Our garage was set on fire by somebody last month. When we discovered the fire around 1:30 in the morning the garage door was diagonally hanging in the tracks. The firemarshalls think the spring broke because of the heat but my contractor said the spring was fine and was not broken. The fire was centrally located in my garage due to my motorcycle burning there. The spring as you might know is right by the edge of the garage where the garage door goes up and down.
The garage door itself is very heavy wooden garage door not aluminum as most garage doors are these days. The left side of the garage door was hanging about three feet or so up where I could just bend down and go underneath it on the left side. The door was folded in about three sections and the right side of the door was down about 3 from the ceiling. If you were looking at it like a clock the top of the garage door was at about 10 o’clock and the hand point the other was about 4 o’clock. We left the garage door open at the bottom any where from about 6" to 10" for the cat to come inside at night. The reason for the range is because we have a Genie screw type electric garage door opener.
My question for ya’ll which I really pray that ya’ll can help me discover is what would the door do if someone was trying to break into it to steal my motorcycles. My wife’s lawyer discovered that the cable that hooks to the spring could be cut since it is exposed due to the bend of the garage door it has towards the ceiling of the house. Also how much pressure would it take to open the door lifting from the bottom since it was opened that much for the cat.
Also the firemarshall said the garage door would have fell like that due to the heat but my contractor said the garage door wasn’t even burnt and it is wooden and it wasn’t burnt and he said the spring was fine. Your help would be really appreciate my wife is feeling like Harrison Ford from the fugitive because it seems like the cops aren’t trying to find the truth just her as a suspect because they think the garage door fell from the heat instead of pushed or pried up from the bottom.
I know a fair bit about fire. I also investigate accidents and mechanical failures for a living.
I’m afraid it’s very unlikely you can convey enough information about this on a message board for anyone to be much direct help. If you could take digital photographs and put them online that would be a help.
I’m a little unclear about the exact nature of your problem - is your wife under suspicion of setting this fire? You seem to want to demonstrate that the sagging of your garage door was the result of forced entry and not fire damage. If that’s the case, there’s a few things you can do to help yourself:
Photograph the hell out of everything. Include something in the shots for scale - a rule, a coin for close-ups, a person.
Keep everything you can. If the door springs have been annealed from the heat then that can be checked by hardness testing and/or metallography. It’s not a matter of opinion, and unless the thing has visibly deformed or melted, you can’t tell with the naked eye. Similarly, whether a cable has been cut or parted due to fire damage is checkable.
You need someone more expert than your contractor to assess the condition of the door and the spring. I’m afraid commercial expertise in these areas can be expensive, but you don’t need a full-blown investigation, just a few tests. The spring manufacturer might be of help, or a local university. Be careful of letting the spring out of your posession though.
Fire marshals can make mistakes. Google the name “Gerald Hurst” to find just how many, how often and how badly.
Ditto to what Matt said. I have taken fire investigation classes and alot of this stuff you have to see with your own eyes. Fires behave in pretty predictable ways and the investigator may be seeing something you are overlooking or misunderstanding. Then again he may just be lazy.
They have already make a few already. They even told me that they have heated conversations amongst themselves over what happened that night. What is sad is somebody could have killed my family and I and they are looking at my wife instead of trying to catch the wacko.
Well then, one way or another, the scene is screwed. But on the bright side, I can’t see there being any provable case against your wife. A 10" gap at the bottom of your garage door means any skinny person could have gained access to your garage without even having to push the door up - I certainly could.
I’m not sure how it works in the USA, but in the UK the defense doesn’t have to prove a thing. It’s for the prosecution to prove their case, and the defense to poke holes in it. If a fire marshall wants to claim a spring is fire-damaged, he better have photographs showing distortion/melting, or a lab hardness test showing softening compared to a non-fire-damaged spring, or lab photographs of metallography showing an annealed microstructure. Otherwise, he’s just venting gas through his mouth, and you can quote me. Any case for the prosecution that claims a door is hanging off because of a fire-damaged spring but doesn’t retain that spring as evidence is plain incompetent.
Your earlier post implied your wife has a lawyer. It’s a lawyer’s advice you need now, since the actual evidence seems to have departed. But with the presumption of innocence being fundamental, I’d say the prosecution has blown it already.
If “they” are having heated conversations about what happened, try and get a few dissenters on record. And don’t say a word without your lawyer present - don’t get tripped up verbally by what sounds like a very weak case.