Burning Issues

By Philip Faflick

Ninth year of straight science

In eight prizewinning years, Nova proved that straight science can sell. Result: the program has been crowded out of its regular Tuesday night slot by a host of imitators, including Walter Cronkite's irregularly scheduled Universe and Bob Guccione's hyperthyroid Omni.

For Nova's new position following CBS's 60 Minutes on Sunday night, Executive Producer John Mansfield has frontloaded his 20 new episodes with news-oriented documentaries, hoping to persuade Mike Wallace fans that relevance does not end at 8 p.m. E.D.T.

This week Nova opened its ninth season with the now familiar topic Computers, Spies and Private Lives. The show's strength came not from its focus but its footwork and such Orwellian touches as the telephone confrontation between a debtor and a mechanized collection agent: "Speak to me. Your response or lack of it will become a permanent part of your record." Next week's show, a more traditional piece on modern efforts to crack the secrets of the great fiddle makers, manages to scoop Scientific American, whose October cover story on the acoustics of violins misses much of Nova's best material.

This Sunday's offering (Oct. 4), Why America Burns, hooks viewers early on with an indelible image: a living room transformed into an explosive fireball by a match tossed in a wastebasket. Experts call the moment of conflagration "flash-over." Most Americans have never heard the term--indeed, most people who have seen flashover are dead. Yet flashover for fun, and for profit, has become the country's favorite act of God. Every hour 300 fires break out in the U.S., killing one and disfiguring three, more than in any other industrialized country.

Nova, led by ex-BBC Producer Brian Kaufman, finds the National Fire Protection Association's 16-volume code as outdated as it is voluminous--at least for protecting high-rises. The law does not adequately take into account the combustibility of new plastics that fill modern office towers, or the toxicity of their combustion products--factors that are now thought responsible for the ferocity of the fireball that swept through the MGM Grand Hotel last November, killing 84 people.

There is no shortage of villains in the piece. Big landlords and insurance brokers are the prime employers of arsonists, and even the tobacco industry has its own accidental influence: thanks in part to chemicals added for long burning, cigarettes left on bedding, armchairs and sofas start smoldering fires that kill more than 2,000 Americans each year.

Nova is not content merely to wag its finger. Having identified the problems, the program suggests solutions--and sounds a tocsin. In Switzerland, a country with one-tenth the fire-casualty rate of the U.S., the show notes, chimney sweeps are required to clean and inspect every building regularly. "Many say that Americans would not tolerate the rules and regulations and residential inspections of the Swiss," viewers are advised. "Americans, it seems, would rather burn.'' --By Philip Faflick

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