Last week’s blaze, which was reported just before noon on Monday, July 27, scorched 45 acres and claimed the life of 87-year-old Cecil “Ted” Burrell. Damages, however, were confined to a trailer and one structure. A deputy with the Weber County Sheriff’s Office also received minor injuries during the fire and was treated and released the same day. An evacuation order was issued for several homes in the vicinity of the fire but was ultimately fully lifted the same evening, allowing residents to return to their homes.

With the fire 100% contained and the worst of it extinguished, Washington Terrace City Manager Tom Hanson told the Standard-Examiner Tuesday that there still isn’t an official cause on the fire.

“There’s several lines of speculation out there,” he said. “However, all I can do is relay back that that’s still under investigation, and I have to wait till any formal designation of cause.”

In the meantime, he said the city is working with state officials on mitigation efforts in the burn area.

“The state of Utah owns most of the land that was burned, and we are working with them on any mitigation that needs to happen to prevent erosion and any further problems if we have a downpour,” he said.

Hanson said that while the main fire is gone, one area affiliated with another past natural disaster continues to smolder and that fire crews are working to methodically extinguish it.

“In the middle of ‘The Black’ — the area that’s burned out — there’s a pile of wood chips that was left over from the windstorm event where we received several loads of trees that were ground up and piled down there,” he said. “Those wood chips are smoldering and burning, and our fire crew and public works team are down there scraping up and opening up those piles so that they can put them out. There’s a little bit of smoke that comes up from that. It is an environment where it’s not a risk to the general area because it is in the middle of the burned out zone.”

He said that the nature of wood chips can make a pile smolder for a long time.

“It’s kind of a reticent of if someone has … a hay fire and they’re trying to put that out,” he said. “It’s just very difficult to put out because you just can’t get the water deep enough to get it to really go out. So we’re working on that right now and trying to get that taken care of.”

Hanson said that residents will continue to see smoke from this area in the coming days, but that it is extremely unlikely for these to set a brand new blaze in motion.

“I think the biggest concern that people have is the smoke that comes up occasionally from the wood chips and I would love to put it at rest that, though there’s a little bit of smoke coming up from the wood chip piles smoldering, it would be very difficult at best to get a fire to start from those that would impact the general area,” he said. “It’s down in a valley that has been completely burned out and there’s no fuel for a fire to take off in that area.”