WESTFIELD–The city’s fire department gained another member of their force who can help investigate fires.
Westfield Fire Department capt. Seth Ellis recently graduated from the Massachusetts Firefighting Academy’s Basic Fire Investigation course. Ellis was one of 64 graduates from the program, which concluded last week.
According to the Massachusetts Firefighting Academy, the six-day program “provides fire and state and local police officers with the technical skills to accurately determine the origin and cause of fires in their jurisdictions and together, build solid, prosecutable cases.”
The program is used to to help investigators learn a team process to investigate fires, whether they are of a suspicious origin or not. Among the skills attendees learned were “concepts of witness interviewing, fire behavior, scene examination, fire scene documentation and evidence collection.”
The program is crucial in learning how to properly gather evidence, which can be difficult to come by following a fire.
“It is a challenge to determine the cause of the fire when so much of the needed evidence is destroyed by the fire itself,” State Fire Marshal Peter J. Ostroskey said in a press release. “This training provides our local fire and police investigators with the skills and knowledge to meet that challenge.”
