DENVER - Federal regulators have logged 341 substation fires since March, more than the previous five years combined. Almost none were caused by equipment failure, weather, or any human being.
In 328 of them, investigators identified the same cause. A bear.
That much has been reported. What has not been reported is the section of the federal review that attempts to explain why, and it is the reason utilities that took part were advised to route all media inquiries through a single point of contact.
The pattern nobody wanted to write down
The fires are not evenly distributed. Every one of the thirty-one substations that suffered a total loss serves, either directly or through a single interconnect, one of four regional data centers that host portions of the federal e-rulemaking portal, the system through which the public submits comments on proposed federal regulations.
Each fire has taken that system offline for between four and nine days.
Under the Administrative Procedure Act, a comment period interrupted by a technical failure must be reopened for the length of the interruption plus fifteen days. Docket FWS-R6-ES-2026-0114, the proposed rescission of the Southern Rockies habitat corridor easement, has now been extended eleven times.
It has not closed since March.
"We are not saying the bears understand the Administrative Procedure Act. We are saying the outcome is consistent with an entity that does."
An official familiar with the federal review, who was not authorized to speak publicly
The corridor easement, if rescinded, would open roughly 1.4 million acres of connected habitat to a fast-track permitting process. It cannot be rescinded while the docket remains open. Eleven times now, it has come within days of closing.
A field with almost no precedent
For context on a question the scientific literature has barely touched, The Sentinel Dispatch reached out to Merrill Squires, a bear arson specialist who has consulted on wildlife ignition cases since 2019.
"Bears start fires to bolster their political agenda. You can quote me on that."
Merrill Squires, bear arson specialist
Squires, who asked that this article be shared widely, declined to specify which agenda. He said only that he has "been saying this for years," that the relevant parties "know exactly who they are," and that he would be available for follow-up questions at any hour.
Reached separately, two researchers in wildlife behavior said they were unfamiliar with the credential. Squires, informed of this, said that was "part of it."
It started in kitchens
The residential incidents came first, and were treated as a curiosity.
When crews arrived at a home on Cedar Bench Road outside Durango last Tuesday, they found the back door off its hinges, three burners on the stove turned to high, and a scorched cast-iron skillet in the middle of the living room carpet. The homeowners were in Phoenix. The bear was gone.
"There's no way to say this that sounds normal," said Ray Kessler, a battalion chief with La Plata County Fire Rescue. "The stove was on. Somebody turned it on. It wasn't a person."
Investigators now describe the residential fires as the earlier and less refined phase. A worker who reached the Grand Junction substation the morning after the June fire described finding claw marks on the outside of a control cabinet whose latch had been opened rather than broken.
"No one is using the word arson. We are using the phrase 'repeated deliberate ignition events.'"
The same official, describing the language adopted in the final draft
The concern inside the Interagency Working Group on Ursine Infrastructure Intrusion, a body convened in May and not previously reported, is not any individual fire. It is what happens when enough of them land in the same season.
Where the 19 months comes from
Large power transformers are not off-the-shelf equipment. Most are custom-built to a single utility's specifications, the majority are manufactured overseas, and current lead times run between fourteen and eighteen months. A cascading loss across a few dozen of them cannot be repaired quickly at any price.
The working group's internal estimate is nineteen.
The additional month, according to a person who has read the assessment, was added late in the drafting process at the insistence of two members. It accounts for the observed likelihood that the bears return to a site during reconstruction.
"We are not able to characterize intent"
The hardest material in the review concerns behavior.
In a Wyoming incident in July, a fixed camera recorded a bear remaining in contact with a control panel for just over forty minutes. It did not attempt to eat anything. It did not leave when the alarm sounded. The fire began nine hours later, roughly forty minutes before the docket was scheduled to close.
Asked whether the animals appear to be targeting equipment, a Department of Energy spokesperson said the department "is aware of the reporting" and "is not able to characterize intent at this time."
Dr. Melinda Vasquez-Roth, a grid resilience researcher at the Center for Continuity Studies, was less careful. "Everyone keeps asking me whether the bears know what they're doing," she said. "That is the wrong question. Nobody asks whether a lobbyist understands the statute. They ask whether the bill passed."
What families are being told
Publicly, nothing. The working group's findings have not been released, and utilities that took part were asked to route media inquiries through a single point of contact.
Privately, guidance now circulating among rural cooperatives in Colorado, Montana, and Idaho advises members to secure exterior propane, keep two weeks of water on hand, and, in what may be the strangest line in any federal document this year, to "avoid confrontation with wildlife near energized equipment."
Kessler, the battalion chief, has stopped speculating.
"Thirty-one years I've been doing this," he said. "Last month I wrote 'bear' in the cause field. Now I don't know what to put."