First Responders In Fire Investigation

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How First Responders Impact the Fire Investigation There are many types of first responders that may be called to an emergency, but I will only be discussing three different types of first responders in this discussion. First I will talk about firefighters and since this is about a fire investigation, I would presume that the fire crew would be the first to arrive on the scene. Three important things that the fire personnel are taught to pay attention to is hearing, sight, and smell. At the scene of a fire, all fire crew personnel will arrive and begin to survey the situation, listening, and looking for possible dangers, locations that the fire is attacking, people in need of rescue and possible suspects. Once the firefighters have a better…show more content…
Smelling for chemicals can be dangerous but also a helpful hint what could be harmful to people nearby or what might have been used in the fire setting. Fire investigators need as much information as possible to reconstruct the scene back together to understand what happened. Firefighters go through training to use their senses to identify anything that could help investigators. Some of the things they look for is suspicious people that have been at more the one fire, wind strength, chemical trails, and any evidence found at the scene. Firefighters should do their best to keep notes of everything they find. What they have noticed, what they have touched or moved, patterns or footprints that look out of the ordinary. The goal for the fire crew should be safety for the people, and to preserve the evidence to the best of their abilities, for the investigation. Next first responder to enter the location would most likely be police officers. Police officers have different responsibilities when arriving at a fire scene, one of the first things they might do is to encompass the perimeter and help secure the area. Once the area is secure, they may begin to take notes of all the people that were either in the fire…show more content…
The last group of first responders I would like to discuss are paramedics. In a perfect scenario, paramedics should arrive at the same time the fire crew does. It should work like a conveyer belt going in two separate directions. As the fire crew are helping people out of the area of the fire, they can take the injured and go directly to the ambulances and paramedics, and the people that are unharmed can go to safety with the police officers. These paramedics can do a lot for the investigation, they can report the types of burns in there were any accelerants that caused the fire to burn hotter on certain body zones, and report anything they hear from the people they are treating. These three forms of first responders are invaluable to the fire investigators investigation. Without firefighters preserving the evidence, the police taking notes, and paramedics giving burn mark information, the investigator would have less to go on. I have two quotes from an informational video about first responders that I thought were spot on, 1st “for a firefighter, it’s safety
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