Kentucky school fire forensic case

$8M arson/electrical-fire case. SEM-EDS analysis returned by a Kentucky lab found 13% technetium in the nail samples. Tom's punchline: "We can solve this case — just sell the nails." Garbage data. Case settled before he testified. Lesson: question your data.

Which leads me to another story. I had a case down in Kentucky of a school that burned down — I think it was an elementary school. The roofers were putting nails in the roof, and the question was: did they hit an electrical cable and cause an arc that started the fire? We had some analysis come back from a laboratory in Kentucky. They did an SEM-EDS analysis, and it found thirteen percent technetium. I said, oh, we can solve this case — it's only worth $8 million, we'll just sell the nails. That much technetium is valuable. This is where, again, you have to question the data. This was garbage data. The case settled before I got up to tell the jury how stupid the other people were.

SEM operator reported fourteen percent technetium in roofing nails. Tom uses it to skewer credulity in chemical analyses: "we can settle this case, we just sell the nails for the technetium."

So they give you a little radioactive technetium, and it's decaying rapidly enough that they can see where the blood vessels are, because the technetium's running through your blood. If you have a blockage in your heart, they can say, we saw something before and there was a blood vessel there, and now we don't see the blood vessel, which means blood is not flowing through. I had a case once where a school burned down in Kentucky, and the people did an analysis in the scanning electron microscope and came up with an analysis that said there was fourteen percent technetium in the roofing nails. I thought, well, we can settle this case — we just sell the nails for the technetium. It just shows you how good some chemical analyses are. Thanks for that expert.

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