Investigating Loss Investigation: What goes into fire engineering?

Hello Everyone,
This is the first post in a series about how fire & fire suppression engineers preform loss investigation services.  As home improvement contractors, sometimes we like to expand our horizons by looking into what other people who work n the contracting and building industry do, however different their work may be.   Loss investigation is a technical field that is part detective work and part engineering.  Expert fire engineers who specialize in this field use the evidence collected after a fire to determine how the fire protection system that was in place might have malfunctioned.  More importantly, they discover the cause and origin of the fire and evaluate the performance (or lack there for) of the fire protection system, note and analyze the components of the hazard that lead to the spreading of the fire itself and, in doing so, make conclusions that can be used by insurance companies or businesses to decide how to settle after a disaster.
The first component of this service, cause and origin investigation, is firmly grounded in the scientific method, and is controlled and regulated by governmental organizations such as the National Fire Protection Association, who monitors the scientific veracity of all claims made by fire engineers in loss investigation cases.  This means that fire suppression and loss investigation consultations have to use scientific findings and research as the primary evidence, as opposed to the engineer’s professional experience.  This means that fire engineers and companies that provide fire engineering services have to well-versed in all elements of fire science: physics, theoretical mathematics, fluid dynamics, heat transfer, etc.  Needless to say, studying the way in which fire behaves is a complex science, and one that requires objective, detail-oriented study.  Be sure that when you are located a fire engineering firm, their engineers are registered Fire Protection Engineers.
Forensic Engineering is a similar field, but one that exclusively examines the reasons behind the failure of a fire protection system.    They are then able to assign responsibility to the correct parties and support the damaged party during any litigation that might occur as a result of the failed system.
After a forensic engineer has identified the party responsible for a fire system’s failure, there is a period in which the subrogation potential is analyzed and debated, which is to say, the total insurance amount is debated.  A trained & qualified fire engineering firm is sometimes able to recover millions of dollars for a client simply by providing evidence of the behavior of the fire and how it could have been avoided.