BALTIMORE — A Baltimore official told a City Council committee Tuesday that a consultant’s investigation of an underground fire in June could shed light on the safety of century-old infrastructure beneath the city’s streets and lead to steps to prevent future accidents.

City leaders still don’t know what’s causing the fires, or the cost and scope of repairs.

The committee sought answers to the growing number of underground fires downtown, incidents often blamed on a hard-to-replace, city-owned clay conduit system built in the 19th century that houses electric lines and other cables.

A report due this fall by Stevensville-based RTI Consulting, which is investigating two recent fires, could offer insights on potential causes and ways for the city to respond, said Mark Conway, chair of the council’s public safety and government operations committee.

“What we want to do is understand what’s going on and then fix the conditions that lead to that problem,” Conway said after Tuesday’s hearing. “My expectation is that that’s going to mean some investment in our conduit in a different way, under a new way.

“Ultimately,” he said, “We want to be able to figure out what interventions we need to take in order to prevent fires in the future.”

The city’s conduit system covers a network of about 700 miles of utility line. Outside that system, steam pipes and water mains wend their way underground.

The latest fire occurred on the corner of East Baltimore Street and Guilford Avenue, where first responders found smoke pouring from manhole covers, leading to road closures and bus line detours downtown. Fire officials are still investigating the cause of that and other recent fires.

Last year, city officials called for an investigation after three fires occurred on North Charles Street.

Conway, who scheduled the hearing in response to June’s fire and as a follow-up to a November hearing, said there have been 34 fires in the last 10 years. Data presented during the hearing showed a significant spike of 10 fires in 2018 and another 10 last year, with about two fires in each of the other years.

“It tells me that something is going on in those given years,” he said. “I’d also be very curious to see … if there are conditions within those years that make them more prone to fire.”

Rebecca McAfee, a 40-year-old city resident, told council members her boyfriend is a city firefighter, and she’s “already nervous about him doing his job.”

“Something needs to be done,” McAfee said. “There should be a resolution as quickly as possible, because this is a crisis, and God forbid, one Baltimorean is killed the next time this happens.

“We can’t sit around pointing fingers at each other after we come together,” she said.

Others attending the hearing included representatives from Baltimore Gas and Electric Co., Vicinity Energy, Comcast, city agencies and the Baltimore City Fire Department.

During a press conference prior to the hearing, Tom Rafferty, BGE’s director of regional electric operations, emphasized that the city bears ultimate responsibility for the condition of the system it owns and maintains, including making capital improvements.

BGE, one of several tenants of the underground cable system, reached a controversial agreement with the city in 2023 that requires the utility to spend $120 million on capital improvements through 2029 and pay Baltimore an “occupancy fee” of $1.5 million annually.

But that agreement covers only a fraction of the city’s full network, many sections of which are believed to be in disrepair, BGE said.

Since the first year of the conduit agreement, BGE has installed 250,000 feet of new and upgraded conduit, just a portion of the 12 million feet of conduit containing BGE’s electric lines, BGE spokesperson Nick Alexopulos said in an email to The Baltimore Sun. The utility has rebuilt 12 manholes and installed 17 manholes, out of 12,000 total in the city.

Company officials on Tuesday stressed that they have no authority to manage or investigate the system. They said none of the preventative and maintenance work showed problems with BGE’s equipment or facilities before the recent manhole fires, and no fires broke out in areas where BGE has made upgrades.

“The conduit system itself has been degraded, and with this particular event, there’s a lot of heat coming out of the ground that appears to be from the steam area,” Rafferty said. “That could be steam from a leak or it could be steam from water or sewer hitting the steam pipe, but it looks like the extreme temperatures could have caused some damage.”

Besides BGE, he said, every entity with underground utilities, even those outside the conduit, must commit to properly inspecting and maintaining their equipment.

“The more that the infrastructure is being upgraded, and the more people are excavating in the city, they just have to be good stewards … and protect the other utilities they’re working around,” Rafferty said.

Each of last year’s fires involved smoke and flames emitting from manholes, with a blaze in September causing an alleged explosion that scattered fragments of a manhole cover along North Charles Street. The conflagration caused significant damage to local businesses along North Charles Street, including a beloved bookstore, and injured a firefighter.

An explosion also occurred after an underground fire in the same stretch of North Charles Street in January 2024, but no one was injured. Both fires caused power outages.

And last June, an underground “high-voltage” electric fire in the same area of North Charles Street prompted a nearby building to evacuate. All of last year’s fires damaged the city’s conduit system.

“We don’t know the causes behind the fires,” Conway said in an interview. “We don’t know how big the scope of improvements is that we’ll need to make to the conduit. And I think that’s the big question mark for us. We don’t know yet what we’re gonna do. We don’t know yet how much it’s gonna cost, nor the scope.”

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