GREEN BAY (NBC 26) — Investigators with the Green Bay Metro Fire Department say the cause of a fire that sparked at Aldo Leopold Community School back in June has been deemed undetermined.
Classes are back in session for the school year, but questions still remain about what happened.
Nobody was inside the building when the fire started, but there was enough damage to affect classes for the rest of the week.
Green Bay Metro Fire Department Lieutenant Shauna Walesh said investigators deemed the cause of the fire as undetermined.
Lieutenant Walesh says there were four separate possibilities from the incident as to why the fire started, but investigators were not able able to confirm any of those.
Lieutenant Walesh said the first hypothesis was that the fire occurred as a result of combustibles being placed too closely to the kiln. The second was that the fire was a result of a malfunction of the touch pad on the kiln. The third possibility was that the fire was the result of an LED panel malfunctioning in the drop ceiling of the kiln room. The fourth hypothesis was that the fire occurred as a result of an electrical wiring malfunction in an unoccupied space.
Following what they called an intense investigation, authorities were not able to determine any of those hypotheses as the cause of the fire.
NBC 26 asked Lieutenant Walesh whether an undetermined cause is unusual, and she said it can happen when evidence is destroyed during the fire or even when firefighters are putting out the flames.
She says it sometimes happens and pointed to the Aspiro bus fires from 2023; the cause of that incident was also deemed undetermined.
According to a Green Bay Area Public Schools spokesperson, two of the rooms that were damaged in the fire are still under construction and administrators believe those rooms will be completed and ready for students after the winter break.
The spokesperson added that workers were able to remedy the other parts of the building that were damaged by smoke during the summer break.
