By John McNamara
The Capital
BOWIE, Md. — A brush fire in a wooded area near Bowie’s Whitemarsh Park on Sunday evening led to a lot of speculation in the mainstream media and social media on Monday.
Various reports and social media postings attributed to the cause of the blaze to a meteorite that landed in Bowie on Sunday evening.
Apparently, the rumor got started by an unauthorized tweet from someone connected with the Bowie Volunteer Fire Department.
The saga started on Sunday at about 6 p.m., when units from several different stations of the Bowie Volunteer Fire Department were called to a large brush fire in a wooded area of White Marsh Park, about ¾ of a mile off Annapolis Road.
When firefighters arrived, they discovered a crater, about 12-15 feet wide by 5-6 feet deep. The size of the crater, once reported, led to wild speculation about the impact of some celestial object on the ground.
The fire spread to the adjacent trees and brush and took about 15 firefighters, four hours to extinguish, according to Bowie fire officials.
According to a statement released by Jonathan Howard, chief of the Bowie Volunteer Fire Department, “A tweet was sent out using the official department twitter account that insinuated that there was a relationship between a meteorite and the cause of fire. This was simply not so and the post should have never been made listing a cause. Cause and determination is made solely by the Prince George’s County Fire/EMS Department.
“As the chief of the Bowie Volunteer Fire Department, I apologize for the media attention this has created and have put measures in place to make sure this doesn’t occur again.”
According to Mark Brady, a spokesman for the Prince George’s County Fire Department, investigators examined the scene of the fire Monday morning said the origin of the fire remains undetermined.
There is no way the fire could have been started by a meteorite crashing into the ground, according to Mike Hankey, the operations manager of the American Meteor Society.
“It is a common misconception that meteorites do start fires, but the reality is they do not,” he said. “This idea comes from the way Hollywood has portrayed meteor impacts in movies.
“The reality is, nearly all meteorites explode high up in the atmosphere … When they reach the ground, they have lost all cosmic velocity and are traveling with only the force of gravity pulling them down. The meteorites are not on fire and are not hot to the touch. They hit the earth at the same speed a golf ball would hit. And most of the time, they are about that size or smaller.
“Further, there were no visual reports of any meteor in this area during this time frame. If there were a meteor big enough to make a crater, it would have been seen by tens of thousands of people for hundreds of miles.”
Copyright 2016 The Capital