Investigators in Colorado are looking into the possibility that spontaneous combustion inside an  abandoned underground coal mine may have triggered the most destructive fire in the state’s history.

More than 1,000 homes were lost when the blaze burned through several suburban communities there in late December.

Until recently, wildfires in the Western U.S. occurred mainly in forested areas but in this era of climate change, that’s changing. CGTN’s Hendrik Sybrandy reports.