First responder training course participants benefit from the expertise of several individuals as training courses are planned, developed, and taught. Subject matter experts, course developers and consultants, and course instructors possess decades’ worth of experience and an incredible amount of specific knowledge. One of these experts who has played a key role in multiple EMRTC-offered courses is Joe Konefal.
With his extensive background in law enforcement and fire investigation, Joe is an internationally recognized authority on fire, arson, fire death, and bomb-related explosions. He literally wrote the book on fire death investigations with his self-published Fire Death Scene Investigation Field Guide, co-authored by Konefal and Edward Nordskog. Konefal co-wrote another book with Nordskog, titled Arson Investigation in the Wildlands.
Based in California, Joe built up his professional credentials with numerous career moves since his first post-college job. Upon graduating from San Jose State in the 1970s, Joe realized his ambition of entering the law enforcement field and landed his first job as a public safety officer for the City of Sunnyvale in the bay area. In this position, he served as both a police officer and a firefighter. That sparked an interest in fire investigation, and he later moved into a fire investigator role. After marrying and starting a family, Joe began working with the State of California’s Fire Marshal unit and became an arson bomb investigator. His career continued to progress as he became a bomb technician and then later a supervisor. Upon his retirement from the state of California in 2006, Joe began working for New Mexico Tech’s first responder training program.
Joe is involved with EMRTC’s first responder courses in multiple capacities including course development and teaching. He teaches both resident and mobile classes, including the HME, ILERSPA, upcoming Surviving Bombing Incidents for Educators (SBIE), and IRTB courses. Joe enjoys teaching the IRTB course the most, noting it is “the nuts and bolts of what a first responder must know involving fire explosions.” He cites the course content as “knowledge that is really important from a safety standpoint.” It is clear from speaking with him that Joe truly enjoys the chance to share his expertise with others through teaching. That priority on giving back and passing along knowledge to others is what led him to be involved in writing two books.
Both Fire Death and Arson Investigation in the Wildlands contain time-tested information concerning fire death and arson investigation that will continue to have relevance in years to come. As Joe explains, “we’re always going to have new people coming into the field and new ideas from technology, but we teach the baseline of essential topics that lead to successful fire death investigation. “
When asked how (and if) he is able to separate the dark topics involved in his work from his off-the-clock time, Joe candidly responded that there’s no simple way to achieve that separation. Particularly when cases he worked on involved deaths of children close in age to his own, Joe’s work has involved difficult subjects and hard to forget images. Because he worked closely with local detectives and fire investigators, Joe found it helpful to rely on those colleagues as sounding boards and talk about cases over lunch or coffee. Writing Fire Death, while it stirred up memories of extremely tough cases, was also in some sense cathartic for Joe. It gave him deeper appreciation for his family and awareness of the fragility of life, and it served as a way for him to feel like he’s giving back.
Part of Joe’s extensive experience includes testifying in court as an expert witness on arson cases as well as explosion-related cases. When asked whether that role is comfortable for him, he thoughtfully replied “No, you don’t ever get comfortable, but you do get to a point that you can feel confident about your preparation.” He explained that as a public investigator, it’s your job to put together a case based on facts, and if you end up in court, you are doing your job. He further explained that he would approach his job with the mindset of putting together each case so thoroughly as if it were going to court.
On the horizon, Joe has been working with EMRTC to develop curriculum and practical exercises for a post-blast course geared towards training first responders how to conduct post explosion investigations. This future resident course will take place within the next year at New Mexico Tech in Socorro.
