SPOKANE, Wash. – The Spokane Fire Department is investigating at least five fires near High Bridge Park Monday that could have been caused by an arsonist.
“The intent does seem to be malicious and that’s got us concerned,” said fire investigator Justin de Ruyter.
The first fire near Peaceful Valley started around 2:30 p.m. Monday. Spokane Fire believes all fires could be related.
SFD said it received multiple reports of a suspicious man in the area just before the first two fires started.
“We were on the scene of the first fire when the second fire started,” de Ruyter said. “We’re pretty confident that is not a spot fire from the first fire. That’s going down the road of suspicious and hopefully identifying someone tied to those fires.”
A few hours later, three more fires started in High Bridge Park. Firefighters got to those quickly and were able to keep the brush fires to a quarter of an acre.
SFD said there was no lightning or other natural causes for those fires.
“Based on it being in the general area of the two fire starts, that’s definitely suspicious and that’s something we’ll look into as being related to the earlier fires,” de Ruyter said.
Firefighters are especially concerned about arson because of the dry and windy conditions in the forecast.
“We’re concerned going into the next few days. If these are related and we’ve got somebody running around doing this maliciously, we need to get that person off the streets,” de Ruyter said.
Both SFD and the police department will be interviewing witnesses and looking at any surveillance footage they can find.
SFD said it will be difficult to investigate how the fires in High Bridge Park started because very few people live there and it was dark when these instances occurred.
People living in the area said they are tired of seeing things like this happen and hope the police can make an arrest soon.
COPYRIGHT 2024 BY KXLY. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. THIS MATERIAL MAY NOT BE PUBLISHED, BROADCAST, REWRITTEN OR REDISTRIBUTED.
