No injuries were reported after a shed and an electric vehicle charging station caught fire in Cooper Landing on Wednesday morning.
Dan Osborn is chief of the volunteer Cooper Landing Emergency Services and said crews were dispatched to Grizzly Ridge. The business includes a lodge, convenience store and gas station near the Cooper Landing boat launch. Osborn said his agency responded with assistance from crews from Moose Pass and Seward.
“When they got there, they found it was a EV charging station and generator that were on site, and then fire spread to a shed that was attached to those two things,” he said.
Osborn said he hasn’t heard of many instances of electric vehicle chargers catching fire. But he also said the technology isn’t abundant on the peninsula and the chargers seem to be “pretty safe.”
PlugShare, which publishes an interactive map of electric vehicle charging stations, shows there are about a dozen on the Kenai Peninsula. Soldotna became home to Alaska’s first Tesla Supercharger in 2022, when business owners opened a multi-bay charging station.
Efforts to expand access to electric vehicle charging stations in Alaska is underway thanks to a Biden-era federal program that was reopened last year.
Osborn said it’s unclear whether the charger started the fire.
“It's under investigation as to what the actual cause of the fire was, because there was a couple different electrical components, or it could have been something in the building that spread to those,” he said.
Osborn’s agency does not have an investigator on staff, so he said the incident will be submitted to the state fire marshal’s office. That office will determine whether the fire meets the threshold for additional investigation.
Around 3:30 p.m. Wednesday, Osborn said crews had extinguished the fire and a fire marshal was investigating. He said crews will revisit the site of the fire throughout the night to ensure it doesn’t rekindle.
On social media, Cooper Landing Emergency Services said a hazardous materials team was en route to the fire site “out of an abundance of quality” to test air quality.
