He turned the page and made a sound of satisfaction.At long last.He was looking at the actual, formal electrical plan for the building.He traced the main circuits.One ran down each side of the alleyway ceiling with junction boxes at regular intervals.No light or plug outlets were depicted within a dozen feet of either ignition point.Which meant there was no electrical source that could explain either ignition point.
The conclusion was inescapable.Both fires had started in places where there was nothing to spontaneously light them.
The Shoemacher fire was arson.
While he’d been confident intellectually that his suspicions were right, it was another thing entirely toknowit.The knowing sat heavily upon him, weighing down his mind and body with horror.
He forced himself to turn the page.
He didn’t focus immediately on the next drawing because he was still struggling to absorb the truth staring him in the face.
It was possible that someone dropped a cigarette or match.Maybe they thought it was put out, but it was still smoldering.That would cause a fire with one ignition point.This fire hadtwo.
Furthermore, the fires had been started by something much,muchhotter than a cigarette or a match.Something had burned on top of the cement so fast and so hot that the moisture trapped inside the cement had no time to heat up slowly and evaporate.Instead, that moisture hadexploded, leaving distinctive crater-shaped pits called spalls.
No pile of hay set on fire burned anywhere near hot enough or fast enough to do that to concrete.
There was no way around arson as the cause of the fire.
The drawing he’d been staring at without seeing it came into focus before him.It was the mechanical sheet, depicting the plumbing, HVAC, and other systems to be installed in the building.
Wait.What?
Snaking all over the drawing of the barn were thin red lines, neatly drawn in a grid pattern.Red lines were the standard way of depicting a fire suppression system in a commercial structure.
Surely not.
He glanced up at the page’s title block and couldn’t believe his eyes as he read,HVAC,Plumbing and Fire Suppression Systems.
Fire suppression?
The barn had water sprinklers?Where hadtheybeen the day of the Shoemacher fire?And how come the final report made no mention whatsoever of them?
Sprinkler systems in commercial structures usually used pipes made of black iron or galvanized steel, and the sprinkler heads would’ve been made of brass, bronze, or stainless steel.They might have melted in the fire at some point, but the remains of the pipes and sprinklers would have been obvious in the remains of the fire and impossible to miss.Even the worst fire investigator in the world couldn’t miss hundreds of feet of metal piping melted in stripes among the ruins.
Of course, it was possible the construction contractor installed the sprinkler system on the cheap and used CPVC pipes instead of steel.But sprinkler heads were only made out of heat resistant metals.There would have been several dozen heads scattered throughout the charred remnants of the barn.No fire investigator would have missed those.
Ho.Lee.Cow.
This changed everything he’d thought he knew about the fire.
In the case of a hot, fast burning fire, sprinklers might not successfully extinguish it.But they most certainly would have bought enough time for people to go into the barn and lead the horses out to safety.Plus, sprinklers would have soaked the hay in the loft enough to slow its combustionwaydown.
Even on a hot, dry, August day, damp hay would burn alotslower than dry hay.The hay didn’t even have to be sopping wet to burn more slowly.As long as the outsides of the bales were damp, the insides wouldn’t ignite anywhere near as quickly.The hayloft certainly wouldn’t have exploded into flames all at once, trapping the Cobbler Cove firefighters the way the Shoemacher fire report said it had.
All the witnesses he’d spoken to who’d been at the fire that day described the whole roof of the barn going up in flames all at once.
The drawing depicted a large, pressurized storage tank of water, 30,000 gallons minimum, to be buried beside the well house.Pipes delivered water under pressure from the tank to the barn and its sprinkler heads, which were depicted at forty foot intervals both downstairs and upstairs.That was well below the minimum required interval for a building of this size.
This was a wet-pipe system, meaning the pipes were always full of water and pressurized, ready to spray at the first indication of smoke or heat in the system’s sensors.It should have done an excellent job of delivering the three C’s of fire suppression: coverage, cooling, and contraction.
Coverage referred to everything getting wet quickly.
Cooling happened as cold water absorbed thermal energy from the fire.Less heat meant less fire.Plus, water cooled the air and physical materials in the space, both those on fire and those about to be on fire.
Contraction happened when water hit the fire and turned to steam.That steam rapidly displaced the air in the room, sharply reducing the amount of available oxygen to fuel the fire, quickly contracting the fire’s size.
Even in the case of an extremely hot fire started by a nasty accelerant, a sprinkler system would havemassivelyslowed down how fast the fire spread.
