OGDEN — When Ogden City Fire Chief Mike Slater took the helm as chief last July, he could hardly have predicted how quickly activity would be taking off.

“We had a fatal fire the day before I became the chief,” he said. “Then we had a couple of apartment fires that just happened like bang, bang, bang. That responsibility falls solely on the fire chief.”

These apartment fires, which occurred in August, spurred action on securing construction sites across the city.

“We met with 54 contractors and said, ‘Hey, we need help to lock the front doors. These buildings are vulnerable, they’re open,'” Slater said. “We worked in collaboration with them and it was amazing to me how fast that happened and how, through a little bit of push — like we stayed on them and said, ‘Hey, you’re still open. We need your first floor secured, we need fencing on some of these  buildings’ — they all conformed and complied. From the moment we did that, knock on wood, those apartment fires stopped.”

The most prominent of these fires came on Aug 8, 2025, when an under-construction complex in the 100 block of 18th Street in Ogden caught fire.

Slater confirmed on Wednesday that this fire is being investigated as having been set by somebody.

“We called the (ATF) National Response Team in to help us with that,” he said. “We were in a transition phase and they have a lot of resources. I have looked at the final report — it was an incendiary fire. We say incendiary versus arson because there’s intent with arson and we don’t know the intent because we don’t know the individual. We don’t know who it is, but it’s an active investigation.”

He said that another apartment fire that occurred around the same time on 32nd Street is also being investigated the same way.

“They’re all active investigations,” he said. “A little bit of maybe ego says we’re going to catch the individual. We’ll catch them. It may be next year. it may be two or three years down the road, but we’ll catch them. We’re dogs — we’re not going to let this go and we want to show people that you can’t do that in Ogden City.”

Slater said investigations into suspicious fires can vary greatly depending on the scale.

“This was a big five-story apartment building, so we called in the National Response Team,” he said. “We have relationships with everybody throughout the country. So we reached out to our Salt Lake rep, they volunteered to come in and sent in electrical engineers, chemical engineers and fire investigators from all over the country. It’s impressive — you walk into that room every morning and they’re pulling data and cameras and they’re turning every stone along with our police department and our fire investigators. If it’s a small house fire, we have really good fire investigators that can come down to a cause and determination.”

He said it’s especially important to track down those who intentionally set structure fires.

“With the incendiary ones, it’s a criminal offense, so we’re going to throw everything we can at it because the likelihood of that individual not doing it again is probably low,” he said. “People don’t just commit one crime and then move on and never do it again. We want to prevent that from happening in any other community.”