Of interest to all practitioners who provide fire advice, whether in-house or as a consultant is the Judge's opinion in this case which involved a large fire failing to be extinguished by a wrongly-designed automatic system, employees failure to follow training, expert witness' inability to reach agreement and displaying extreme bias and a massive amount of contributory negligence in failing to act on the results of risk assessment. http://www.info4fire.com...e-of-suppression-system. The link within the article to the full court judgement is worthy of a full read if you have several hours to spare.

Sorry. I'll try again. http://www.info4fire.com...re-of-suppression-system

Had every intention of doing that this week while away on my travels. Copy pasted into word - over 100 pages. Decided to do my bit for the environment and changed the line spacing / font size. Result now 58 pages. Still a fair bit so "print 2 pages per sheet" - press PRINT. Can I now read it? Not likely. Will now have to dig out a maginifying glass. Thanks Stuff.

"The case also featured conflicting evidence from the various expert witnesses called by both sides, who were unable to agree on many aspects of the fire and whose differences became quite heated during the case" If expert witnesses can't agree on the right FS solution, what chance do us mere mortals have???

Thanks to Stuff4blokes for highlighting this judgement. I would second Ron H in that the judgement is a worthwhile read. No doubt Ray Rapp will do us all a good summary after his devotions to the 100+ pages ;-) In the meantime, a simple scan through the introduction, paras 367 et seq together with section J gives a good feel for the judgement. The lessons are far wider than fire safety or the role/function of experts. It also indicates just how much detail comes out of serious incident investigations for those who have no experience of such matters. Is it the conflict of opinion that was a concern to the judge? I don't think so. It is the failure of the panel of experts to follow the direction of the court and thus be unable to properly assist the court in the manner they are required to do. (para 396 et seq) The judge is, however, very critical of all the expert witnesses called (para 424-426) both in terms of their evidence and their failure to act as instructed. Indeed one can almost read his annoyance at the whole matter when he records "be dubious about the reliability of all of the expert evidence that has been presented to me. This is emphatically not a case where the court is able to prefer one expert over another and let that approach dictate the result." hth P48