Remembering well on Remembrance Day is getting harder as veterans of World War 1 are all gone and those of World War 2 become fewer.

War Memorial Ottawa 

Remembrance Day 2014 

We are now 100 years out from the start of World War 1 and 75 years out from the start of World War 2.  There are no Canadian veterans left from World War 1. There are fewer veterans left from World War 2.  Even more sobering is the fact that the ranks of Korean War veterans are also declining.

In the past we have always been able to make Remembrance Day a very tangible event. We would see veterans marching to the cenotaphs in every town and city in Canada wearing their campaign medals and regimental berets. They were our annual tangible connection to their service and commitment to ensure we live in a democratic and free society. 

As time moves on we now face making other kinds of connections to these passing veterans. Younger people can only have remote connections to the considerable sacrifices made by their grand parents and in some cases great grand parents. Schools work to make the connection but now without any human faces of the veterans of World War 1 and 2. 

I am fortunate at my age. I have my memory connections as an officer of The Royal Canadian Regiment (RCR). Our regimental service in all Canadian operations since 1883 and even earlier through our regimental links with the Canadian Fusiliers and Oxford Rifles  is welded to my very person. 

In my time during the 1960’s we had members of the regiment who were still on active duty wearing campaign ribbons from World War 2 and Korea. Tangibility was not a pressing issue for us.

Each year we would see veteran RCR old comrades parading with us wearing World War 1 medals and some also wearing the ribbons of their second round of service during World War 2. Those kind of connections are fleeting for my grand children who are all Millennium born high school students. I do my best to keep them in the Remembrance Day loop but they live in another time and place.

One of my wife’s relatives in Belgium works very hard keeping the memory of our Canadian service to his country. He does uniformed reenactments of regiments that fought in Belgium during World War 1 and 2. He lives near Ypres so he is in constant touch with the horrendous experience of that city in both World War 1 and 2. Today, however, the ruined city of 1918 that was again damaged in 1944, has been restored to pristine condition.

Touring these sites with him is an education. We went to to the Menin Gate where the names of all the Commonwealth troops who died on the Ypres Salient in World War 1 are inscribed. I saw many Canadian names and regiments on that wall but the most tangible fact was something he pointed out to me. As we examined the World War 1 names there are World War 2 bullet holes in the Menin Gate from when it was fought over in 1944.  A poignant and very tangible experience since it was members of our First Canadian Corp who fought through here again in World War 2. 

One of my private moments of remembrance also took place Belgium some years back. I went alone to site of Passchendaele on the Ypres Salient to honour Canadians who died and those who held their positions in the first gas attacks in 1915. After examining our monument, I noticed that a path led through the evergreen hedges to a gate.

I opened the gate and stepped onto a farm field where cows were grazing. In the ground were zigzag depressions running off towards Sanctuary Wood. It was what is left of the front line trenches from World War 1. 

Zigzag trench lines in 1917

Half way across the field an angry man approached me. Obviously I was trespassing. He asked me in Flemish what I was doing on his land. I answered in English that I was tracing the first world war trench lines. He answered in English. “Are you an American?” No I said I am a Canadian and a member of The Royal Canadian Regiment. “Then you are welcome!” he answered extending his hand. He phoned his neighbours so I would have clear passage.

Vimy in France is our major monument to the Canadian soldiers who survived and died during World War 1. The Canadian Corp, and of course The Royal Canadian Regiment as part of that larger force, fought here in April 1917 to push the Germans permanently off this very high point of ground. Some claim that Canada became a country at this battle.

In 1992, my wife and I had the younger members of my family, Peter and Alexandra with us. They were both preteens and I wanted to let them know about our contribution to World War 1.  We were finishing a long  car trip from Belgium to Spain and back. We landed at Vimy late in the day and found that we could not get on a tour of the site and particularly the tunnels that still exist to move troops forward or to blow up the German lines with caches of high explosives.

There was one hope that we could get a tour. An Irish group was coming after attending a commemoration for the Battle of The Somme. If they would agree to us joining their tour then we could see the tunnel.

Suddenly a bus arrived and many people got off with security men. The guide went to confer with the Irish person in charge of the tour. This person turned out to be the Lord Mayor of Dublin. In addition, the  then Anglican Primate of Ireland, Cardinals of the Irish Catholic Church and many other protestant church officials plus politicians of all stripes from the Irish Parliament formed this group.

The Lord Mayor welcomed us and introduced two World War 1 veterans from their tour who turned out to be the reason they were at Vimy. One of the veterans had served with the British Army at Vimy as a runner between the British and Canadian lines. His task was to take messages from the tunnels if phone communications went down during the battle.

We then went down into the tunnels which are 30 meters underground and therefore impervious to heavy artillery fire. As we walked through the tunnel we noticed regimental crests carved into the chalk walls and messages from soldiers who waited down here for the main attack to start. There were command bunkers and medical aid rooms. It was living history with one veteran who had been down here for the Vimy Ridge battle in 1917.

Suddenly the veteran asked the guide which tunnel we were in. I recall her saying that it was Number 9 of the twelve that were dug. The Irish veteran said that if it was Number 9 tunnel he could show us where his friend was killed on the day of the battle. A hush fell over groups as this veteran led us further down the tunnel to a room near the end. It was a command room. 

In the corner was a stairs cut into the chalk that led up to ground level. The stairwell was filled with rubble held in place by chicken coop wire. The veteran was silent for a moment as it all sunk in. Then he recounted how his friend was standing near the stairs when a German shell blast came down the stairwell killing his friend instantly.

That is the most tangible experience I can relate about war having fortunately never experienced war myself. Each time I go to a Remembrance Day ceremony I think about the bullet holes in the Menin Gate, the zigzag trench line that still exists in a Flemish cow field and those who died there in a muddy carnage. Then I remember the look on the face of an old Irish veteran who came face to face with the horror of his friend’s death in a Vimy tunnel long, long ago in 1917.

Pro Patria

© Copyright 2014, Tom Thorne, All Rights Reserved.

Jian Ghomeshi: a catalyst for a prolonged CBC budget crisis with the Harper Government.

Former CBC Q host Jian Ghomeshi in a no-win position.

Jian Ghomeshi, consenting adults, the public good, legal wrangles and the CBC budgets.

by Tom Thorne

Jian Ghomeshi was fired by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) last weekend. Apparently the CBC administration has discovered that Mr. Ghomeshi likes rough sex and he allegedly enjoys hitting and smacking women during sex. Mr Ghomeshi, himself,  has revealed that some of allegations do have traction.

In a weekend lengthy 1586 word Facebook account of his difficulties, Mr. Ghomeshi admitted to consensual rough sex with several different women. Some of the women are now coming forward saying they don’t remember giving their consent. None ever went to police to complain or to lay a charge against Mr. Ghomeshi. Most of the women have remained anonymous except actress Lucy DeCoutere and lawyer Reva Seth.

The problem the CBC faces is Mr. Ghomeshi  is prominently in the public eye and is a poster boy for the CBC in a time of crisis when their federal government budget allocations are under intense fire. The CBC has laid off possibly 600 plus staff because of their budget crisis with more recently. CBC morale is already tapped out.

The last thing the CBC administration needs at this time is to fuel the Harper Government with a scandal that won’t play very well with Conservative’s support base, which in turn will enable Harper to cut more CBC budget to look good with his political base in an election year. That’s the 38 percent that gave Harper a majority government last time.

So when this situation surfaced CBC administrators had little choice but to confront Mr. Ghomeshi for the greater good of the CBC which is sailing some very rough fiscal seas. Of course there are problems of removing their star from the firmament and removing Mr. Ghomeshi’s 3.5 metre high poster from their CBC building hallway in Toronto.

They have deals to consider with 170 US radio outlets where Mr Ghomeshi’s program Q is now aired daily. The CBC administration may end up saving face, doing the right thing for violence against women, but lose audience and prominence in the ever shifting broadcasting and developing web based distribution models. Not a good situation during a budget crisis.

However, CBC has little choice. In addition to the obvious business problems created by the Ghomeshi firing they may be in a lose-lose situation since they will experience more federal government budget cuts and they will be facing a civil suit for $55 million launched by Mr. Ghomeshi through his lawyers Dentons Canada LLP.  Mr Ghomeshi is also filing a reinstatement attempt with the broadcast union that represents on air CBC people.

An interesting development is the withdrawal of the public relations firm Navigator from the fray. This public and media relations company was initially engaged by Mr. Ghomeshi to represent his image interests and to offer advice. Their council may have been ignored in some way because they now realize that they cannot help him.

Was Navigator involved in the Facebook 1586 word statement? It gets his story out front. After that statement Mr. Ghomeshi has only remained silent. He has let his law firm represent him which is probably his wise and only choice. 

Navigator cannot hope to counter Lucy DeCoutere and Reva Seth going public describing their sexual experiences with Mr. Ghomeshi.  Anything Navigator could say or do with be seen as supporting violence against women. It is a no win argument and hence their departure from working with Mr. Ghomeshi.

Navigator’s only defence of Mr. Ghomeshi is to say that the rough sex was consensual implying that all the women also made a kinky personal sexual choices. That is also a public and media relations situation that is also a loser.  

What appears to be the case is Navigator has cut their loses for what quickly developed into a no-win situation which can only be seen as a tactical withdrawal before their own reputation for good PR work is sullied.

Mr. Ghomeshi may very well be permanently adrift with his career in tatters and facing legal wrangles that could go on for years. This CBC case will probably never get to court and it may yet be compounded by suits launched by the women involved. It remains to be seen if they launch actions and if their cases are criminal or civil. Violence against women has no statute of limitations. 

One can only conclude that Mr. Ghomeshi is in very deep trouble. The longer outcome for the CBC is not promising. The women involved probably now know that not reporting violence is bad for all women, and mostly those not involved with the famous.

©  Copyright 2014, Tom Thorne, All Rights Reserved

How an Information Society digitally stores, secures and retrieves its history. History is made from what information survives time.

Papyrus scrolls are fragile preservers of history. Cuniform clay tablets preserve history very well for thousands of years. Digital media preservation may be even more fragile than papyrus because its information volume will be too intangible and large to fully interpret. 

That may very well define the nature of the history studies of a digitally-based Information Society. 

Digital content and preserving history.

by Tom Thorne

This article is the 165th that I have written for this blog. It is 100 percent captured, stored and displayed by digital systems.  As I examined the stories and articles that I have done since the blog started in 2011, I realized that the blog itself has never been downloaded as an entity or entirety by me for any possible archival survival or simply as a backup. 

Certainly I have digital copies of all the stories on the blog, but the blog itself with its presentation, pictures and comments is not backed up until today when I finally did it. But the blog is also stored digitally and is about as secure as a future hard drive crash or a scratch on a CD or DVD. It also sits ethereally on some Google host computer located somewhere in the vast digital expanse of the Internet. 

I have no real idea where Google keeps this blog. I know that when I post during the morning in Belleville, Canada it is put up somewhere in the early morning somewhere else on planet earth. My blog usage statistics has a different day ending than the one I am living in Ontario. The day where my blog viewer statistics ends is at 21:00 hours Ontario time.

So I backed it all up knowing full well that if I place it on a hard drive or digital CD or DVD it could easily be lost in the future. That act provoked thought about what using digital media really means. History is made from what media survives time or by what information can be accessed. It is also true for print and broadcasting both audio and video which are all also stored as digital files these days.

Archives that were buried or lost from Sumerian times 4000 years ago exist today on clay tablets most of which are tedious records of transactions by merchants. These caches of history are usually discovered by accident and made sense of by archaeologists.  A small number of these clay tablets record literature or art so there is always a bias of communications. The media that survive are literally the message. What that means to an Information Society is a big question.

Ideas we have of ancient Egypt are gleaned from surviving temple stones with chiselled hieroglyphic texts or from the much more fragile papyrus scroll medium. I well remember in 2010 seeing several versions of the Egyptian Book of the Dead on papyrus in the Cairo Museum. It is a major preservation job to keep them from turning to dust. History is what survives as primary sources and as a result may offer only a fleeting fragment of what actually happened in those times.

In the case of these ancient texts on papyrus, clay or the fragile paper of the Dead Sea Scrolls for example, they are now also preserved and stored digitally while the originals are carefully put away in climate controlled storage.

Archives are regularly subject to the destruction of warfare. They are also destroyed by natural disasters or buried for safe keeping only to be lost when the human in charge dies or forgets where they are.  What survives becomes history. It can never be the full story. It is a selective story or account of a small window into human time and place. Digital storage of information is even more fleeting than paper, clay or stone.

Imagine a society that is interpreted in the future by a study of Facebook or Twitter files. Imagine all the blogs including this one that become the fabric for the social interpretation of our times.  I think I need to be much more responsible using this new medium if that is the case in the future. 

I like to think that this blog has some useful ideas and content, but a family blog showing their kids activities may have more sociological value to examining the 21st century than anything I say.  But how much will any of this survive as an archival record? They can be here today and gone tomorrow. Just zeros and ones magnetically held in place or burned into a plastic surface by a laser beam.

A few weeks ago we received a letter from our family doctor. He announced that he is retiring on 20 November 2014. He asked that we make certain that we order  our medical files which are in paper file folders and get them scanned and placed on a CD. Then whenever we find a new doctor we can present our disk. He has hired a document management company to do these backups at our expense.

As it turns out our doctor who we have had for 29 years has found a replacement but he wants a CD of our files when he takes over the practice in December.  We are having the backup disks made after 20 November. My wife’s file  is quite big and mine is average sized and we will be charged by the number of pages they have to scan.

This process calls into question paper versus electronic medical files. When the new doctor gets our digital file presumably the files will be digital from that time forward. I just saw a specialist who makes digital files as he talks to you. No paper, just notes on his laptop. My dentist does the same thing and is phasing out his paper files. My Income Tax is also a digital file each year. 

Hopefully these digital doctors and professionals have good backup systems so patient and client files are not lost in a crash. It seems to me that there is a huge digital document business is developing. At the moment these files are all held by individual professionals but it a short time until they will be all connected. 

In the medical world your health insurance number will access a digital file that shows the state of your health, medicines and pharmacy, specialists you have seen and any hospital stays. Ontario bureaucrats botched getting this running but it is inevitable since it is being done at the doctor’s office level.

This database will be digital so how it is secured and how it is stored and backed up is a crucial issue for our times. It will be able to offer a profile of what you cost the health system. It should stop duplication of dangerous prescription drugs. But where will this data be stored and secured and who will get to retrieve it? A future history drawn from these files will be able to analyze data to show the incidence of heart disease and cancer in the 21st century and how many people had dental mouth guards to stop them grinding their teeth when they are sleeping.

Digital history stores much more intimate information than ever before. Therefore it is more complex than ever before to manage. How so much data will be selected for use is an issue and how that information is pulled and selected from databases will define history of our times in the future. And if a digital system crashes then history will be redefined from what has survived just as it has been for the last six millennia from other more tangible media.


© Copyright, Tom Thorne, 2014, All Rights Reserved.

Scots will likely closely vote No today. However all is not lost. There has to be more power for the Scottish Parliament. In that sense Alex Salmond has won.

Salmond: Och aye, the wurst we can dae is gie yon 

David Cameron a wee scare fur his job and get 

mair devolution concessions frae him!

Scottish independence 3

by Tom Thorne

Today the Scots vote for their independence or to stay in Great Britain. Yesterday I began a review of all polls taken since the start of September concerning this issue. About 4.5 million Scots are voting as I write this article.

The polls indicate that the No side will win this referendum. It will be quite close but they will take it according to 15 polling organizations that I reviewed. The No side up to the present moment expressed anxieties that the referendum would go to the Yes side.

Traditionally the Highlands are voting Yes by a four percent margin coming in about 55 percent. Glasgow with 20 percent of the voters will go Yes. The rest of the country is below 50 percent + 1 to win. Therefore pollsters are calling a close victory for the No side.

Undecided voters through all the polls stay at about 10 percent. It is unlikely that all of these people will go to either camp. If this vote splits like the rest of the country then it will not appreciably change the outcome.

16 year olds are allowed to vote in this referendum. There is not enough of them in Scotland’s aging demographic to appreciably change the results because they will likely split almost evenly. Notions that 16 year olds are more radical than their parents is usually a pipe dream.

97 percent of Scots able to vote (4.5 million out of 5 million population) are registered to vote so if they all turn out there will be a huge vote to tabulate and count. Look to Friday morning for the results.

Will there be a swing one way or the other? Well to this point the polls taken for weeks and months have been increasing slightly for the Yes but not enough to win. When people enter the polling booth they may swing but it is unlikely.

Therefore I am calling a No vote win. The result will be close enough that Scotland’s First Minister Alex Salmond can claim a better deal for Scotland and hold Prime Minister David Cameron to his devolution promises made this week to stem the Yes vote.

If there is a Yes vote then David Cameron is gone as Prime Minister. No wonder he was out in the final week stumping for the No side.

© Copyright 2014, Tom Thorne, All Rights Reserved

Scottish independence is a fight against Westminster's social and economic agendas. Is it too late?

Available from Totally Graphics on Amazon.com.

Scottish independence 2

by Tom Thorne

Scotland has a population of 5.5 million people at this time in history. There are more people of Scottish origin living outside of Scotland today than in the auld sod itself. I am one of them. I have distant Munro and Crawford cousins in Australia and still have relatives in Scotland as well. 

One of my correspondents in family history is related to me in the 18th Century Argyll Glenaray and lives in New Zealand. When I think about this diaspora and its influence in the world I can only say that it is very influential throughout the old British Empire. 

In Australia my relatives descend from Neil Crawford who at age 17, in 1839 landed in South Australia and founded a huge Crawford dynasty. Neil is the son of my five times great aunt Grizell Munro (1793-1880) and her husband Alexander Crawford. If Neil had stayed in Scotland he would have always remained a landless tenant farm labourer like his father. In Australia his descendants are now all professionals and farmers with their own land.

In 1890 my great grandmother’s sister Agnes Munro (1855-1945) left Scotland with her husband James Broadfoot. Once they were in Australia, James who was a skilled Mariner became a ship’s captain and started a shipping business. By the 1920’s he had five ships working the Australian East Coast. Today their descendants live throughout Australia. 

In 2001 the book How the Scots Invented  the Modern World by Arthur Herman was published. The subtitle of this book was even more egotistical than its title, it reads “The True Story of How Europe’s Poorest Nation Created Our World and Everything In It”.*

I was naturally delighted in the prospect that the country of my origins could be so influential. This book did not rely on Scotland’s military skills demonstrated so well by Wallace and the Bruce to make its points. It didn’t stress the poverty and wretched conditions of the 18th Century Scots as the Industrial Revolution changed Scottish life. 

Instead this book relied on documenting Scotland’s intellectual skills, inventiveness and in particular how the modern university was given birth in Scotland and exported throughout the English Language World. It is a book that records Scottish innovation, skills and frankly panache.

I think that this disproportional influence of an even smaller population than there is today is profound. Today Scots are looking for a new time in the Information Age when their intellectual skills can experience a renaissance escaping the considerable right wing politics of London and southern England and the poverty that it still generates in larger cities such as Glasgow.

In a London centred universe Scotland has challenged with this referendum the right of “The City” to control their affairs. They have shaken the roots of the United Kingdom and how it has evolved into a business centred meritocracy ruled by a London parliamentary coalition of right wing politics that relies on trickle down economics as the alleged answer to everything. In many ways Britain for the moment is caught in the same right wing notions as we experience in Harper’s Canada.

The Scots have had enough of the effects of this kind of David Cameron politics. The truth is that other less advantaged areas of Britain are also looking to Scotland to innovate and build new more equitable relationships with Westminster. This is not a referendum to separate as much as it is a process to define a new Britain. Again as they did in the 18th Century the Scots are leading the way with their cultural bias which is always to be straight forward and tell it like it is.

© Copyright 2014, Tom Thorne, All Rights Reserved.

* How The Scots Invented The Modern World, The true story of how Western Europe's poorest nation created our world and everything in it., Arthur Herman, Three Rivers Press, A Division of Random House, New York, ISBN 0-609-80999-7, Published 2001.

Scottish independence is a restoration of nationhood and not a withdrawal from Great Britain.

Scottish independence 

by Tom Thorne

I have made two trips to the auld sod in recent memory. The first one was in 2007 and it was a general tour that took my wife and I to see the Highlands, the ancient stone rings on the Hebrides at Callanish and also the neolithic sites on Orkney.  Then in 2013  I went on a three week research trip to places where my Munro family originated in Argyllshire and later lived in Dumbartonshire. 

On the first trip as we came south to Edinburgh and Glasgow we stopped at Inverness and the nearby site of The Battle of Culloden where in 1746 the Jacobite army of Bonnie Prince Charlie was brutally routed by The Duke of Cumberland’s forces.

The bleak battlefield at Culloden left its mark on me since it is also the burial ground of the carnage unleashed in that battle. Here Scottish attempts at self determination 40 years after union with the rest of Britain were dashed. Here Scots tried to restore the Stuart monarchy for all of Britain.  

The aftermath of the battle was punitive and nothing short of ethnic and cultural cleansing as the defeated were hunted down and killed and their homes burned and pillaged by the victors. They were not allowed the wear kilts or tartans and could not have any arms. Prince Charles Edward Stuart hid for months until his loyal followers managed to get him away to France. Simon Fraser, Lord Lovat was hunted down taken to London and beheaded for his alleged and largely unproved part in the “rebellion”.

Hundreds of rebellion prisoners were transported to Australia and America or rotted literally in prison ships waiting to sail in English ports. Prisoners were also hanged by lot. If you picked a hanging ticket out of a hat you were strung up. One in ten faced this fate. The aftermath of Culloden was horrific and to this day leaves a stain on the history of the United Kingdom. The price of the United Kingdom in the middle 18th Century has a very bloody origin.

Long before the Union in 1707 Scotland was an independent country with its own monarchy. Admittedly the aristocrats of Scotland were widely intermarried with the aristocrats of England and as a result of these unions much of Scotland was property of English lords. The Scots played England against France continually in a bid to remain independent but often when the chips were down Scottish aristocrats sided with England in self interest or played a duplicitous role in the politics of the British Isles.

Scotland, after the reign of Elizabeth I, provided King James the First of England the Sixth of Scotland. His reign was followed by the calamity of Charles I but later his son became Charles II for the restoration after the rule of Cromwell. And so there has been continual links with England and Scotland for centuries and those links have always been tenuous and fragile when faced with the real politic of English-Scottish relations. 

During the late 18th Century and early 19th Century Scots were cleared from their lands held often by aristocrats who lived in England. The land held by the people from their clan chiefs was taken and turned over to mass sheep farming. The people went to new towns to learn how to fish or take up a trade. Many found this impossible to do and without any economic base for their future left Scotland for Canada, United States and Australia in droves.

Now the Scots are to vote on an restoring their independence this week. The links as always with England and the rest of Britain are there as they have always been since the time of William The Conqueror in the 11th Century. During the 12th and 13th Centuries the Scots tried to take back their country from Norman fiefdom status with many uprisings such as Sir William Wallace executed so well followed by Robert Bruce. Ultimately the power in the south prevailed either by warfare or finally by The Act of Union in 1707 which benefitted the landed aristocrats more than the people.

What will change in this relationship if the Scots vote yes?  History tells us that the tight relationships between the English and Scots are still there. Maybe a yes vote will tell the rest of Britain that the Scots want a more equitable deal than they have experienced for many centuries. A no vote is really for the historic status quo brought about by the Act of Union. I suspect that the yes vote will be a close winner because Scots realize that they must assert themselves against a top down Conservative England that has developed under David Cameron. If Scots reflect on their history with England they may vote with their heart to actively get changes and to wake up an England that takes them for granted. 

Quebec separatists who see this referendum as useful for their cause should reflect that Quebec has never been a country with its own government like Scotland. They have only been a colony of France that was abandoned in a treaty after an 18th Century war between Britain and France. Their status is not the same as the Scots. The Scots have a clear claim to nationhood if they are willing to pay the price. 

© Copyright 2014 Tom Thorne, All Rights Reserved

British Prime Minister David Cameron and Scottish First Minister Alex Salmond both fight 

off  Excedrin headaches as they contemplate the Scottish Independence vote this Thursday.

2013 Hyundai Sonata fire that gutted the car gets a forensic report six months after the date of loss. The report says fire cause undetermined.

The fire gutted interior of the 2013 Hyundai Sonata.

Update: 

2013 Hyundai Sonata fire. Fire expert says cause of the fire is undetermined. 

by Tom Thorne

A fire forensic report concerning the 2013 Hyundai Sonata fire done by professional engineer, Brian D. James states “The origin of the fire is located within the rear seating area of the passenger compartment.  All burn patterns are consistent with this as an area fire origin” this report was submitted to the driver’s insurance company on 16 June 2014 almost six months after the incident.

Mr James preliminarily examined the car on 22 January 2014 two days after the date of loss which was 20 January 2014. A further examination was conducted on 15 April 2014. This  time the car was  “destructively examined and the various circuits and components were examined within the vehicle and associated to the area fire origin.” 

The 15 April examination was conducted “with other parties” present. Who these other parties were is not recorded in the report. The car was fitted with seat heaters and the report states “did not show any remnants of seat heaters or wiring components”. Because these components could not be located  Mr. James concludes that there are “no indications of any failures”.

However there is evidence that there was a seat heater under the back seat because Mr. James reports “that the seat heater fuse was open, however, the could be the result of the fire spread and or the fire spread to the forward seat heaters”. The ambiguity of these statements enables Mr. James to say “that the cause of the fire is undetermined”.

There was some concern that the “aftermarket anti corrosion module” may have been the cause. That is ruled out by this report since there was “no evidence of malfunction”. The report rules out any gas line or gas origins for the fire since it is clear that the fire started in the passenger compartment back seat. The drivers destroyed lap top computer is also ruled out as a cause of the fire.

If the cause of the fire is undetermined the fire patterns do indicate that it started in the passenger back seat. The real problem now is whether or not Hyundai is negligent in their engineering, design of components or in their manufacturing. This report is ambiguous enough to provide a defence against any alleged Hyundai negligence. 

This case is perhaps complicated by the fact that the car was a dealer demonstrator before the sale to the driver. Assessing any liabilities to Hyundai now could involve a second party namely Hyundai’s local Belleville, Ontario dealership.

The purchasers and the specific driver of this Hyundai Sonata are really between a rock and a hard place. If an expert witness like Mr. James says the cause of the fire is unknown but he does say it started in the back seat. Without any direct connection to a failed or malfunctioning component in this Hyundai Sonata it could be difficult to make a serious case.

It may be sufficient to ignore this report as inconclusive and to really state the obvious in any legal claim. Hyundai is accountable for all the component parts making up the entire car. The fact that there was a fire and its burn patterns clearly shows it started in the components of the car, then a suit could go forward indicating negligence in the manufacturing of such a car. It is obvious even in the ambiguity of this report that a manufactured part of the car caused of the fire. 

No external component or after  market anti corrosion device can be blamed. The Lithium battery of the lap top lying on the backseat didn’t overheat and therefore set the car on fire. Hyundai’s components somewhere in this car started the fire.

It is not normal that a car barely a year old should close down all its systems and then  ignite in the backseat. Hyundai Canada or at least their local dealer should have taken the car to a heated garage early in this forensic process, and read out its computer systems. Perhaps that action could provide clues about why a fire starts spontaneously. 

Hyundai and the insurance company left the car in a wrecking yard. It was subject to to the wiles of a long and severe Canadian winter from 22 January to 15 April 2014. The engine compartment was completely intact so computer connection was possible. Only the interior of the car was gutted by fire.

The question is when will Hyundai Canada or the head office in Korea step up to the plate and acknowledge that this kind of spontaneous fire needs attention both for after sale customers and their car buying public in general. Their customer relations department simply gave excuses for their lack of action for almost six months as their email correspondence with the driver attests.

© Copyright 2014, Tom Thorne, All Rights Reserved