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CHARLES G. KING ASSOCIATES Charles G. King Associates, Inc., was founded in 1980 by Charles G. King and Shelly King to provide the highest standards in fire analysis and dependable, on-the-spot investigations to determine the origin and cause of fires. Over the years, we have conducted fire investigations for insurance companies, law firms, and municipalities. We have been called in by law enforcement to give expert testimony in criminal cases involving arson, and we have examined the remains of hundreds of appliances, utilities, residences, businesses, cars, trucks, recreational vehicles, and boats. Our objective is to use our knowledge of fire dynamics and burn patterns to identify and report where, why, and how a fire started. OUR APPROACH TO FIRE INVESTIGATION Having become multidisciplinary, fire investigation today reaches out to areas of expertise unavailable in the past. What fire investigators do can be termed "real-time archeology." The fire investigator's "pit" is the fire scene. Our investigators systematically analyze burn patterns, collect evidence, and document the scene. We reconstruct, as closely as possible, the original condition of structures, equipment, appliances, or vehicles. This enables us not only to determine where and how a fire started, but also to recognize what may have been altered, destroyed, removed from, or added to the fire scene prior to our inspection, thus providing our clients with invaluable information about Spoliation of Evidence. At Charles G. King Associates, we continuously strive to update our knowledge, consulting industry guides such as NFPA 921 and relying on the scientific method, defined as "The systematic pursuit of knowledge involving the recognition and formulation of a problem, the collection of data through observation and experiment, and the formulation and testing of a hypothesis." |
