SEQUIM — A section of U.S. Highway 101 was closed for about two hours Thursday as firefighters fought a 15-acre grass and brush fire in a field southeast of downtown.
Dee Cherry, who moved this week from Vancouver, Wash., to a Belfield Avenue home just east of the fire line, said the blaze accelerated quickly.
“It really took off,” Cherry said. “I saw a plume of smoke, and I thought, ‘Oh no! There goes my new house!’
“And then it seemed like it was really going,” she said. “But they did a good job of containing it.”
Flames sent a column of smoke skyward that could be seen from miles away.
Investigators from Clallam County Fire District No. 3 and the Sequim Police Department are searching for the clues about what started the fire, which was reported at about 11:25 a.m. in a field south of the Mariner Cafe at Washington Street and Brown Road.
District No. 3 Chief Steve Vogel said some children reported seeing the fire, but investigators need to talk further with them and other witnesses before determining a cause.
Fire officials closed Highway 101 as smoke billowed across the roadway obscuring some drivers’ vision.
Flames, fanned by southwest winds, burned close to the highway’s edge but didn’t cross the roadway.
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The rest of this story appears in Friday’s Peninsula Daily News.