Early-morning fire at East Wenatchee Bitcoin mining site quickly contained

EAST WENATCHEE — A fire in a mixed-use commercial building north of Pangborn Memorial Airport on the morning of Feb. 24 caused minimal damage after being quickly contained by employees and responding crews.

Wenatchee Valley Fire Department units were dispatched at 7:02 a.m. to the 300 block of Urban Industrial Way after workers reported smoke throughout the building, Fire Chief Brian Brett said. An employee located the fire and used a fire extinguisher to slow its spread while firefighters were en route.

Crews arrived to find flames extending up the back side of the structure and extinguished the fire quickly, Brett said.

The fire began in a portion of the building used for Bitcoin mining and was traced to a failed exhaust fan motor that had been circulating air for the operation.

Damage to the building was minimal and no injuries were reported.

The incident comes in a region that has wrestled for years with how to regulate cryptocurrency mining operations because of their heavy power use and associated safety concerns. Beginning in 2018, cities including Wenatchee, East Wenatchee and Chelan — along with Chelan County and local public utility districts — adopted temporary moratoriums or zoning controls to give officials time to address fire risk, electrical-load impacts and land-use questions tied to the rapidly expanding industry. Officials at the time warned that high-density mining operations could strain local infrastructure and, in some cases, create hazards when equipment was installed without systems designed for sustained high electrical demand.

Urban Industrial Way lies within East Wenatchee’s industrial area, where larger-scale computing and data operations have typically been steered under those zoning frameworks.

Andrew Simpson: 509-433-7626 or andrew@ward.media