So I watched the video from Simon. While I'm not trained in arson investigation or anything, I was a firefighter. What I see is a garage on fire with a car in it. It's hard to tell from a 4 second cell phone video, taken from a few houses down, if the car was the origin, because we see the front of it looks fine. Looking diwn the right side of the car, it looks fine too. You can actually see the flames reflecting off the paint, which means it hasn't started to burn. Having said that, here's my take away. New Zealand doesn't have the same level of code enforcement as the US. If someone did a **** job of installing the wiring in the garage or from the breaker to the charger, that can be a point of ignition, especially if there is corrosion from being that close to the salt water.
Now as far as the misinformation goes, I know enough about investigating to know eye witness statements aren't reliable. Simon claims that some eye witnesses say it was in the garage, some say it wasn't. Hard to to tell from the video. It looks like it's in, but there's also sunlight hittiting the front of the car. Without knowing the address and time, I cant say where the sun would be to know where the car would be to make that exact shadow pattern. Maybe the car was half in/half out, as if someone was maybe doing work in the garage behind the car.
But a 4 second video of a house fire seems more like a clip of a longer video. Whenever I see such a short clip of a video I expect to be a lot longer, I'm immediately suspicious. Its no different to me than when people take a verse or part of a verse from the Bible to fit their "narrative" only to find out it was taken out of context. Was he videoing the fire or the three cuties walking around? Also, I don't see any impropriety with the media. They reported the information given to them. The investigators came back and said something different, and then they reported that. Lastly, Simon has the information of the lead investigator. Why not contact him directly instead of the public affairs officer? Maybe things are different in that country. Here, the investigation would likely be open record or available via a freedom of information act request. Without that, and my understanding of fire behavior, the best I can say is the investigator is suspect too. I can't call him a flat out lie because I dont see fire inside the living spaces in a 4 second clip. Not knowing how the house is constructed, who knows how far and how long timewise that fire could exist in voids. The most fuel and available oxygen is going to be in a garage open to the air, so it stands to reason the fire, whenever it reached it, would grow the fastest, even if it started elsewhere. We can see buy the smoke color there are a lot of combustibles in the back of the garage.
So my take away is both "sides" lie, and I'm not surprised.
