35:37

Hmm

Vincent Brannigan 35:37

So I'm not saying that the way 921 decides things is wrong. I'm simply saying it's not science

Wojciech Wegrzynski 35:47

Mm-hmm. Yeah

Vincent Brannigan 35:50

problem is not that, uh, 921 is bad or that fire investigators are stupid or, you know... I'm not saying that in the slightest.

Wojciech Wegrzynski 35:57

Yeah.

Vincent Brannigan 35:57

There are

Wojciech Wegrzynski 35:58

A-

Vincent Brannigan 35:58

stupid things, but there aren't, that's not the general purview

Wojciech Wegrzynski 36:00

I think it's also not like... I, I, I went through it. I, I had a previous episode with, uh, Rick Roby long time ago. I went through it. I, I, it's, it's not the worst standard I've seen actually.

Vincent Brannigan 36:14

Oh, it, it's an ex- the data collection is excellent.

Wojciech Wegrzynski 36:16

Yeah, but, uh

Vincent Brannigan 36:17

collection, which, which everybody in abductive inference says is the place to start, the rules for data collection are excellent. The rules for various events are excellent.

Wojciech Wegrzynski 36:26

But you know

Vincent Brannigan 36:27

the, some of the things are not scientific

Wojciech Wegrzynski 36:29

But, but I also agree with you that, uh, actually this distinction whether it is science or not is kind of important in here. Because if, it really is science, that it's unbiased and ultimate, you know, and, and final. Like,

Vincent Brannigan 36:45

It...

Wojciech Wegrzynski 36:46

a- and that's what the court looks, an ultimate, final, undeniable answer to problem, right?

Vincent Brannigan 36:52

And here's, here's how you know it's not science,

Wojciech Wegrzynski 36:54

Yeah

Vincent Brannigan 36:54

which is they've never done a round robin of 50 investigators with the same material coming to

Wojciech Wegrzynski 36:59

That would be interesting

Vincent Brannigan 37:01

Yeah, you know who did that was the, um, handwriting analysis people,

Wojciech Wegrzynski 37:05

Э?

Vincent Brannigan 37:05

the forensic document examiners, and they found out the forensic document examiners were slightly better than high school teachers.

Wojciech Wegrzynski 37:12

Really?

Vincent Brannigan 37:13

And high school teachers look at a lot of handwriting, you

Wojciech Wegrzynski 37:15

Hmm.

Vincent Brannigan 37:16

they had some advantage, but that it was not So, FIRE has always shied away from that kind of testing, of what they might find.

Wojciech Wegrzynski 37:25

that has a strong opinion and that's why you're in the podcast. But, uh, also, you know, fire is, uh In reconstructing a course of, of a fire with the intention to, uncover the origin

Vincent Brannigan 37:40

Right

Wojciech Wegrzynski 37:41

and intent beyond, be- behind the origin, because it's also important, like not just what started the fire, but what is the reason the fire was started, and also, like, uh, literally who to blame for. I find that extremely, difficult because in reality there's a lot of events that happen during the fire that may be concealed at the end, right? And-

Vincent Brannigan 38:04

That, well, there's... First of all, let's just, let's just limit it to what might be analyzable scientifically, is how the fire developed

Wojciech Wegrzynski 38:12

Yeah

Vincent Brannigan 38:12

order... And d- and finding the, the origin of the fire, and even sometimes the cause. Okay, so in other words, for example, lightning strikes

Wojciech Wegrzynski 38:21

Hmm?

Vincent Brannigan 38:21

are very distinctive. So therefore, if you isolate the origin of the fire and you find a big lightning strike, you're pretty good. You know, in other words, you're, you're not being unscientific by, by saying, 'cause there's a known cau- you know. So, a- and so we can do some things scientifically,

Wojciech Wegrzynski 38:38

Mhm

Vincent Brannigan 38:38

uh, at least to the level of engineering, shall we say. They're

Wojciech Wegrzynski 38:41

Yeah

Vincent Brannigan 38:43

it's not necessarily deduction, but it's scientific. uh, I'm, I'm an expert on the sinking of the Titanic. I know all of the conspiracy theories. I know all of the foolishness. I even, uh, disagree with Guillermo over the effect of the coal

Wojciech Wegrzynski 38:54

You disagreed with Guillermo?

Vincent Brannigan 38:56

Uh,

Wojciech Wegrzynski 38:56

Oh, that's interesting

Vincent Brannigan 38:57

expert on coal fires and no question. but I know where the coal bunker was, and I know that it was empty at the time of

Wojciech Wegrzynski 39:03

Aha

Vincent Brannigan 39:04

And the fire was one where w- they could shovel the coal out and into the boilers, which meant it wasn't hot enough to have damaged the steel.

Wojciech Wegrzynski 39:11

Okay, that's interesting

Vincent Brannigan 39:12

it just made it warm. Okay, so I, you know, you can do these investigations, and the scientific principles illustrate what is really an abductive inference. Your, your inferences are coming because the science is good. You know what temperature coal burns at, you know what temperature steel melts at. You know, you know all these things. So it's a fascinating problem where you, what you can do in a, what I would call a scientific way.

Wojciech Wegrzynski 39:37

Mm?

Vincent Brannigan 39:37

Scientification is the word I use.

Witness Statements And Courtroom Roles

Vincent Brannigan 39:39

In other words, we can look, good are we at, at reconstruction? Well, let me, let me give you two of the weak points that are in that FAA All right, first of all, when you deal with eyewitnesses or witnesses All right? There is no expertise by anybody in truth-telling by witnesses.

Wojciech Wegrzynski 39:56

Okay.

Vincent Brannigan 39:57

Nobody has that expertise, and it, it says, oh, you have to valid- you know, you have to whatever, you have to this, you. What i- i- in, in reality, now if, if we translate this into the law, the determination whether a witness is telling the truth or not, an expert witness, is up to the finder of fact. In America, this is a jury. Okay? M- almost always. Sometimes a judge, but a jury. But in, in the continental system, I know that it's always a, a judge, but he still, or she, is still deciding what the facts are.

Wojciech Wegrzynski 40:27

Mm.

Vincent Brannigan 40:28

Though that decision is not scientific, it is strictly operative and operational. Uh, it's for the purpose of convicting or acquitting the person. It's not science.

Wojciech Wegrzynski 40:38

Hmm?

Vincent Brannigan 40:38

but that's because it is the only thing we have on truth-telling.

Wojciech Wegrzynski 40:42

Yeah

Vincent Brannigan 40:42

have any magic truth-telling machine. And so therefore, if an investigator relies on a witness statement, what is he doing? Or she? Uh, they are s- usurping the role of the court, and that is a fundamental problem with 921.

Wojciech Wegrzynski 40:58

Mm-hmm.

Vincent Brannigan 40:59

other words, the way 921 should be structured in that case for the expert to say, "If the witness is telling the truth, then these consequences follow. If you decide the witness isn't telling the truth, then we have no idea what-"

Wojciech Wegrzynski 41:12

So in other words, uh, if an investigator says that it has been an arson because someone reported they've seen someone enter the, the building shortly before fire, th- that's, that's the role of the judge. The, the...

Vincent Brannigan 41:27

But there's a role as judge or jury to decide if

Wojciech Wegrzynski 41:29

w- what the expert could have, should have given is, is, uh, course of the scenarios if a person entered or not, if it will, if it... Yeah, okay, okay. That's interesting

Vincent Brannigan 41:38

so this is true with almost all witness statements.

Wojciech Wegrzynski 41:42

Hmm

Vincent Brannigan 41:43

Uh, there's a few exceptions, but almost all.

Wojciech Wegrzynski 41:45

But i- if you, sorry, but if you have a record, like a camera, whatever, th- th- then it's becomes, uh, a fact or

Vincent Brannigan 41:53

is evidence

Wojciech Wegrzynski 41:53

evidence.

Vincent Brannigan 41:54

sure, absolutely.

Wojciech Wegrzynski 41:55

Yeah

Vincent Brannigan 41:56

of fact, if somebody wrote something down contemporaneously, that's better than the eyewitness te- you know, in other words, at least you have a contemporaneous record if it's mechanically recorded, they sent an email, you know. but, doesn't mean it's correct. It just means that, that they're telling the truth that that was their recollection. and this comes up in all the time in the World Trade Center conspiracies and what people heard and what they saw. And it's actually, it's very interesting because the Titanic is one of the most documented disasters of the early part of the 20th century. but even so, that doesn't mean that the witness is correct.

Wojciech Wegrzynski 42:31

Mm.

Vincent Brannigan 42:31

but if you will, if they're, if they actually... This is how far away they

Wojciech Wegrzynski 42:35

W-w-what if multiple witnesses state the same and it fits?

Vincent Brannigan 42:39

increases the, the, the credibility unless they all, the same phenomenon mistakenly, which is entirely possible,

Wojciech Wegrzynski 42:47

Mm-hmm.

Vincent Brannigan 42:47

uh, or they collaborated.

Wojciech Wegrzynski 42:49

Okay

Vincent Brannigan 42:50

You know, so, so this-- And this issue came up in the Titanic. So the issue of how far away the iceberg was when they first saw it

Wojciech Wegrzynski 42:58

Hmm?

Vincent Brannigan 42:58

one of the ones where people have examined this every way, but we know, we have a really good thing that someone heard the alarm and ran from one place up to the bridge and was on the bridge, according to his statement, when the, iceberg hit. So that, that's a highly considered, a highly credible thing as an expert officer and so forth. So, other people's estimation of how long it was is not, not very good, so that tells you how far away the iceberg might have been. And so, looking at all these things, yes, we can use science to evaluate some of these statements. Yes. But it doesn't make the whole process the

Wojciech Wegrzynski 43:34

W-w-where's

Vincent Brannigan 43:35

again, I wanna repeat myself. I'm not saying 9/21 is bad.

Wojciech Wegrzynski 43:39

Eh?

Vincent Brannigan 43:39

I'm simply saying it's not the scientific method.

Wojciech Wegrzynski 43:41

Oh, I mean, that, that, that, that's what we're exploring here.

Vincent Brannigan 43:44

yeah,

Wojciech Wegrzynski 43:44

uh,

Vincent Brannigan 43:44

yeah.

Wojciech Wegrzynski 43:45

thing o- of science is testing and experiments. W- what's the role of testing and experimentation because y- you cannot prove a hypothesis by one experiment. You can disprove it. So s-

Vincent Brannigan 43:56

Well, this, this is the problem because it allows what calls essentially thought experiments.

Wojciech Wegrzynski 44:03

Poldek's room

Vincent Brannigan 44:04

experiments are known in science, like Schrödinger's cat.

Wojciech Wegrzynski 44:08

Mm-hmm.

Vincent Brannigan 44:08

They're all about fundamental phenomenon, not about what happened that day.

Wojciech Wegrzynski 44:12

That's speculation

Vincent Brannigan 44:14

they confuse, thought and cognitive experiments. In other words, it's abductive inference. It's the same

Wojciech Wegrzynski 44:19

Mm.

Vincent Brannigan 44:21

to the situation that you have. and again, that's what the police do, that's what everybody else does, but they don't call it the scientific method. So now, can you do some science really in there? Yes, with some kinds of experiments. you wanna know if it's possible, let-- I, I'll take the one that I, I like the

Experiments That Actually Help Investigations

Vincent Brannigan 44:40

best. All right, you get a bad fire in a restaurant,

Wojciech Wegrzynski 44:42

Mm-hmm

Vincent Brannigan 44:43

and the question is, does alcohol, does whiskey in bottles burn real well? All right. Well, if you wanna know if whiskey in bottles burns the way people saw it, you can set up whiskey and you can set up a, a fire. You can s- you can do an experiment. You can see what it w- what happens. And, amazingly enough, it turns out whiskey in bottles does burn real well,

Wojciech Wegrzynski 45:04

Okay

Vincent Brannigan 45:04

At least in the experiments I've seen. uh, it's not necessarily arson 'cause of the nature of the fire. possible to do experiments, real experiments that help, that help advance the ball. but simply sitting in your office and, and say, you know, matching the hypotheses that you have, to the exper- and saying, "Ah, we've tried these nine hypotheses, and this one fits all the answers." for that, I recommend to anyone that they read Sherlock Holmes, and it's the Adventure of the Yellow Face.

Wojciech Wegrzynski 45:33

Mm-hmm.

Vincent Brannigan 45:34

And it's the one where he comes up with a comprehensive explanation that fits all the things, and it's completely wrong.

Wojciech Wegrzynski 45:41

Okay.

Vincent Brannigan 45:42

All right? And, and, uh, it's actually kind of a cute story, and at the very end, he's telling Watson that this was at a place called Norbury. "If I, if I ever appear to have too much belief in my own powers, if you will whisper Norbury in my ear, I will be very grateful."

Wojciech Wegrzynski 45:58

Okay

Vincent Brannigan 45:59

it, it's When you're doing abductive inference, there is always the problem, the possibility of Norbury. Uh, the one that I like is the possibility, uh, uh, I w- this was in a sci- not a science fiction, but a crime fiction. And the, the homicide was committed by twins. And therefore, the, the guy had the alibi 'cause it was his twin, you know, here, and the other person saw him here, you know. And, and, uh, it turned out he had an undi- a, an undisclosed twin,

Wojciech Wegrzynski 46:24

I, I, I have identical twins. I hope they, uh, never go through that. uh, Vincent, okay, but okay, experiment, the experiment I, I like because you are testing a hypothesis within the laws of the nature. Like, you cannot, uh, alter gravity. You cannot, uh, alter the physics of combustion, pyrolysis. Yes, you can mess with materials, et cetera, but at least the set of rules is real and doesn't-- There, there's like no doubt that, this is reality. What's the place for models where this is not exactly

Using Models To Say Possible

Wojciech Wegrzynski 46:56

the case?

Vincent Brannigan 46:56

uh, one of the ones I did very early, uh, this was... Uh, and this is when models were in the trivial days. I actually got an interesting call from the judge I had clerked for,

Wojciech Wegrzynski 47:05

Yeah

Vincent Brannigan 47:06

doing arbitrations with insurance companies in the private sector after retiring from the government. he called me in my office and said, "Vince, have you got just a few minutes? I, I, I've got an interesting small case here." This was a house fire, and, the insurance company was saying, uh, you know, that it was arson and, you know, they'd set the fire. And, issue was a new gas dryer had been installed in the basement, but all of the fire investigator stuff said the fire started on the other side of the room in a pile of, clothes, in a, you know, in a basket of clothes. I was asked was it possible for an accidental ignition from the gas dryer to start over there in a pile of clothes, and the basement was essentially sealed.

Wojciech Wegrzynski 47:49

Hmm

Vincent Brannigan 47:49

So I said... I, I... And they said, "Look, I've got the... Always... Is, is it possible? I'm just asking or is it crazy?" said, "Well, yeah, sure." It happened to be propane gas dryer, so you got propane out of a, of a dryer due to poor installation, and going over and saturating the clothes on the other side, and gas will saturate it. ignition, and you can finally... You know, there's a water heater over here, there's various... ignition, boom, you can get the clothes on fire very fast, then the fire spreads back the other direction. So you could be completely consistent with an ignition on the other side of the room, with a leaking gas dryer. And I said, "I, I can't prove that it happened. Is it, is, is, is it possible? Yes." And they settled the case right there in front of the judge 'cause I'd said it was possible. And I had... That was one of the first times, 'cause I had seen this in a mathematical model. I've seen people, you know, in early mathematical models showing movement and, ignition and back drafts. so I... That piqued my interest in, in where were they were going with mathematical models of combustion. And these were very early things on calculators and whatever. Uh, but they had been starting this when I was with, with Jim Quintieri.

Wojciech Wegrzynski 49:04

we once had a case about, uh, I wasn't doing that, my colleagues in the office were, but we had a case where a person has, uh, died in the-their own, uh, house, and it was like a, a mansion building. Multiple, uh, chimneys were on the roof, and in another flat, they had not the perfect, heating device. So, so it was imperfect, and apparently it was leaking, carbon monoxide.

Vincent Brannigan 49:27

Bye

Wojciech Wegrzynski 49:28

And the person who died, he was in a completely different flat, but it happened that the chimneys were very near to each other, and the case was about wind. Was it possible that in wind conditions, the CO vented outside and returned through the other chimney back to the other person's house? And we've actually-- the, the colleague who, who was doing, Grzegorz from my office, he, he did the modeling of flats, of, of surroundings, of the building, wind engineering. And actually, his simulation shown that, yeah, yeah, it's, it's actually quite possible that in, in this wind

Vincent Brannigan 50:02

Yeah, sure.

Wojciech Wegrzynski 50:03

um-

Vincent Brannigan 50:05

I, I would say at the level of it's possible,

Wojciech Wegrzynski 50:08

Yeah

Vincent Brannigan 50:09

there's a lot of utility in the early days. I mean, the... It basically, because insurance basically the question is if it's possible, 'cause, you know, you have to-- If, if something is possible, then you have to show that, that it didn't happen. and that's due to the peculiarities of insurance cases.

Wojciech Wegrzynski 50:26

Mm.

Vincent Brannigan 50:26

Um, if I can make it happen with Guillermo to do my course and what I wanna do the course on fire in Western culture, people believe all kinds of weird things about fire. So,

Wojciech Wegrzynski 50:36

Yeah

Vincent Brannigan 50:36

you have to, you have people in, in the middle of fires in flashover conditions having conversations. Right. Right.

Wojciech Wegrzynski 50:42

Uh yeah, we, we, we, we have people, uh, arguing with us about, uh, spalling and evacuation, and like if there's spalling, there's no evac- like concrete spalling, you know. If the concrete is spalling, you don't worry about evacuation anymore.

Vincent Brannigan 50:57

Yeah, the, uh, it, it, that's, uh, the example that I give people is they worry about their pets in a fire.

Wojciech Wegrzynski 51:03

Yeah

Vincent Brannigan 51:03

And I say, "You never have to worry about the birds. Very high metabolism, they're dead already. Whatever, whatever

Wojciech Wegrzynski 51:09

Oh.

Vincent Brannigan 51:10

the birds are already gone. The dog, built low to the ground, great sense of smell, great survival instincts, they're always out on the lawn barking at the fire department. And you can't find the cat, but you gotta get the cat a good lawyer because you know the cat started the fire."

Wojciech Wegrzynski 51:24

Okay. Yeah,

Vincent Brannigan 51:26

So that

Wojciech Wegrzynski 51:26

yeah.

Codes, Grenfell, And Exterior Fire Surprises

Vincent Brannigan 51:27

night hit.

Wojciech Wegrzynski 51:27

I, I think, uh, o-o-one other level of, of this conversation where I really feel the, world is shifting a bit, like in terms of regulations, law, and, and how stuff is put now into my building codes. I-- like I, I have a feeling I, I've-- uh, as I said, I was in high school when 9/11 happened, but I have a feeling a long time ago, a lot of things went into the code because people believed that's, a correct, uh, number, a correct idea, a correct thing. And now we are shifting into space where everything requires evidence. They want... Like for example, my, my colleague is fighting about Eurocode on, on bricks, on masonry, and we have these hollow concrete bricks, and we know the Eurocode is completely wrong. It was not a problem to put the, the, the values into the Eurocode 20, 30 years ago, but to remove them, that's a hell of a battle, and they want evidence and everything. And, and again, like, you know, we, we kind of end up in, in, in this battle of ha-having hypothesis, testing them, but you cannot prove them enough, uh, even if you don't disprove them. I, I, I think the world is shifting, and we'll need more of that scientific approach in, in this.

Vincent Brannigan 52:37

I think the desire to make sure that code requirements at least some kind of scientific background, a very complicated question. I know that back in the 19... 1970s, early '80s, I worked on, the problem of assigning code values in very old buildings.

Wojciech Wegrzynski 52:57

Okay

Vincent Brannigan 52:57

In o- in other words, how, what, what can we do based on what we know,

Wojciech Wegrzynski 53:02

Mm-hmm

Vincent Brannigan 53:02

and, and everybody-- nobody was asking for science, everybody was asking for just, uh, i- is, is this lunatic or is this reasonable, or is it, you know... And, and so this was like archaic construction. So we did a lot of old brick walls, and we said if you put a, if you put a one-hour rated fire door and it really is closed in an old brick wall, for the most part you get enough safety for life safety, even if we haven't tested the old brick walls, you know? And so we, we, we have a lot of, we've seen a lot of buildings burn down and the brick walls stay right up. so we looked at a lot of, of archaic things, and we came up with a few really important... Uh, e- everywhere exit signs, lit exit, properly lit exit signs turned out to be a critical, value and so forth. So the archaic construction area, as I said, nobody's saying that this is approved or meets modern code, but it's the best we can do given the circumstances,

Wojciech Wegrzynski 53:56

Yeah

Vincent Brannigan 53:56

These are old buildings and whatnot. and, so we, we've done... I, I would say the really, the really good stuff, I mean, some of Babrauskas's stuff on ignition and, the cone calorimeter and so has been absolutely vital in understanding the materials and the stuff in the building. We still don't know how much fire we get for how much fuel. But we have, we have boundaries on it. We have a pretty good idea of it's not gonna be worse than this, it's not gonna be, you

Wojciech Wegrzynski 54:22

Mm-hmm

Vincent Brannigan 54:23

as little as that, and, that helps. And it was the mistakes on the ceiling, the buildings, and the exterior. I mean, the, the Grenfell Tower uh, you know, was, was a nightmare waiting to happen. I mean, ev- everything wrong with the building was in there

Wojciech Wegrzynski 54:37

but this is wh-- thi-this is where everything we know goes, uh, meets something that's a little bit out of the context window, and suddenly it's irrelevant. This case is not within the, the, the, the scope of what we knew-

Vincent Brannigan 54:51

Right, right, right. Uh,

Wojciech Wegrzynski 54:52

in a way

Vincent Brannigan 54:53

within the scope of responsibility and, and work. An issue we had, we had a brand new sprinklered building burn down completely in Maryland about six years ago, uh, from an exterior fire.

Wojciech Wegrzynski 55:04

Wow

Vincent Brannigan 55:04

is the sprinkler system was unable to cope with an exterior fire on a six-story building. Now, nobody died, we got everybody out, but the entire building was, was, was

Wojciech Wegrzynski 55:13

N-

Vincent Brannigan 55:13

down by a fire that went up the outside and then came

Wojciech Wegrzynski 55:16

The, the, the same thing happened in Dubai in I think w- was it 2015? Remember that hotel next to Burj Khalifa? Yeah, yeah. So, so very, very similar case. Uh, anyway, uh, Vincent, I think we got it. It was a very interesting, uh, conversation. I always like exploring those topics with you because it's, uh, you have a very unique view on the world of, of the world and fire, uh, in it. A- anything, anything you wanted to add maybe for the

What Real Experience Still Gives Us

Vincent Brannigan 55:45

I just wanna add that, uh, my posthumous thanks, John Breen was the fire marshal of the District of Columbia,

Wojciech Wegrzynski 55:51

Yeah

Vincent Brannigan 55:52

he taught me more about fire investigation anybody else, you know. And, and, was the shortest man in the DC Fire Department, which he attributed that's why he became the fire marshal. And and, and, uh, we went to the same high school. the, the good people that I worked with along were just fantastic at... They were very good at looking at a fire scene developing an overall idea, and we had to, you know, of, of what happened. And I still today, if I'm trying to estimate how big a fire we'd get in a room, I don't ask an engineer. I ask an experienced fire officer to look at the stuff in the room and tell me what it's... So our empirical understanding is still very, very important in all of these things, but it's not science,

Wojciech Wegrzynski 56:36

Yeah. Uh,

Vincent Brannigan 56:37

that's the bottom line.

Wojciech Wegrzynski 56:38

uh,

Vincent Brannigan 56:38

Okay.

Wojciech Wegrzynski 56:39

that, that's, that's the bottom line. Uh, th- thank you, thank you so, so much for those views, and I, I hope, uh, people found that interesting, and I hope, uh, in our fire investigations

Vincent Brannigan 56:48

more trouble somewhere down the line anytime

Wojciech Wegrzynski 56:50

w-

Closing Thoughts And What To Watch Next

Wojciech Wegrzynski 56:51

And that's it. Thank you for listening. I hope y- you've enjoyed this one. I've always enjoyed arguing with Vincent on LinkedIn. Then I brought it up into the audio space. Now I argue with Vincent on audio and make a podcast out of that as, uh, as a way of living. And always his, uh, views on the world are quite insightful. I mean, it's not that in terms of investigations, not that NFPA nine two one is a bad standard or something. It's just, you know, if you claim that you're using science to uncover something and science is-- science is science. You don't really discuss with science. A theory is a theory. there's no alternative explanations, et cetera. Uh, then you have to be a little bit more precise, I guess, in using the, the scientific method, and that's what the podcast was about. And I think, you know, when we use the same arguments, when we try to discover, uh, new materials, when we try to define new classes for, uh, a product, when we try to impose new laws and changes to the law system, we also should be very explicit in w-what we call science. And, I hope, uh, after this episode, I know a lot more about what is hypothesis, what's a theory, and I'm, I'm hoping that, uh, someone else learned a little bit of that as well. Um, apologies for the audio drifting a little bit on the Vincent's end. I didn't capture that one. I did all my best at-- in the post-processing to fix everything and, uh, I hope it was enjoyable to listen in, in the end. But I understand that this time it, it was below the normal standards. But yeah, I think the-- still the discussion is the most important part of it. Anyway, thanks. That would be it for, for today's, uh, podcast, and I'm very grateful for you being here with me in the Fire Science Show for another week. And guess what? Next Wednesday, more fire science will come your way. and I hope you are looking forward to that. Take care. Cheers. Bye.