Working on a screenplay or story with crashes, fires, or other physical accident events and want some reality infused in the writing? If you have a fire or accident related question or two, we will gladly provide answers at no charge. Mr. Williams is a writer and is also available for hire as a technical advisor on these areas of expertise for larger productions. For contact information click here.

Let's Get Real
Writers are wise to write what they know, but how many writers have killed someone with a 9mm pistol, or set fire to a church, or faked a car crash? Not many, one would guess. Considering all the crime novels, TV shows, and movies out there, this is a very good thing.

Yet writers must tackle these and other difficult subjects all the time - hopefully after doing some research.

Unfortunately though, there are far too many books, TV show plots and movies which simply don't get their facts straight, with situations forcefully contrived to fit the crime details. This is sloppy, lazy writing.

The sad part is that it isn't even necessary. It is possible to get it accurate and make it interesting and exciting. All you need to do is ask someone who knows.

What do the following words have in common?:
Arson, murder, extortion, fraud, kinky sex, lies, accidents, corruption, incompetence, deception, strippers, strip clubs, bias, irresponsibility, death, trauma, serious injury, destruction, crashes, fires, nudity, tragedy, grief, revenge, vice, greed, adultery, total loss, pain, the legal system, wealth, juvenile delinquents, sexual fetishes, movie stars, celebrities, crime, blood, terror.

These subjects make great fodder for creative writing, yes? But no, that's not the answer. The answer is that this is a list of just a few components of real life cases investigated by Jeff Williams in the past 25 years. As you can see, fire and crash investigation is not a dry subject. The circumstances of many of these real cases are far more interesting than plots (which too often have no basis in fact at all) dreamed up by some of today's writers. If the real McCoy is so dramatic, what's the point in making anything up?

If you're a writer, you owe it to yourself to get your facts straight, to describe procedures and/or techniques properly and use them cleverly in the plot. In doing so you will demonstrate that you have done your research, and that you are clearly interested in getting it right. Your work will have legitimacy, and - more important - believability.

There's Real Life Fires - and Then There's Hollywood
The quest for realism on TV and movies has lead many screenwriters and producers to re-enact crimes in detail.

Since the crimes themselves are not always that interesting due to poorly-written stories in general, some directors use creative license in their methods to spice things up; for instance, there are a lot of exploding cars on TV shows, but real-life auto explosions are very rare, not always as dramatic, and very difficult to accomplish 'accidentally'. 

In the majority of films and TV dramas, 'arson' fires are typically handled with all the grace of a rhino on barbituates, with very little adherence to reality. The field of fire investigation is apparently one where few scriptwriters dare to venture since so few people understand it.  But when they do, the result is nearly always a blindfolded stumble into the dark side and a frustrating embarassment to anyone with fire investigation experience.

Evidence is typically contrived to fit the plot, buzz words used in fire investigation are indiscriminately and erroneously tossed about with an air of authority, and fire investigation techniques are largely ignored or mis-represented. With this preface, we now turn our attention to the current diva of distortion, 'CSI'.

The TV crime series 'CSI' ventures occasionally into the arson field, with consistently incredible results. This show deserves a critical appraisal since it's SUPPOSED to be more reality-based, and many people apparently think the show is an accurate portrayal of 'forensics'. It's not. But it's hot. The bottom line, though, is that it's still Hollywood, so why do we even expect accuracy at all? Well, how about something merely reasonable, then? Their writers make the big bucks, so a little research might be expected. Right? Wrong.

When it comes to fire investigation, 'CSI' is about as accurate as vote counting in Florida elections.

In the following three stories, nearly every aspect of fire investigation is wrong. Nearly every piece of fire-related dialogue is wrong.

The writers clearly need a fire consultant. The irony here is that real life fire investigations can often be far more interesting than anything these writers can make up.

Fahrenheit 932
A man is in the slammer for the arson murders of his wife and son, and contacts the CSI's top forensic investigator, Grissom, to help him. The man was known to have purchased gasoline the week before the fire, and he was observed fleeing the scene. While these two facts alone seemed to be flimsy evidence for a conviction, there he was in jail. 

Amazingly enough though, with each passing commercial the guy looked more guilty.

A half dozen "arson investigators" had already turned the accused down for help (maybe for good reason?). Grissom, by the way, was not a fire investigator, so it's unclear why CSI would even be involved in an origin and cause investigation in the first place.

The man explains to Grissom that the fire began late at night in the couple's bedroom closet in his nice large suburban house. He at first claims that he came home from buying ice cream to find smoke billowing out the back of the house. He explains that a "flashover" had occurred in the bedroom (he's a volunteer firefighter, you see, and he knows these things).

Although he tried to hide it from Grissom, the man had burned his hand horribly ("third degree burns" we learn - hey, that's charred skin!) on the door knob and was blown back by a fireball as he opened the bedroom door from the hallway. The flashover prevented him from entering and saving his wife and young son. He even knew the temperature of the fire - 932 degrees Fahrenheit, because that's the temperature, we're told, that flashover occurs! 

Flashover, in real life, is a transitional phase in fire development and does not occur at such a specific temperature, though research has shown that flashover typically occurs when temperatures in a room reach or exceed approximately 1100 degrees Fahrenheit. Generally speaking, flashover is defined as the stage of the fire when every exposed combustible in a room has caught on fire.

Investigators found remains of a flammable liquid in the closet. With a good analysis a chemist will be able to tell specifically what was used (whether it be gasoline, kerosene, diesel, methanol, acetone, etc.). The script mentioned gasoline, but on the show the more generic term "hydrocarbons" was used so that viewers would be kept in the dark about what the fuel really was.

Enter our forensic heroes, the CSI team, to the rescue. They discover a mysteriously-charred (?) board at the top of the bedroom door frame, and a burned "industrial grade high voltage" electric space heater discarded and thrown into the living room during overhaul by the fire department.

Displaying his amazing skill in logical deduction, Grissom reasons that the heater had to have been plugged in to the closet outlet in the couple's bedroom because "that's the one closest to her bed". Yes, that's what he said.

Why he assumed that the heater had to be plugged in at all, anywhere, we're not told. And Grissom never questioned why, if it was so cold that a heater was necessary, the accused would be out buying ice cream at midnight.

Grissom and his crack team later observe that the bedroom wiring's circuit breaker had tripped in the electrical panel - conclusive evidence to them that the circuit had "overloaded". In real life, finding tripped breakers is not unusual, and doesn't necessarily indicate that an electrical fire has even occurred; this also happens when electrical components are merely exposed to a fire.

They later find melted glass fragments on the closet floor.

What could possibly explain all these new clues which had supposedly been previously overlooked by the CSI guy originally assigned to the case?  BTW, the original investigator determined that the guy was guilty, so the scriptwriters made this co-worker of Grissom a major jerk.

In a startling admission from the accused (with a flashback), Grissom discovers that, on the night of the fire, the man had argued with his wife in their bedroom over a new woman in his life (Grissom!!  Hello?!). The son was nowhere to be seen in this scene, but for plot convenience he reportedly hadn't been able to sleep and was supposedly in the couple's bed trying to get some shuteye during their shouting bout!

In her anger, his wife began flinging available small potential projectiles at her philandering hubby. One of the objects thrown was a hefty glass kerosene lamp which missed him but shattered against a closet wall and spilled its flammable contents. This is also one important detail the accused has forgotten to tell Grissom about until late in the episode. And it also explains why we're told initially only that the lab found "hydrocarbons", since gasoline is not kerosene lamp oil - though both are hydrocarbon fuels.

The accused says he left home and drove off after the argument. But after mulling it over it a bit, he decided to turn around and try to salvage his 10 year marriage. He returned less than 20 minutes later, in shame - only to find the house on fire.

A lot happened in that 20 minutes - according, again, to Grissom's unique perspective. Immediately after the man left the house, the heater had coincidentally overloaded the circuit, sparked out the outlet in the closet where it was plugged in, and ignited the kerosene fumes in the closet.

For some reason, the wife and son had done nothing to clean up the spilled kerosene before the fire, or escape the bedroom once the fire began, and they presumably died of poisoning by carbon monoxide (a fire by-product), which takes time to accumulate. What were they doing while the fire was building in their room?  Were they asleep?  If so, how did they fall asleep so quickly? (remember that the 8 year old was in their room because he couldn't sleep!) Were they conscious through all this? (pssst, Grissom.... these are clues!)

So what else is wrong with this sad plot? Actually, very little was right, but there's simply not enough time to cover it all. Nearly every fire-related comment in this show was inaccurate in one way or another.

Although "flashover" is mentioned several times (it's clear that the scriptwriter had confused a 'flashover' with a 'backdraft' - another fire event entirely), various shots of the shadowy bedroom showed that a flashover did not occur. A 'V' shaped pattern against a wall and a breach through the ceiling is the only burn damage shown other than the heater and the mysteriously charred upper doorframe. No other walls are scorched, and the bed mattress has a few burn marks which show up in one scene but not in another.

As mentioned previously, every exposed combustible item in a room is burning during a flashover. How difficult could it have been to actually burn a mattress and a few other props before placing them on the set?

And why did this couple have such a large space heater running in the bedroom when the upscale suburban house they lived in undoubtedly had a heating unit built in?  And not to be nitpicking (too late!), but closets don't come equipped with wall outlets. Not only that - if the heater really was "high-voltage" it would have had a differently-shaped cord plug (like what you'd find on a clothes dryer cord) which wouldn't have even fit into the bogus closet outlet that shouldn't have been there.

The insulation on the wires Grissom was so carefully examining in an on-camera close-up was burned away only in one small localized area, which is not unusual, and was pretty conclusive evidence that the wires hadn't been "overloaded" with excessive current. At least one of the wires should have been bared of insulation its entire length, since the insulation would have melted off of any conductors overheated by a fire-causing "overload".

What happened, electrically, appeared to be a fault (with electrical arcing - not an 'overload') in the duplex wall outlet (which, by the way, occurred in the lower socket, and NOT the upper one where the heater was shown to be plugged in during a flashback!). That electrical fault could have been caused by the kerosene-fueled fire, another crucial point overlooked by Grissom.

But at the end, the man goes free (his girlfriend and Grissom are there when he's released), and the episode ends with these lines:

suspect: It's funny. When I got out, I thought I'd feel ... (sighs) ...free.
GRISSOM: And ... ?
suspect: I feel ...
GRISSOM: ... responsible?

Ironically, Grissom helped free a man who very well may have committed the murders of his wife and son. But he looked so cool doing it.

Scuba Dooba Doo
In another incredible plot, a scuba diver is found quite dead, suspended up in a tree in a burned-out area of forest. The scriptwriters were obviously inspired by this urban myth, but developed a nonsensical murder story around it full of inaccuracies about both scuba diving AND fires.

In the story, two land developers get in a fight, with one killing the other. The killer inexplicably decides to "disguise" the murder to resemble the urban myth, since wildfires were apparently a problem around Las Vegas and Lake Mead at that time. So he lathers his dead partner up with soap and somehow gets a wetsuit on him (anyone who's ever donned a wetsuit while alive would know how impossible it'd be to get that thing on if you're dead).

The killer gears up his victim, complete with scuba tank, then props him up in the woods and lights a match, creating a forest fire which ultimately blows up the scuba tank and sends the dead diver high into a tree. Later we find that the diver, a developer, was also an environmentalist, which was likely only a vehicle to introduce a bit of humor into the plot (in this case, the scriptwriters had some fun with the term "tree-hugger").

Enter the amazingly adroit CSI team. The character "Catherine" performs her investigation in the charred forest in a knockout tight and brilliantly white blouse - hardly appropriate 'gear' for examining a fire scene. But she looked great!

Her partner discovers the remains of a cigarette butt embedded in a charred pack of matches, and determines that this was a time-delay device which allowed the arsonist an extra 5 minutes to escape undetected. If the scriptwriters had done their research, they'd have discovered that, while smoldering rates vary, the burning time of an unpuffed cigarette is actually 10 to 30 minutes.

The team observes that the diver's scuba tank had "fissured" at its base, which is how the pressurized cylinder exploded and propelled the body upward into the tree. One problem with this plot contrivance was that the exploding tank did not have the energy to take a large human male body any significant distance. The second problem was that the tank would more likely have ruptured at its valve or along its side - where it's weakest, but certainly not at its base - which happens to be the strongest area of the aluminum tank. A side rupture or valve failure, though, would have propelled the body sideways or down and so were not plot-worthy.

The team also observed that the diver's still-intact, plastic air pressure gauge showed a reading of about 3000psi.  It's not clear what this had to do with the plot, but it looked cool - so into the script it went. The problems here were that, even though the tank which was supposedly supplying that pressure had blown up, and even though the hose from the tank to the gauge had been burned in two - the gauge was still reading 3000 pounds per inch of pressure.

Bad Words
Of the three CSI plots critiqued here, Bad Words was both the worst, and the most recent. Frankly, after these three programs aired we stopped watching CSI altogether, even if the subject matter involved crashes or fires. It got that frustrating.

In Bad Words, a night time fire occurs at a home, killing a teenaged girl in a dysfunctional family of three generations of women and one young boy.

Three of the CSI investigators, Catherine, Warrick, and Nick, are immediately at the scene, while the fire is still in progress. Jack, an arson investigator for the city, is also present, and because he says that a garage fire occurred on the same street 10 days prior, Catherine immediately jumps to the conclusion that the cause of this fire is arson. No one has yet to even step into the yard of the house.

For most of the story, the crack team of investigators could not even determine which room the fire started in. In real life, determining the room of fire origin is - by far - the easiest part unless the entire house has burned down to the ground. In this story, where only home furnishings have burned (and not the house itself), the room of origin should have been easily determined within minutes.

While in the kitchen, Jack comments that the adhesive used in attaching flooring is "highly flammable. Crack in the linoleum, the fire will just seek it out and go for it." While this may be true when it's first installed, adhesive in flooring does not normally contribute any significant fuel in a house fire. Jack's comment, interpreted charitably, was apparently meant to be a 'red herring' to throw us off the scent.

In the living room they focus on a heavily-burned couch. Catherine says, expertly,  "This looks like a liquid pour pattern. High-intensity burn." Couches typically are constructed of wood, fabric, and polyurethane foam, and typically provide one of the best fuels for a fire in the home.

When burning, furniture containing polyurethane foam creates a tremendous fire, often producing the intense fire damages Catherine observed. The burn patterns created by a burning couch also often mislead inexperienced fire investigators, as happened here. Even Jack, the supposedly experienced arson investigator, is fooled. He thinks that the fire spread from the couch toward the kitchen.

Later in the show, it's explained that the polyurethane foam used in the couch was "outlawed in 1988 due to its highly incendiary nature". Not true. In Great Britain, special regulations did go into effect in 1988 regarding making the material fire retardant, but polyurethane foam is still in wide use in furniture and other products today. You'll even find it in padded bras.

Nick notes that the refrigerator magnets in the kitchen have demagnetized due to high heat. He concludes that the fire had to exceed 932 degrees (the real temperature is actually a hundred degrees or so higher) for that process to occur, and that the burning sofa would not have reached such a "high" temperature. The reality is that flame temperatures above a burning polyurethane-cushioned sofa can be double that temperature.

In fact, in a typical house fire, the highest temperatures will often occur - surprise! - above a burning sofa. 

It's also doubtful that Nick would have found any refrigerator magnets. These flexible magnets will burn in a fire (they're made of resins as well as ferrite powder).

Things really get interesting when Nick's videotapes taken of the crowd at both of the fires show the same woman at each one. This excites him, especially since she's a good looking woman. But since both fires were in the same neighborhood, shouldn't he have expected to see some of the same people gawking at both?

Nick thought that this woman was "hot" - for a couple of reasons. In addition to having been arrested in the past for arson, she arrives for his interview dressed in a maximum cleavage red blouse, and explains - while licking her lips at Nick - that she's not really an arsonist, but a pyromaniac who gets aroused when she sets a fire. Pyromania is a very rare impulse control disorder which nearly exclusively involves males, so this hottie was definitely an unusual creature, indeed.

And, as for the "bad word" the young arsonist wrote on the floor? The scriptwriters did manage to get that one right. This photo was taken of the school notebook artwork of a troubled boy who, in real life, torched his own home.

Another memorable example of inept TV scriptwriting involved a old 'Quincy' episode, titled Guilty Till Proven Innocent, which dealt with a friend of county coroner Quincy. The man was accused of setting his furniture warehouse on fire with gasoline, killing an employee in the process. The Los Angeles arson investigator was depicted as the mean fire guy out to 'get' the poor business owner.

As usual, Quincy solved the case and, of course, in favor of his friend - all questions of conflict of interest aside.

How did the fire happen, according to Quincy? Well, the employee was walking along carrying a can of gasoline which, unbeknownst to him, was badly rusted and leaking. When he walked by a pilot light for a gas-fired appliance, the flame ignited the leaking gasoline vapors as he passed. But the gas can itself was found far away from the body - so how'd THAT happen, Quincy?

Quincy mused that the employee, engulfed in flames and holding a burning gas can, took the additional time to fling the can far, far away. Then the poor chap turned around to run - and ran right into a big wood beam that somehow was at forehead level, knocking himself out. Unlike the CSI plot, at least here we have a reason (stretched thin as it is) for why the victim didn't escape the flames.

From real life experience we can assure you that someone holding a gasoline can when it suddenly ignites will drop that can right there, instinctively, like the proverbial hot potato.

And two final thoughts: If that gasoline can had been leaking so badly, why did it still have fuel in it and why didn't the poor employee notice the leaked gasoline before he even picked it up?

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