[4] The fire was the third in recent years to affect the area surrounding the Hanford Reach National Monument and the Arid Lands Ecology Reserve near Rattlesnake Ridge.
[5] The fire was eventually contained through the use of controlled burns on Rattlesnake Mountain in Benton County due to concerns that the fire was getting too close to the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, which had recently been compared to the Fukushima nuclear disaster by Newsweek magazine earlier in 2016.
[8][9][10] Even though there were no findings from the Anderson v. United States of America case, the dismissal document from May 21, 2019, points to a cause for the fire:[10] The Army training unit continued to engage in live fire training exercises through the afternoon on July 30, 2016.
At approximately 4:40 p.m., one of the Army training unit's soldier's fired a machine gun at a target using tracer rounds.
The fire spread beyond the YTC and onto Plaintiffs' rangeland properties, causing property damage to Plaintiffs' cattle businesses.