The nearly 1,200-acre Hazen Fire in central Buckeye is 100% contained as of Friday. During the firefight, City of Buckeye and Arizona Forestry and Fire Management officials were also putting out metaphorical fires online.
On May 2, a brush fire ignited in the Gila River bed at Arizona State Highway 85 and Hazen Road. Over two weeks, the flames stretched across lands owned by the Arizona Game and Fish Department, a handful of local cement manufacturers, and a 40-acre plot of undeveloped city land.
The cause of the fire has been ruled unknown, according to Tiffany Davila, Arizona Department of Forestry and Fire Management Public Affairs Officer.
City of Buckeye Communications Director John O’Halloran says the city had to flag online misinformation regarding its source, impact area and response.
“There was a lot of misinformation regarding evacuation notices, and people wondering if there were evacuations actually posted,” O’Halloran said. “Evacuations are usually handled by the county sheriff’s office, and they never issued any evacuation notices.”
Some conspiracies shared online alluded to a more nefarious cause for the fires.
“I mean we were seeing things from Bill Gates owned the land and he was behind the fire, to the city was trying to build secret data centers,” O’Halloran said. ”There were comments about how people were trying to burn the tamarisk down to clear roads out to make way for new developments, just all sorts of different misinformation.”
AI-generated photos and videos of the fire were also shared. In a Facebook post on May 11, the Arizona Department of Forestry and Fire Management stressed the importance of gathering incident information from verified government pages when scrolling social media.
O’Halloran says there is little the city can do to combat online misinformation outside of monitoring fictitious posts and redirecting residents toward factual sources.
When asked about the connection between the fire and the prospect of future data center developments, he says, “I think a lot of it just starts as clickbait for some conspiracy theorists, and then it just takes off from there.
“We do have some developments in Buckeye that could potentially house data centers in the future … but, as it stands right now, Buckeye doesn’t have a single data center built," O’Halloran said.
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