PONDERAY - The smell of acrid smoke hung in the air, and white dusty material, black soot and ashes trailed out the two glass doors of The Loggers Daughter Laundromat Thursday afternoon, after a fire that erupted from a large, natural gas-operated commercial dryer, was extinguished.

According to manager Cassie Cain, at 1:30 p.m. employee Mackenzie Cain, Cassie's pregnant sister, noticed flames leaping from a dryer. She dialed 911 after her attempt to put the fire out with an extinguisher failed. Northside Fire /Rescue responded, and the fire was quickly put out before spreading.

"It appears the fire was inside the drum," NFR Captain Dan Knott said. "But it's hard to say what the cause was."

An identical fire occurred on the same day last month: Feb. 19.

Cassie felt that two fires on the same day one month apart was more than coincidental. She pointed out the facility had two doors: one near the office and another on the far side of the laundromat, behind several rows of tall commercial washers.

"It's easy enough for someone to walk in the back door," she said.

The laundromat's owners, who, Cassie said, have been operating laundromats for more than 20 years, told her the two fires felt more than coincidental to them as well.

"I can count on one hand how many times this has happened," Cassie said, quoting the owner.

Cassie pointed out that the dryers have four different safety features designed to shut off the gas operated dryers in the event of a fire.

"There's no way for them to catch fire," Cassie said.

"The second fire in a month tends to raise suspicions," Knott said.

But he also noted that the owner of the clothes that burned in the dryer is known, and is not the same person whose clothes burned last month.

The cause of last month's fire remains undetermined. Although the area of origin is known, the point of origin is not. Both fires appear to have originated inside the drum of the dryers.

"At this point we have still not found a point of origin," Knott said.

The NFR, in conjunction with the state fire marshal, is working to determine the cause of last week's fire.

"We're ruling everything out before we move to other things," Knott said.

NFR Fire Chief Brad Mitton was more direct about the investigation.

"It's definitely not arson," Mitton said.

However, the cause was not electrical either, he said.

"It's coincidence," Mitton said of the coincidental relation between the two fires and the days of the month.

Employees at the laundromat had received fire extinguisher training from NFR last week, following the dryer fire last month.

Two engines, a brush truck, and six firefighters responded to the fire.