You can’t make this kind of stuff up! From the Seattle Times:
The fire chief in Touchet, Walla Walla County, is not joking when he says burning mice running onto unburned surfaces may have restarted the blaze.
Flaming mice on the run.
That’s fire Chief Larry Hector’s best guess at what happened Saturday evening as flames rekindled from the Frog Hollow fire that began earlier in the day.
“Mice come out of the fire, on fire, and run into the unburned stuff. And start the fire all over again,” Hector explained.
Hector heads Walla Walla County Fire District 6 out of Touchet and was incident commander for three separate fires that scorched about 300 acres of mostly alfalfa stubble in the Touchet area. The original fire was started by a combine, the second started under a power line and the third was caused when a hawk struck a different power line and brought it down, he said.
HT: Dave G.