Fire Lover Read Free Page B

only thirty feet from the southwest fire door when the starting point of the fire was still the entire length of the store away. Yet he had barely escaped without injury. The fire was on him just that fast. He was not interviewed.
    But Sergeant Palmer did learn that there were two other retail-store fires in the area on that terrible evening, and that they had both been deemed arson fires, but Palmer decided that since they were set in potato chip racks and not polyfoam, they were probably unconnected to the Ole's blaze.
    Soon, in the northern portion of the ruined building, far from where Jim Obdam and Anthony Colantuano had seen the first column of smoke, searchers found human remains.
    Another fire investigator, who arrived on the scene at 7:00 a. M., was a supervisor with the arson-bomb unit of the California State Fire Marshal's Office, where he'd worked for sixteen years.
    Jim Allen, like any arson investigator, was looking for signs of the fire's direction. Normally, fire moves upward through a heat-transfer process, and as it hits a surface - a wall, a ceiling - it follows the path of least resistance, spreading out in a V pattern, upward and outward. The V or convex pattern reveals the point of origin in a simple fire, but the Ole's disaster had not been simple.
    Allen noted that it was in the center of the building that the roof had collapsed. In addition, after temperatures in the location reached 160 degrees and melted the doors' fusible links, both north and south steel fire doors had rolled down as they were designed to do. The assumption was that a major fire would occur after hours when no one was in the store, but the speed and heat of this fire had been astonishing, and those doors had sealed egress quickly, very quickly.
    Allen stayed about seven hours, a lot longer than Sergeant Palmer, and after three or four of the aisles had been dug out, he prowled through the southeast corner with John Orr, a friend and colleague who had also arrived on the scene.
    Jim Allen was of the opinion that the investigation, like the fire, was moving too fast. This fire had caught up with people trying to outrun it, so there had to have been a large load of fuel. Of course, he knew that polyurethane foam is a hydrocarbon fuel that comes from a petroleum product, with the burn characteristic of petroleum, but he did not learn of its presence, not that day.
    Allen didn't like the speed with which Sergeant Palmer's conclusions were being offered, and he said so to John Orr, but his colleague failed to tell Allen that there had been two other retail-store fires in the area the night before. And he never mentioned that he had been at the scene of one of them to consult, and was the official investigator on the other. Three such fires might indicate an arson series, and play a significant role in determining the nature of the Ole's fire.
    During the early afternoon, Jim Allen, John Orr, and other arson investigators were ordered out of the area by a tall sheriff's department lieutenant who said, "We're going into body recovery now."
    When Allen protested, the tall lieutenant said, "You can leave, or run the risk of being arrested for interfering."
    In addition to never learning about the polyfoam in the southeast quadrant of the building, Allen was curtailed by the LASD investigators, who said that all witnesses would be interviewed by them.
    At a meeting that then took place there in Ole's shopping center, at a Winchell's doughnut shop, Sergeant Palmer said to the huddle of fire investigators, "I can't eliminate an electrical problem in the concealed space between the false ceiling and the roof."
    "We haven't come up with a point of origin," Jim Allen offered. "Let's keep going."
    "We should be unified with our conclusion," Sergeant Palmer said, but Allen replied, "I'm writing up my report that it's an undetermined fire. I don't know for sure if it started in the attic or where it started."
    Ultimately, Palmer believed it had been