CHEYENNE — The intense and volatile fire that ripped through a four-story apartment building under construction and two nearby garages on Tuesday is being investigated by a 25-person fire team from the Denver office of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF).
Cheyenne Fire Rescue Chief Andrew Dykshorn told Cowboy State Daily that ATF investigators have been at the scene since Wednesday and “bring the federal assets” to handle a major event like the fire at the Ridge View Apartments and Townhomes at 2025 E. Carlson St. behind Sam’s Club in north Cheyenne.
“This is definitely something that’s normal on larger events,” Dykshorn said of the ATF team. “They have investigators, that’s all they do — investigate big fires. It’s like an incident management team for fire investigation.”
The Ridge View fire qualifies, he said, adding that the ATF also helped local officials after the Hitching Post fires in 2010 and again in 2021.
The building was four stories tall and planned to include 68 to 72 apartments, and because it was under construction was basically “just a matchbox with open lumber, ready to go up at any time.”
Without having progressed to the point of having exterior or interior finishes applied, it wouldn’t have taken much to ignite the wood framing of the building, Dykshorn said. He added that it’s too early in the investigation to say how the fire started.
“Obviously with unfinished buildings, there are reasons we put finishes on the inside and outside of buildings,” he said. “The building is more vulnerable to fire.”
He said the construction was at the point that an indoor fire suppression system “was the very next step the plans” called for.
The chief also said that, contrary to online speculation about the blaze, there were plenty of working fire hydrants in the complex that crews could tap into.
“There’s quite a bit of planning and infrastructure in place, and there were plenty of hydrants around there, and we had plenty of water pressure,” Dykshorn said. “We didn’t have any water issues at all.”
‘So Much Heat’
A lot of that water was poured down onto the burning building from ladder trucks because the fire was so intensely hot, Dykshorn said.
“We needed to reduce that heat. When we go to a defensive strategy like that, we look at what’s around it and the adjacent exposures,” he said. “We tried putting a lot of water on the main building to get the heat down.”
That helped to keep a nearby finished and occupied apartment building from being evacuated, the chief said. But it didn’t stop the fire from totaling two nearby garages that were nearly finished, but weren’t being used yet.
“With that much fuel, that’s very typical there would be that much radiant heat,” Dykshorn said. “Open-air lumber construction materials like that is just a lot of wood glued together, so those generate so much heat.”
The first 911 call to report the fire came into the dispatch center at 3:33 p.m. Tuesday, he said, and firefighters were dispatched at 3:35.
“Our guys were there at 3:40 p.m.,” he added.
Had the response taken seven or 10 minutes instead of five, “I feel the structure to the south that was occupied, we would have had to evacuate that had we not got there when we did,” Dykshorn said.
Wyoming’s famous wind also, for once, cooperated with firefighting efforts, he said. It blew away from the other buildings instead of toward them.
“If the wind had been in a different direction, we would’ve had a whole different problem,” Dykshorn said.
Tires Were Blowing Up
Sitting in his vehicle across the road from the fire Tuesday afternoon, Paul Trujillo watched the building burn from before firefighters arrived until it caved in.
That only took about 15-20 minutes, he told Cowboy State Daily that day.
“We literally watched it from the beginning,” Trujillo said. “It was 15-20 minutes from start to collapse. It spread to the garage in between the two buildings, and it also started a grass fire.”
He said he also was amazed at how fast and hot the fire burned.
“Oh my gosh, we were back by Sam’s Club and you could feel the heat like you were standing in front of a campfire,” he said.
Trujillo said he was concerned about the other apartment buildings to the south, along with Sam’s Club and Frontier Mall, if the wind changed.
“I was worried, because there are two sets of apartments there that they’re building,” he said. “We did see a window open, and when you see a window opening and that fire’s going on, I was worried somebody might be in there.”
He didn’t see anyone come out, “But we did hear some explosions coming from the building,” Trujillo added. “And the first thing we saw was the (construction) crews running around with their yellow vests on.”
Those explosions were probably the tires on an industrial lift that was in the building and the vehicles of workers parked around it blowing up, Dykshorn said.
Now, the investigation is in the hands of the ATF team, he said.
Greg Johnson can be reached at greg@cowboystatedaily.com.
