EDGEMONT – Firefighters responded Monday to a multi-structure fire in the Edgemont Highlands subdivision northeast of Durango.
The fire was reported at 2:06 p.m. in a cluster of houses on Red Canyon and Copper Rim trails. The fire broke out in one structure, then spread to a neighboring house and into vegetation alongside both.
“Crews arrived to find one house fully involved and a second adjacent residence on fire,” said Randy Black, Durango Fire Protection District chief, in a news release Monday.
Several DFPD wildland and structure fire crews responded to the blaze and were quickly able to contain the fire before it moved into the surrounding forest land. They also were able to prevent it from spreading to additional houses.
No injuries were reported and all the affected residents were accounted for.
The La Plata County Sheriff’s Office deputies responded to handle crowd and traffic control. Atmos Energy and La Plata Electric Association also responded.
On Tuesday, Black said the cause of the fire remained under investigation.
“We don’t have any information or any results yet,” he said. “We still need to go through all of our processes. We’ve got to look at burn patterns. We’ve got to look at all the data.”
Two DFPD fire investigators were on scene Tuesday, as well as an investigator from the Colorado Division of Fire Prevention and Control. Additionally, a second Division of Fire Prevention and Control investigator with an accelerant dog, which uses its sense of smell to sniff out trace amounts of volatile chemicals, searched the property and then left earlier Tuesday morning.
A first responder said Monday that it looked like “one house possibly exploded.”
Greg Cathcarht, who lives nearby, said he “heard an explosion and a scream” when the fire started.
“I rushed to the front door, and it already just engulfed one of the houses,” Cathcarht said.
Black said there was a grill with a propane tank between the two houses, but that there was not enough data to say whether it was the source of the fire. Rather, it was one of many focal points investigators are considering as they determine what may have caused the fire.
“We know that there was a propane tank attached to the grill between the two houses. Is that the cause? No idea,” Black said.
Cathcarht rescued a neighbor’s two dogs from her house when the fire broke out. The neighbor was gone and her house was locked, so he had to throw a potted plant through her back window to retrieve the two dogs from inside the home.
Black said had the fire occurred in the summertime, when wildfire danger is typically higher, the fire would have been more difficult to contain.
“Crews were able to keep it from going anywhere,” he said. “We’ve got two wildland trucks that are here. This in June or July could have been pretty different.”
sedmondson@durangoherald.com
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