Waldo Canyon Fire Investigation Update
There were few new details released Wednesday by authorities in their third month of investigating the Waldo Canyon wildfire in western El Paso County.
Members of a special task force gathered at the Police Operations Center in Colorado Springs to address the media. The news conference, followed by a brief question and answer period, lasted only 15 minutes and ended before its scheduled time of 3 p.m.
Lt. Adrian Vasquez of the police department, and a task force member, revealed that the origin of the June 23 fire was within three miles of the Waldo Canyon trail head off U.S. 24.
However, Vasquez said the task force still hasn’t determined whether someone started the fire accidentally or intentionally, and investigators still do not have a suspect or a person of interest.
“We do need assistance from the public still,” he said. “Somebody out there knows very specifically how this fire started. They are aware of it — at least one person is. Many people may have information about someone they know who was up there, and they’ve not come forward yet.”
Vasquez said the task force received 373 tips of information about the fire, a third of those being high-priority tips requiring interviews with people, and the rest lower-priority tips from phone calls. He said some of the lower-priority tips still must be checked out.
Reports about smoke in the Waldo Canyon and Pyramid Mountain areas began coming in the day before the fire erupted, said Vasquez, but searches that evening and the next morning did not find anything.
KRDO NewsChannel 13 reported earlier that the fire was human-caused. But Vasquez said some previous details about the fire have been leaked, and the task force will further restrict the release of future details to avoid jeopardizing the ongoing investigation.
“Some of that (previous) information was released without our authorization, and is incomplete and shouldn’t be out there,” he said. “We’ll release what we can, when we can.”
Previously, an unnamed source said that he wanted to give federal investigators, as well as city and county law enforcement, an opportunity to review the task force update before making it public.
District Attorney Dan May said without more details from a suspect or person of interest, he can’t determine whether criminal charges are warranted in the case.
When asked by a reporter why the task force in nearly three months still has so many unanswered questions, Vasquez cited the difficult nature of the investigation and said the task force wanted to inform the public about what details have been gathered.
The task force wants anyone with information about the fire, no matter how limited it may be, to call police or Crimestoppers.
The task force includes members of the Colorado Springs Police and Fire departments. the El Paso County Sheriff’s Office, the District Attorney’s Office, the FBI, the ATF and the U.S. Forest Service.
