In 2007, a blaze broke out at the Georgetown Public Library, destroying large portions of the building and leaving the neighborhood without a permanent library for years.  Soon after the fire, the city sued the contractor that had been doing repairs to the library at the time for $13 million, alleging that the heating guns used started the fire.

Unfortunately for D.C., the contractor is contesting that claim, and the lawsuit has revealed that D.C. Fire and Emergency Medical Services did a less than stellar job investigating the fire.  Washington City Paper’s Jason Cherkis unearthed court documents and e-mails between the FEMS and the Office of the Attorney General that show the full extent of the investigators’ negligence.

Cherkis’s post is a must-read, but here are a few of the major allegations:

• Lt. Craig Duck led the investigation despite having no training in fire investigation.
• Duck thoroughly bungled the investigation, throwing away crucial evidence.  The evidence he did hold on to was not properly secured or catalogued.
• Investigators may have breached national standards by not making and keeping notes while investigating.
• FEMS was extremely uncooperative when OAG asked them for the requisite documentation from the investigation, failing to hand over investigators’ notes and photographs.

Photo from Flickr user randomduck, used under a Creative Commons license.

At around 4 p.m. this afternoon a fire started in a rowhouse on the 3000 block of O Street, according Fox D.C.  Firefighters were able to put out the blaze, but found a woman dead on the first floor of the house.

According to Fox D.C., the cause of the fire and the identity of the woman are not yet known.

Georgetown resident and blogger Carol Joynt, the former owner of Nathans, was able to get pictures of the blaze, and believes the victim is a “neighborhood eccentric” named Nadia.

According to Joynt:

Her next door neighbor, Barry Freundel, the rabbi of Kesher Israel, discovered the fire and was out in the street with his family yelling “fire.” Someone kicked in the front door, but there was too much smoke to go in and they shouted up at the house, hoping she would emerge. But there was nothing. Just more smoke and flames shooting out of the roof.

Photo from Carol Joynt’s blog.

Or better to ask would it (PDF!) be, if the law required private institutions to uphold the expression clause in the First Amendment?

FIRE, the Foundational for Individual Rights in Education, says yes. In their whirlwind evaluation of U.S. News & World Report’s top 25 Universities’ free speech policies, FIRE determined that the state of speechifying at Georgetown University made it a “‘red light’ institution”:

Turning now to Georgetown’s speech codes, the most objectionable policy in force at Georgetown … literally prohibits any “intentional act deemed offensive” at Georgetown University. This directly contradicts the Supreme Court’s holding that “If there is a bedrock principle underlying the First Amendment, it is that the government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because society finds the idea itself offensive or disagreeable.”

Consider the benefits of this loophole: deem any question asked by that one kid right before class is about to end offensive, and Poindexter’s got no legal recourse through which to fight the ramifications.