July 9 Vent Fire Follow up
updated: Jul 15, 2012, 9:09 AM

By the Urban Hikers

The sidewalk electrical vault vent fire that occurred during the evening of July 9th still had us puzzling us, so the next day we went back to the vent to investigate.
The vent, located on Cota Street near Garden was one of two side-by- side vents. We wondered how or why a large amount of newspaper had become lodged inside the burned vent.
As suspected the top of the vents are sealed, and therefore not easily removed. We found that most likely both vents - the one that burned and it's adjacent one - were both filled with crumpled newspaper, since the unburned one still had a lot of paper in it when we saw it after the fire. We still don't understand how the paper got into the vent, or who put it there, but we do know that there have been several electrical vault fires around town recently and that they can be extremely dangerous due to the possibility of of a spontaneous explosion when a vent/underground electrical vault is affected by fire.
For more on the event you can read Electrical Vent Fire (keyword "caught") on Edhat

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