Cornwall County Fire Brigade are one of a handful of brigades within the UK to employ the services of their own fire investigation dog team.

The dogs are used as a tool to search cold, post-fire scenes for the presence of flammable and ignitable liquids that could have been used to start or promote fires deliberately.

Charlie is a border collie x bearded collie who was acquired by Cornwall Fire Brigade from the Blue Cross Animal Welfare Centre at Tiverton in Devon. Charlie passed certification at the Fire Service College in April 2003. During the period since then he has attended, along with his handler, Richard Gibbons, well over 40 incidents where the presence of flammable or ignitable liquids has been suspected.

Nelson is a German Shepherd x border collie who has been part of the fire investigation team in Cornwall County Fire Brigade since June 1997. He retired from sniffing fire scenes in April 2005 after 8 years in that role and over 400 incidents. He now works as an Arson deterrent/community safety dog visiting schools and other organisations with his handler Richard Gibbons. A dog's sense of smell is many times more sensitive than a human beings, in fact recent research suggests that if a litre measure of a substance was dropped into Lake Geneva, a dog would be able to detect it’s presence.

A dog’s superior sense of smell and willingness to work alongside man has lead to their use for specialist purposes, such as the detection of drugs and explosives. In 1986 research was carried out in the United States of America as to whether dogs could be conditioned to detect accelerants at fire scenes, the outcome proved positive and today over 100 such dogs are in service.

When Charlie works he initially carry's out a random search procedure until airborne scent particles of accelerant are picked up. He will then work along the scent path until they detect the area of greatest concentration, at which Charlie alerts Richard to the location.

Charlie's alert is what is termed ‘passive’, this means that when a source is located he will sit close to the spot and once given direction by Richard, he will put his nose just above the exact position. This is the location where a sample should be taken for analysis by a Police Scenes of Crime Officer.

Charlie's reward following all searches is praise and play.

Charlie wears special protective clothing to make sure that he doesn’t cut or burn his paws when searching a fire scene.

It is important that Charlie and Nelson have a good relationship with their handler so when off duty they live at home with Richard and his family