Why finding the cause of the giant Hillsborough fire won’t be easy

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It's like looking for a needle in a haystack. A giant, charred, haystack.

Finding the cause of a fire as huge as the one that consumed two large warehouses in Hillsborough late last week — blazing for a day and a half, and sending thick, black smoke at least as far as 130 miles away — is exceedingly difficult, according to John Jay College of Criminal Justice Professor Glenn Corbett.

Why? There's a pretty good chance the fire consumed a lot of the evidence.

"In a fire like that, not always, but very often, you're relegated to using eyewitness accounts," said Corbett, who currently serves on the Fire Code Advisory Council for New Jersey and is a former member of the Federal Advisory committee of the National Construction Safety Team.

Corbett wasn't speaking from direct knowledge of the Hillsborough investigation, which is being conducted by the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, as the warehouses were located on federally owned property. Instead, he was speaking about huge fires more generally.

If investigators are lucky, he said, video surveillance inside the building will have captured the start of the blaze — and will be recoverable from what's left of the buildings.

"That can be very important," he said. "Often, that can be the best evidence you can find."

In any fire investigation, "you basically have to narrow down where you believe the area of origin began." Absent much preserved evidence, that means turning to other areas.

Corbett said it could be important to find out what the first person to call the fire into officials saw. Photographs or video taken early in the fire's progression may give hints as to its origin.

Fire investigators will likely be reluctant to jump to conclusions, he said — when he teaches fire investigation, he tells his students "never put down anything you're not sure of."

Mayor Frank DelCore has that the warehouses contained paper records, office furniture, foodstuffs and pellets. Corbett said flammable materials could have proven a complication.

Among what evidence remains, investigators will be looking for things out of place — "you wouldn't expect to find gasoline in an office, for instance," he said. Something that unusual might suggest arson.

Hillsborough officials have said antiquated sprinklers and low water pressure allowed the fire to spread more quickly than it might have with more modern fire suppression systems. While New Jersey has some of the nation's strictest fire codes, Hillsborough officials said they were unable to enforce those rules at the warehouses, because they're on federal property — despite having raised concerns about the dangers outdated systems raised.

Officials haven't yet offered more specific information about how the systems in the Hillsborough buildings would have fallen short of local codes, or what level of communication they'd previously had about their concerns.

Corbett said a proper fire suppression system should take into account the nature of the building's use and the materials stored there — under local codes, a building couldn't get cleared without doing so.

"Plastic pellets — that's much higher grade of fire danger," he said. "That's where you need the best sprinkler system, not the crappiest low-grade ones available."