A van caught fire outside a Waldorf hotel before dawn Tuesday, causing an estimated $3,000 in damage but no injuries, in a fire that started at an hour when highway vehicle fires are statistically rare.
The fire was reported at 5:29 a.m. at 3550 Crain Highway, the address of the Super 8 by Wyndham in Waldorf, where a hotel employee discovered it. The Waldorf Volunteer Fire Department responded with three firefighters and had the fire under control within 30 minutes.
The fire involved a 2003 Chevy Express van and started in the engine compartment. No one was displaced, and no arrests have been made. Investigators with the Office of the State Fire Marshal have not yet determined a cause; the case remains under investigation.
Waldorf VFD, which has served the greater Waldorf area since 1949, operates two stations — a fire station on Old Washington Road and an EMS station on St. Ignatius Drive — as an all-volunteer department, alongside its EMS division and Ladies Auxiliary. Tuesday’s call added to a run of recent vehicle-fire investigations the State Fire Marshal’s office has opened across Southern Maryland this month.
The timing was somewhat unusual by national standards. According to the U.S. Fire Administration’s most recent analysis of highway vehicle fires, only about 5% of such fires nationally occur between 4 and 6 a.m. — the least common window of the day — compared with 24% that break out between 2 and 6 p.m. Nationally, mechanical failure or malfunction is the leading contributing factor in highway vehicle fires, cited in about 45% of cases, followed by electrical malfunctions like short circuits at 21%; together the two account for roughly two-thirds of all such fires, though the specific cause of Tuesday’s fire has not yet been determined. The $3,000 damage estimate in this case also came in well below the national average loss of about $7,290 per highway vehicle fire.
Anyone with information about the cause of Tuesday’s fire is asked to call the State Fire Marshal’s Southern Regional Office in Prince Frederick at 410-414-3600.
