Baltimore fire and transportation officials still don’t know why the city has experienced a spate of underground fires this year, and some City Council members worry residents’ safety is at risk.

There have been 10 underground fires in the city in the past year, Councilman Mark Conway said. Most recently, a Sept. 29 subterranean blaze in the 300 block of North Charles Street exploded manhole covers, torched a bookstore, displaced residents and temporarily closed Mick O’Shea’s, a beloved downtown Irish pub. And that was just on that block. The fire also knocked out key city services and disrupted internet to Mount Vernon residents for days. It was the third fire along a three-block stretch of road since January.

At a Wednesday hearing of City Council’s Public Safety and Government Operations committee, Baltimore Fire Chief James Wallace said the department hasn’t been able to figure out what caused the September fire, and it’s possible it never will.

“We do not have the ability to place a fire investigator underground,” Wallace told the committee, citing prohibitive laws and training requirements that limit what the department can and cannot do.

Fire investigators typically need to look at a fire scene firsthand, in its original state, in order to determine a cause, Wallace said.

“We just simply can’t get to that. We can certainly develop hypotheses, if you will, but again there are challenges in with doing that as well,” he said. The cause for the Sept. 29 fire is listed as undetermined.

Conway asked city Department of Transportation Director Corren Johnson if her agency had any insight on what caused the two earlier fires on Charles Street this year.

“We do not,” Johnson replied.

“Do you expect to have any further information?” Conway asked.

“So we’re looking at ... just the recent issues and that’s going to be some of the discussion as part of this investigation process,” Johnson replied.

Officials said Mayor Brandon Scott’s office convened an “underground services work group” that met last Friday. That group is supposed to share information about their various inquiries and includes representatives from Baltimore Gas and Electric Company, Comcast and Verizon, all of which have infrastructure in the conduit, the city’s underground network of ducts for utilities. BGE is responsible for capital improvements to the sections of the city conduit system that contain the company’s electric equipment.

“There’s been a strong focus on this,” Johnson said.

Much of the city’s underground infrastructure is aging, Councilwoman Odette Ramos pointed out. Is it possible that an aging section of the conduit had anything to do with the most recent fire?

Probably not. Johnson told Ramos that some of the newly replaced conduit areas from the January fire also burned in the September fire.

“It wasn’t necessarily an age type of thing,” Johnson said.

Conway, in an interview afterward, said he was not satisfied with the lack of information around the cause of the various fires. Without knowing what caused the fires, Conway said the city “can’t guarantee safety.”

“We don’t have a sense of when it may happen again, we don’t have a sense of what to do differently, and, certainly with no prediction ability yes there’s a possibility that we could have a freak accident that turns into a fire that can result in someone losing their life,” Conway said. “And that would be really, really, really sad.”

Clarification: This story has been updated to clarify BGE’s role with the city’s conduit system.