On duty at the Courthouse that night was forty-year-old Mathias Schaffer. Schaffer was showing some visitors around the tower wh
en one of them pointed to smoke in the distance. Schaffer glanced at the smoke, but dismissed the sighting. It was just the smoldering embers from the previous night's fire, he assured them. Nothing to worry about." "Several minutes passed before Schaffer looked up from what he was doing and saw flames leaping wildly into the black sky. The light was from a different fire after all; he'd been fooled because this new blaze was almost directly behind the still-flickering remnants of the Saturday October 7 fire." What was the effect of Schaffer dismissing the sighting of smoke?
The action of Schaffer dismissing the sighting of smoke caused the fire to grow, for he did not bother to alert anyone else. Neither did he try to do something about the fire.
