Suspicions continued to circulate that the true cause of the bosque fire last month has not been disclosed.

Some villagers are unconvinced that the official statement on the origin of the wildfire — a dropped electronic cigaret falling into highly combustible cottonwood seed— reflects the real cause.

But Village Administrator John Avila insists the doubts and “venomous” attacks in the aftermath of the fire are unwarranted. 

The Corrales Police Department’s investigation  found, “There is no evidence to indicate that actions or inactions committed by individuals  were reckless and/or careless.”

The police report suggests some doubt as to the cause of the fire although it states, “The most probable cause of the fire, based on witness statements is smoking (electronic cigarette). However, due to the origin being too damaged from aggressive fire suppression efforts in order to protect residential homes, any potential evidence was subsequently and unintentionally removed, damaged or destroyed.”

Investigating officers said they “were unable to locate or make a determination on a specific ignition source based upon examination of the fire origin scene. The fire was determined to be human-caused with no clear ignition source(s) identified.”

But that conclusion does not match well the explanation given by Village Administrator John Avila who said July  10 that a Youth Conservation Corps (YCC) employee on fire watch patrol June 20 admitted he had accidentally started the bosque wildfire when an electronic cigaret fell out of his pocket onto a fluffy bed of cottonwood seeds.

The police report and Avila’s statements have, perhaps deliberately, left open the possibility that the bosque fire might have started by some other means. As the police report notes, “It cannot be confirmed and proven a second fire was on the east side of the river prior to the start of the Corrales fire, however the possibility does exist a second fire was active prior to this incident.”

Liability issues are almost certain to be involved in the findings. For example, would Village government be responsible for damages from the runaway fire on Sandia Pueblo lands east of the river? Will the Village have to pay the heavy costs incurred in fighting the June 20 blaze?

Doubts and controversy over that statement of probable cause stirred debate over supper tables in Corrales and sparked heated debates at the post office. An electronic cigaret (e-cigaret) cannot start a fire, some villagers argued. They don’t get hot even with intensive use, some said.

Corrales Fire Chief Anthony Martinez said he had researched the fire hazard from e-cigarets through the internet and discovered at least some corroboration for assertions that the devices can ignite fires.

He suggested Corrales Comment conduct research on the issue. That was done through on-line search and experimentation with an e-cigaret purchased at Cottonwood Mall.

While waiting to purchase one of the devices, another customer at the mall  kiosk July 10 was seeking assurance from the salesman that his e-cigaret was not malfunctioning. The dissatisfied customer said he had experienced problems with his device, apparently the batteries, which were removed and placed on the kiosk counter. The customer insisted that the salesman install different batteries  to determine whether the problem recurred.

Apparently satisfied, the customer left.

In the Comment’s internet research, nearly all information on e-cigarets is posted by firms or associations promoting the purchase and use of the relatively new devices. And, as Fire Chief Martinez had predicted, nearly all asserted the cigaret substitutes are safe and harmless. 

But two reports were found of accidents from use of e-cigarets. A February 14, 2012 article from the Northwest Florida Daily News tells of a Florida man who “was severely burned Monday night when his electric cigarette shorted.” 

It quotes the assistant fire chief of Niceville, Florida saying the man had recently quit smoking and was using an electric cigarette when it malfunctioned, burning his face. The fireman said the man was in his home office when the incident occurred, “and after the malfunction, the office caught fire causing around $200 in damages.”

A website promoting use of e-cigarets, www.vaporkings.com, includes a “troubleshooting” section that may offer clues as to how a fire might be ignited. Under the heading “Battery Tips” the e-cigaret website gives the following advice for times when “the battery activates on its own. This is often common with automatic batteries. One solution is to take the ash end and literally give it a good, hard couple of taps on a hard surface. You can also put your mouth over the battery connector and put as much air pressure as possible on it. This forces the switch mechanism back into its proper position.”

The troubleshooting advice goes on to warn, “Also make sure you are not storing your batteries in pockets or other places with a lot of dust. Pocket lint can and will get inside the battery opening and cause the switch to malfunction. The battery can also occasionally get a small amount of liquid inside it which causes it to malfunction.

“Often when these batteries are returned to us they work fine when they arrive. We attribute this to them having a little time to dry out and so we might suggest you set the battery somewhere safe and just allow it to sit for a day or two.

“Battery gets extremely hot when using or charging. This is a sign the battery has a serious internal problem. Do not throw it in the trash! Set it someplace that it will not cause a fire risk such as a granite countertop.”

Experimenting with the device bought at Cottonwood Mall, Corrales Comment was unable to cause it to become so hot that it could ignite fresh cottonwood seed. By continually pressing the activation button over a period of about five minutes, the steel sleeve covering between the battery and the mouthpiece became quite hot to the touch— about the same as a vehicle steering wheel on a sunny July afternoon.

But at its hottest, when the device was placed under fresh, dry cottonwood seed, no ignition or even scorching occurred.

In an interview July 10 Village Administrator Avila said he is not surprised that people selling the devices attest to their safety. “I understand that people who sell them and people that use them support their safety on the whole, which is what you’d expect.

“That’s been the case in a lot of the comments we’ve seen from people who are doubting our investigation.”

Avila insisted Village officials are not specifically blaming the manufacturers or sellers of e-cigarets. “There are different producers out there, and maybe they’re not all the folks that would have had this instrument that malfunctioned. We’re not trying to point fingers; all we’re saying is that from what we understand, this is the most likely cause.”

Avila was asked to be specific as to how the fire started. “Well, the device came in contact with high cotton.” He said he did not know whether the e-cigaret remained fully assembled when it fell on the ground.

Fire Chief Martinez said several designs for e-cigarets are currently on the market with differing activation mechanisms. When he was asked what kind of device caused the fire, he started to answer, but stopped and said, “We can’t release that, because of the fact that the investigators —I want to make this clear from the beginning: I was not part of the investigation. 

“As soon as I found out that it was possibly one of these devices and possibly a YCC temporary employee —who was not a juvenile; there were no juveniles on that team, and I want to correct the news reports that said they were juveniles— I turned it over immediately to detectives in the Corrales Police Department for an investigation, for questioning.” 

The chief said he also called for a fire scene investigation by the State Forestry Division just as in the earlier Cabezon fire.

Martinez said he was initially skeptical that an e-cigaret could have caused the fire. “I was hearing the same thing that you are hearing… there’s no way this could happen. In the beginning I was wondering the same thing. But when you’re a fire investigator, you have to eliminate all possible causes.

“As far as the device is concerned, it is a general e-cigaret. It’s not a brand name. We’re trying not to open our doors to anything as far as liability. We don’t want manufacturers or companies to come back and say, ‘Well, you’re saying it’s this’ and try to sue us or something.”

The fire chief said he has come across reports that not only might batteries used in the devices short out and cause fires, but that such problems can occur while  they are carried in pockets. “There’s evidence that some of these devices in pockets, similar to our case, where the button has been left on and they get so hot they are burning holes in pants.”

Martinez said he searched the internet for the words “e-cigarette fire.”

Avila said the conditions for a fire were extraordinarily bad on the day of the fire. He said he was told the accumulation of cottonwood seed at the fire scene was four to six inches high sitting on dry grass. 

Avila said the YCC team was walking along a minor trail north of the path that serves as entrance to the preserve at the end of Romero Road. “They were coming from the river where they were investigating some voices and possible campers.”

Once the dropped e-cigaret apparently ignited cottonwood seed, the YCC team attempted to stamp out or smother the fire, the fire chief said. “They tried to gather all the cotton as quickly as they could to keep it away from the fire, but they said they were totally surrounded by fire.

“The cotton just exploded. They could not control the spread of the fire. In the area where they were, it was really, really thick, and the fire just traveled up. We have maps that show that it’s a high fire danger there, and that’s exactly where it happened. It got into those real thick fuels and laddering fuels and it just started torching,” Martinez said.

“They called dispatch and advised them of the fire and attempted to prevent the spread of the fire until units arrived on scene to support that.

“By the time we arrived on scene… some of us were at the fire station and I was coming down from a  meeting in Rio Rancho and I could see it growing and growing and growing. When I arrived I established incident command and put all my forces on trying to keep that fire from spreading south of the [bosque entrance] trail or to the west.”

When the first mutual aid pumper team arrived from Rio Rancho, Martinez assigned it to protecting structures near the end of Railcar Road.  “That was the immediate threat.”

To the north, he knew the fire would probably be stopped by the wide mouth of the Harvey Jones Flood Control Channel which has been considered a significant strategic fuel break. “But the one thing that was beyond my control was the fire spreading to the island and from the island [in the Rio Grande] to Sandia.

“You can see that the island close to Corrales burned first and then on over,” the fire chief said.

Even so, Martinez noted, there may have been a fire already going on the other side of the river before or around the same time as the fire starting here. “There were reports of smoke somewhere in this general vicinity, unknown what side of the river, earlier in the day.”

Village Administrator Avila said he spotted smoke that seemed to be coming from the bosque earlier in the day. “I was driving to a meeting earlier that day, and I saw a column of smoke maybe 10 feet high north of Alameda and west of Second Street. I didn’t know what it was.”

Corrales Comment asked why Village officials didn’t reveal the electronic-cigaret cause of the fire here until nearly a week later since it was known immediately. The YCC person who dropped the device reported what had happened.

Avila replied: “There was an investigation going on, first of all, and we’re not supposed to divulge what we might know about that issue. Secondly, we wanted to let them [investigators] discover, hopefully with 100 percent certainty, what the cause was.

“They were unable to say with 100 percent. [The e-cigaret] was just the most likely cause. But we do know it was man-made and nothing else. And because of the circumstances, this is the most likely cause of the fire.”

Comment: “But you know that it was the cause of the fire, right? Because the YCC person said that’s what happened.

Avila: Without being able to say, ‘Yes, that’s definite proof,’ we can’t do that. As the police report says, that’s the most likely cause of the fire. It’s unfortunate that these folks who were trying to do a good thing [patrol for fire hazards], but wrong place, wrong time for a fire to start.

“We had to establish, ‘Was there something else going on? Was somebody else there before?’ Unlikely, so this is almost 100 percent the likely cause.”

Avila has concluded that the e-cigaret carried by one of the YCC team and dropped into cottonwood seed had to have malfunctioned. “It has to be some sort of malfunction. It is not designed or intended to work that way. At least in our experience, these instruments have some potential for igniting.”

The fire chief summed up his viewpoint on the June 20 fire. “It was an unfortunate event, but here the Fire Department is trying to be real aggressive in trying to promote safety in our bosque. We know our bosque is the jewel of Corrales and we try to protect it as best we can. We patrol the bosque almost daily throughout the year whenever we can. We don’t just look for fires; we’re out there talking to fishermen; we’re educating about how the river can be dangerous.

“And here we have some individuals —not juveniles—  who had gotten the basic wild land fire training and were out there in the bosque trying to protect it. It wasn’t like we were sending kids out there who didn’t know what they were doing. My point is that it was an unfortunate event. They meant no harm, but it was ‘wrong place, wrong time.’

“They were trying to do a good deed down there. They heard voices somewhere near the river. There were people in the river swimming nearby, and they [the YCC team] was just going down to check on them, see how they were doing. Just talk to them. That’s what they do. And then this happened.”

Martinez said he hopes to begin a public educational effort to alert villagers to the high flammability of cottonwood seed clusters. He intends to explore how in the future industrial-style sprinklers might be deployed  along the edges of the preserve to wet down accumulations of cottonwood seed during its high season.

He plans to call public meetings this fall or winter to education the public on how to better protect homes from what seem to be faster spreading wildfires.

The June 20 bosque fire has sparked new pressure to create more fuel breaks (firebreaks) in the preserve. At the July 12 Corrales Bosque Advisory Commission (CBAC)  meeting, a former member of that body, Ray Regan, insisted on an immediate and aggressive effort to remove dead-and-down wood, and implementation of the CBAC chairman’s plan for “shaded hazardous fuelbreaks” at intervals all along the bosque.

Regan stressed that Chairman Mark Kaib’s fuelbreak plan “should be done with a sense of urgency; it should be implemented as soon as possible.” He sought, but did not receive, a firm start-up of the proposed plan. 

Three Village Council members attended the commission meeting: Pat Clauser, Mick Harper and Ennio Garcia-Miera.

To Regan’s demand that action be taken immediately to reduce threat of fire from the bosque, Councillor Clauser noted, “We need to recognize the extraordinary amount of work that has already been done” to reduce that threat, such as several major clearing efforts, removals of tamarisk and Russian olive, removal of jetty-jacks that inhibit fire fighting efforts, increased patrols both by the Fire Department and volunteer Bosque Patrol. 

And before rushing forward with more firebreaks, she suggested, a proper evaluation of the first pilot fuelbreak near the Boy Scout bridge needs to be done to determine whether it is effective and retains sufficient habitat values for wildlife.

Kaib assured that he and other members of the commission are committed to maintaining the Corrales bosque as a nature preserve. The anticipated assessment of last year’s pilot fuelbreak has been delayed, he explained, because abnormally dry conditions this winter, spring and early summer have not allowed the cleared area to restore.

He said the commission intends to convene three public meetings within the next two months to discuss the pilot fuelbreak, with on-the-ground visits, and gain feedback on plans for new ones.

In his presentation to the CBAC, Regan admitted his “Let’s Reclaim Our Bosque!” ad in the July 7 Corrales Comment was “a little over the top” but intended to stir villagers up. He did not present an earlier proposed resolution for the commission and Village Council to adopt, but instead submitted a memo to CBAC calling for “a resolution to implement a plan to achieve a balance between fire prevention and forestry/ animal preserve concerns within the Corrales Bosque.”

Commissioner Joan Hashimoto presented two pages of questions and ideas related to a bosque fire suppression plan. Among those suggestions was to “remove dead wood in particularly high-risk area and high fuel load areas.” She asked whether flammable cotton could be made safer or reduced in volume if it is sprayed with water?

Regarding future bosque clearings and fuelbreaks, she asked “How much destruction of habitat is ‘too much?’ Do we need a baseline assessment of existing wildlife so that we have something to compare future changes with?”

A map deveoped by Kaib and  the Fire Department labeled  “Corrales Bosque Preserve Fire Response Map” identifies nine firebreak areas. From north to south, those are: North Firebreak (between the north end of the preserve and the Jones channel); Harvey Jones Firebreak; Romero Firebreak; East Alary Firebreak; Candi Firebreak; Dixon Firebreak; East Ella, Boy Scout Bridge Firebreak; Andrews Lane Firebreak and “south end dispersed fuelbreaks, restoration.”

In discussing the possibility of increased thinning projects to remove wood from the bosque, Kaib pointed out, “We need to kind of recognize that this is part of the balance. There are some areas along the bosque that need thinning s, but really, if we thinned out the whole bosque and it went to grass, a fire is going to spread through it.  It’s going to spot into backyards” on properties bordering the preserve where homeowners have let weeds, uncontrolled vegetation and woodpiles accumulate too close to structures.

In the aftermath of the June 20 bosque fire, other villagers are rallying to address problems that arose over communicating about the need (or lack of need) for community or neighborhood evacuation in the event of such fires.

Considerable confusion spread throughout the village that day as reports and rumors about the fire spread. Fire Chief Martinez determined early in the fire fighting effort that  evacuations would not be needed. But since that was not communicated publicly for two hours or more, villagers with horses and other livestock began evacuating unnecessarily.

Some villagers complained that the community had no evacuation plan, and when they learned that, in fact, such plans have been in effect for more than five years, the problem was re-defined as lack of communication about the plan and how citizenry would be notified to implement it.

A well-attended meeting on emergency evacuations was held in the Council Chambers July 11. A follow-up meeting is scheduled for Wednesday, August 1, 7 p.m. in Council Chambers, across from Wells Fargo Bank.